[Marxism] FW: Labor Revolution

["Lil Joe" <joe_radical@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Adaoma:
Yes, this is the outline for a "revolution"
when one is talking about transferring from
the private sector to "public property". This
is to call the powers that be to be arms. And
we know who has the weapons and the power...not
the average "joe" (you and me).

Lil Joe: That's the whole point of the strategy.
I know that electoral politics is bullshit, but
Americans believe in it, and so I am forced to
deal with it.

The strategy is designed to bring worker's class
consciousness by their own struggle for electoral
majorities in the House of Representative, and
this by ever bringing in new and more workers as
they see worker-Congressmen and woman, on CSPAN
fighting for working class legislation. It will
have a multiplier effect, as the workers seeing
Labor, Green, or Peace and Freedom Party members
of Congress being attacked by the Democrats, as
well as Republicans on CSPAN day in and day out,
every goddamn day those workers through-out the
United States, and especially in the "Blue States",
will force their trade unions to affiliate with
the Labor Party, throw out the Democrats in the
Unions from the leadership, and send more workers
to Congress.

Such terms as 'Conservatives', 'Liberals' and
'Progressives', will be swept into the dustbin
of American political history, in proportion to
which workers in the House of Representatives
in combat expose the Congress as a masquerading
sham democracy, making it instead of a show of
'libels against conservatives' of the same class,
a political battlefield of class against class,
by more and more workers coming to dominate the
House of Representatives, doing class war - that
is battling the capitalist's Senate.

We can just as easily win seats in the House
of Representatives, as we can seats on local
government councils, or State Assemblies. But,
the class struggle is a national struggle, for
national state power legislating national laws,
it is only at the national level that worker
will have the power to reinforce or overthrow
state and local laws.

A Workers and Farmers House of Representatives,
workers and farmers themselves and not bourgeois
intellectuals and politicians claiming to represent
them - can win the majority of seats in the House,
and at the same time politicize the Unions, radicalize
workers with new knowledge and perspectives, as well
as setting up permanent community organizations that
were born in these Congressional campaign Districts,
concerned with national as well as local issues.

When the workers, farmers, ethnic working-class
community and others begin to legislate a working
class agenda, being stopped by the millionaires
club, as the Senate is called, and/or the Presidency
or Supreme Court thus showing the ruling class
nature of these institutions.

When the Pentagon backs them, we will have the
electoral legitimacy to call on the sons and the
daughters of the working class who are the armed
rank and file of the armed forces - "the average
'joe'" in uniform - to rebel, to mutiny, as we see
now happening in Iraq, every time the quisling
army orders "Iraqi" soldiers to invade and massacre
Iraqi working class and poor people, their moms,
dads, sisters, and children.

Civil war will be one in which the bourgeoisie is
represented by the Senate, President and officer
corps, and the workers represented by the House
of Representatives, and the mutinied soldiers self-
organized into a Red Army. Therefore, as a matter
of course abolish the Senate, Presidency, and the
Courts by calling a new Constitutional Convention
that would throw the existing Constitution into
the trash pile of history, and write a new one
that will invest the House of Representatives as
the single national government, together with labor
dominated Lower State Assemblies in the 50 states.

This strategy is not without historical precedence.
For instance, in the English Revolution 1640- the
House of Commons representing the bourgeois democrats
and the poor, were joined by Cromwell's the Independent
Army. This army fought, and defeated the landed
gentry that was represented by the House of Lords
and the Monarchy, the result being that nobles, as
well as the king being beheaded.

The French Revolution, also began in the popular
Third Estate of the Estates-General. Representatives
of the popular forces in this Estate were radicalized
in their opposition to the First Estate, representing
the Nobility, and the Second Estate, representing the
Church hierarchy, with both representing the Monarchy.

The first measure of the revolution was to at one and
the same time Negate (dissolve) the Estate General,
thereby overthrowing the authority of the 1st
and 2nd Estates, and at the same time Affirm the
power of the democrats by the establishment of
the National Constituent Assembly. This was the
First Negation.

The passage of the government powers from the 3rd
Eastate to the National Assembly was dominated by
the big bourgeoisie represented by Girondists, but
challenged by the Jacobins that was representing
the democratic masses.

The next 'moment' in the progress of the French
Revolution was the transfer the internal [class]
contradictions into the Constitutional Convention,
where the Jacobins won the upper hand. This was
the Second Negation, or negation of negation, that
resulted in the Jacobin dominated Committee of
Public Safety. By the Jacobins representing the
Sans Collutes, therefore having its social basis
in the Commune of Paris ( comprised of radicals
of the Parisian petty-bourgeoisie, artisans, the
proletariat and the destitute poor)it was the
revolutionary Jacobins that both destroyed the
nobility and the royalty by beheading them.

We can do the same thing! However, ours is not
a bourgeois democratic class struggle of a
House of Commons or National Assembly fighting a
House of Lords of landed aristocrats/or a Third
Estate fighting an Estates-General, but of workers
in the bourgeois government house fighting the
bourgeoisie!

By 'winning the battle of democracy' i.e. becoming
the dominant class party in the House of Representatives,
the workers and their allies we will be at war with
the bourgeoisie and their politicians represented
by the Senate and President, whom we will have to
destroy the same way the Independent Army in the
English Revolution destroyed the Lords and royalty,
and the Committee of Public Safety destroyed the
aristocracy and monarchy in the French Revolution.

The issue is not how the workers organize themselves
into a class organization and run candidates to
win seats in the House of Representatives, so long
as they do it, and are under discipline once they
get there and press working class legislation. The
point is that the Labor Party exist, at least in
its elements, and is financially based on the trade
unions, as that along can provide candidates with
finances and thus political independence of
capitalist lobbies and favors. You say 'no', so
I ask you: what class organization do you propose?


Adaoma: The labor parties of America had their
"Day" in history when unions were being formed
and citizens were passionate about the causes.
There is apathy now, don't you think?

Lil Joe: I am not talking about 'citizens' and
whether or not there is 'apathy'. There may in
fact be apathy, and even cynicism among the
bourgeois intelligentsia, and professionals, but
the working-class is angry. Whereas 'apathy' and
cynicism leads to inaction, anger engenders action,
and this action occurs every goddamn day in their
employment when bossed around by their employers,
talked to like shit, harassed by the cops, and
swamped by bills and taxes. It is upon this anger,
responding to fucked up, but changeable material
conditions that the Labor Party will be organized:
of workers, by workers and for workers.

Moreover, actually, what killed the possibility
of the self-organization of the American workers
into a political party was the Communist Party's
betrayal of Labor by its embrace of the Democrats,
Roosevelt and the "New Deal". The kind of pragmatic
politics you are also as an American advocate.

Also, the American Communist Party was receiving
marching orders from the Stalinists in Moscow,
whose international policy was for the socialist
and revolutionary workers organizations and parties
to unite with the liberal bourgeois parties in
'popular fronts against fascism', rather than those
workers taking their futures into their own hands,
workers of every country defeating fascism -- not
by 'uniting with the 'anti-fascist bourgeoisie', but
by those worker's organizing themselves overthrowing
those bourgeois governments, by taking state power,
crushing fascist and all bourgeois opposition, by
seizing the productive forces.

That would inspire the German workers, in the German
army as well as civilians in industry, to do same.
This is not without precedent, as it is precisely
what happened, what ended WWI when the Russian
workers and peasants came to power by revolution,
in 1917, resulting in the German workers to attempt
same in 1918 -19. While the German workers failed
to establish a worker's republic, they did succeed
in overthrowing monarchy and establishing in its
place a democratic republic.

Now, I am not an idealist who believe that ideas
determine reality, but that material reality give
rise to appropriate organizations, strategies, and
ideologies. I therefore have this epistemological
disagreement with you, based on your idealist and
pragmatic approach to historical possibilities.

The 'Labor Party', is not an 'idea', whose time has
come and gone, but is a practical expression of
worker's class conscious self-organization into
an economically, and therefore politically independent
party, daily contesting bourgeois parties in the
struggle for power, class power, dictatorship.

These struggles will provide the epistemological,
material practice - praxis (practical-critical,
revolutionizing activity) that will teach them
what is really going on, as they say in the hood,
and what they have to do. I didn't come to these ideas,
and strategy by reading books, but as a dedicated
participant in the 60s in the Black Liberation
movement, which praxis directed me to the books that
I needed to study, European as well as 3rd world
revolutions, and to the study of Marx, Hobbes, Locke
and so on. Whether or not this or that worker, or
the American working class as a whole, are exposed
to what I have written is not important, because I
think the material pressures of collapsing capitalism
in America will compel them to force a strategy
such as this one. If my research and arguments are
found, and prove useful to workers by saving time,
great! If not? It doesn't matter, I have done my
job. Worker's will do what they have to do, because
history leaves us no other option.

Adaoma: There was not much reaction to Bush's
overriding the wishes of thousands of shore workers.
I'm not sure there is much interest in repealing
Taft-Harley. What Bush did was bold, it has not been
challenged, as it would have years ago.

Lil Joe: I am not stuck on any particular struggles,
whether the workers win or loose, but the objective
material conditions and interests that made those
collisions inevitable teaching workers that they
will continue to loose until they recognize that
this is not a 'classless democracy', and that the
Senate, Presidency, Supreme Court are institutions
based in maintaining the capitalist mode of production
and appropriation, instruments of capitalist class
rule, as well as that the Democrats and Republicans
are capitalist class parties, which is of secondary
importance. In other words, before America can
become truly a democracy, majority rule, the Senate,
Presidency, and Supreme Courts has to be abolished.

As to Bush being "bold", he was also 'bold' when
he ordered the invasion of Iraq, telling the
Resistance to 'bring it on'! He is not so 'bold'
now that over a thousand American troops have
been killed, and tens of thousands severely wounded.
It is therefore not a question of the mentality
of any single individual, or the program of a
Party, in or out of power, but of technological
and material relationships which determine the
outcome of those party programs.

Similarly, it is not a matter of what this
or that American worker at any given moment
(the 30s, the 60s, the 80s, today) thinks
of himself or herself, nor for that matter
the proletariat as a whole think of 'their
'country', or 'socialist ideology': their
'tasks' are a matter of what they are, and
what historically they are compelled to do.


Adaoma: Some changes suggested in your piece,
raising the minimum wage to a living one,
finding a way to educate all citizens freely,
medical care and hospitalization for all
are good and would be embraced, I think.

But, what I anticipate is a white collar "flight"
of business, outsourcing and a decline of big biz
if the private sector is "forced" to do anything.

Lil Joe: You are exactly right! Where we differ,
is that you accept the 'freedom' of capital outside
the context of cosmopolitan class war where workers
in every country in the same 'branch of industry'
will be part and parcel of the same transnational
trade union - that includes workers in Africa, Asia,
Latin America and Europe as well as the United States
and Canada. Thus, the wages and benefits that an
American company is compelled to pay to American
workers they will also be compelled to pay workers
in Africa, and Asia, and Latin America.

Also, and I dealt with this in my prior post, one
of the reasons that American workers will need to
dominate the House of Representatives is to pass
working class package legislation that will make
capital flight illegal.

Since it is the working class with operating on
Nature, changing things by labor and tools, which
are themselves the products of labor including the
productive forces, and creating the surplus value
of capitalist's profits, when an American capitalist
so much as plan 'capital flight' those productive
forces, together with the investment money will be
expropriated and made public property, placed in
the hands of the workers in this industry to manage
wages and hours, benefits and days off as they
themselves see fit. Capitalists that resist need
to be arrested and executed to set an example for
others of their class to go along with the working
class (proletarian) agenda.

Adaoma:I think the tax codes need to be changed
for big buisness, but they have the means to take
theirs somewhere else.   What would be the quality
of life for most of us? Will it improve for the
poorest of the poor? What about the rest.?

Lil Joe: The that want to take their 'business'
somewhere else will have those productive forces
and their finances expropriated and legislated
public property.

In a labor dominated government the 'poorist of the
poor', including single moms, ethnic minorities,
the aged, and the handicap, and all others presently
living in slums, the low wage workers and the unemployed,
are currently welcome into the American Labor Party.
In the strategy I outlined they will have seats in
elected into the labor dominated House of Representatives.
Thus the 'poorest of the poor' will have the power
to push through their own agenda as ending poverty
and want.

Adaoma:I feel that the idea of socialism carries
negative images that are not very attractive to
folks who've come to these shore (since this
plan is for America).

Lil Joe: Well, my analysis is limited to "America",
but recognize the working class as a cosmopolitan
proletariat locked in cosmopolitan class war with
the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, including, for instance
the Iraqi resistance in working class communities
such as Falluja and Sdar City.

The working class revolution will occur when they
realize that they have no alternative other than to
will state power and transfer the productive forces
from the private property of capitalists to the public
property of organized labor, which will operate
independent of the state albeit as 'worker's state'.

It is no more necessary for the masses of revolutionary
workers, in order to make a revolution, to have as a
pre-condition having read the works of Marx, Lenin,
Trotsky, Emma Goldwin, James Cannon, CLR James or Raya
Dunayevskaya than it was for the French masses of the
revolutionary peasants, petty bourgeoisie, proletariat
or even the radical elements of the bourgeoisie to have,
as a precondition read the works of Diderot, Helvatius,
Rousseau, or Voltaire. Revolutions are not the product
of 'reason in history' and 'Actualization of the Idea",
but a practical process inwhich these masses advance and
retreat, learn from their experiences in the processes
of these advances and retreats, until there is reached
a stage where there is no turning back. The conditions
cry out to the working class - Take power! Expropriate
Capital!

Adaoma: The terms are old, the concept is seen as
unsuccessful in many areas.

Lil Joe: It's not 'the term', and you too do not
know 'the concept' - haven't you noticed that every
American anti-communist has said the same as you,
although you are not an anti-communist?

The French, British, and German workers are politically
the most advanced in the world. They are organized into
trade union based labor, socialist, communist and even
green parties, and voted for labor governments, communist
and socialist party governments. Once in power, however,
these governments refused to expropriate capital, thus
inevitably they became the tools of capital. That is the
problem.

It is only in America that 'socialism' is in the media,
and school text books associate the 'uncuccessful'
"socialism" as Stalininst state-monopoly capitalism in
the former Soviet Union. This is deliberate mis-education
based on associating a theory with its pervasion by
people who acted in its name, which is like associating
Christianity with the Inquisition and Crusaders.

The European proletariat gave rise to workers politics,
and socialist organizations and these organizations to
socialist theory, through ideological struggles as they
clarified their objectives. They are not 'pragmatist'
 - that is they do not measure their class interests
by what happend, or didn't happen in the Soviet Union,
but by what is in their material class interests, today.

Adaoma: The idea needs a "makeover" inorder to
convince people that it will bring about change
for the better.

Lil Joe: I am not out to 'convince' or convert
anyone, and certainly not to sell them the 'idea'
of a socialist utopia. I am not a messiah, nor
an 'idealist humanitarian', and have no need to
'makeover' the idea of 'socialism', that is pervert
it to become acceptable to the American capitalist
class, whose politicians and ideologists have so
perverted the 'idea' of socialism so well that even
you accept their definitions and analogies.

Rather, what I analyse are material conditions and
class interests operating in them, material interests
and conflicts of material intersts. The American
workers will flush the bourgeois crap from their
minds the same way I did, praxis. As they operate
in their material interests, they will develope
a critical mind as they read and watch the news,
and magizines, and even school and other propeaganda
books.

Of these workers, some will and others (probably
the majority) will come into contact with the classics
of socialist working class literature, depending
upon the degree to whicxh such groups as the Workers
World Party, the International Socialists, the
Progressive Labor Party, the Sparticist League
Socialist Action, and the Revolutionary Communist
Party participate in building the American Labor
Party, which will also force them from their sectarian
mannerisms.

However, most of the American workers will join the
Labor Party, not for ideological reasons, but because
it is acting in their interests in the House of
Representatives! Some workers might read my writings,
including this post, and agree that it outlines a
strategy to worker's power, and the expropriation
of bourgeois class property by the worker's state.
But, what I outline is not for recruitment purposes,
but a prediction of a possible course of proletarian
praxis, yet it is the praxis itself that will be
the determining factor; not my, or any other writings
by working class/ socialist 'theoriticians'.

Adaoma: For starters the language needs to be more
"layperson" friendly. Working class people are not
the intellectual elite.

Lil Joe: I am a 'lay person', and outside this and
other lists, everyone I deal with are 'lay persons'.
It is wrong to assume that just because one has did
some reading, and thinking that they must be of the
'intellectual' [read: bourgeois] 'elite'. I am working
class through and through, and everyone I deal with,
and talk to are working class. I talk to them the same
as I talk to you. Using the same words, explaining
them as called for.

The only people whom I find it necessary to 'talk down
to' are the brainwashed members of the bourgeois
intelligensia, or so-called 'educated elite'. But,
I don't talk to them the way I am the way I am to
you, as a worker.

When I deal with the intellectual representatives
of the bourgeois, in polemics or/and debates, it
is war: class war in the political since of ideological
battle. The objective of those kind of polemics and
debates are not to 'educate', but to destroy their
arguments, and them. "The weapon of criticism does
not replace criticism by weapons. Material force must
be overthrown by material force" (Marx).


Adaoma: A "working knowledge" of how the present
political/economic system works and what is advocated
in what you've submitted here is what folk need to
make up their minds. Thank you, Bro. Joe. Adaoma

Lil Joe: That is correct. Thank you for your response.



--- In Africa-Politics@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Lil Joe" <joe_radical@xxxx>
wrote:
> Adaoma wrote:
>
> Joe, Please direct me to the thread you wish me to read on
> your views (you have many postings).
>
> Lil Joe: Okay. I will write something today. But, to avoid
> being accused by my opponents of me 'diverting' this
> discussion. But, I will respond to your questions
> below.
>
> Also yesterday I should be focusing on you, rather
> than anticipating attacks by ideologues of the class enemy.
>
> Yesterday you asked about the program of a working class party.
>
> This is an example of my views/plans posted on
>
Ø       http://www.laborpartypraxis.org
Ø
>>
> * Labor Party Praxis will be in the trade union movement and the
> Labor Party fighting for these perspectives. We urge all to form
> or join unions, join the Labor Party, and participate on these
> e-group discussions. This list is independent of the Labor Party
> and is unmoderated. Join discussions at:
      htt://laborpartypraxis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx





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