[Marxism] In response to Sam Webb's On "The Nature, Role, and Work of the Communist Party"

[Benjamin Morgan <foreverblaze89@xxxxxxxxx>]

Comrades,

I have a correspondence with Sam Webb of the CPUSA in regards to his stance on 
political economy featured in the article, The Nature, Role, and Work of the 
Communist Party. (featured at  
http://www.cpusa.org/article/articleview/809/1/139/) I urge you to respond to 
my post and or contact Sam Webb or the communist party a disscussions@xxxxxxxxx 
. Or, contact the National Executive office at cpusa@xxxxxxxxxx

In Solidarity,

Comrade Ben 


Comrade Ben Morgan
12/14/04
 
Dear Sam Webb,
 
 
It has come to my attention that you are leading the communist party away from 
communism. In the section Nature of The Communist Party you outline several 
fundamental changes in political economy which make it a necessity to change 
our strategies; if this is the case why still advocate for Marxist-Leninism? If 
dogmatism and sectarianism are major issues to the party then why exist? 
Rather, you mischaracterize the transitions in which Marx said in the manifesto 
are going on “under our very eyes.” Marxist-Leninism is dead! This is not to 
suggest that Marxism is dead or that Lenin’s analysis is irrelevant. Rather, 
the organizational structure with in itself is dead; democratic centralism is 
dead! Lenin advocated for a vanguard of the people. The communist who could 
lead the proletariat victorious in revolution! Where comrade Lenin failed in 
his analysis or interpretation of Marxism, is to take into consideration the 
process of proletariatization; or
 the social production of class consciousness, needed to foster and sustain a 
revolution. In order to help you contextualize this failure, I will briefly 
segue into the famous post slavery debate of Booker T. Washington vs. W.E.B 
Dubois. WEB Dubois, a fellow communist and presumably Marxist-Leninist, 
advocated for what he called the “Talented Tenth.” The Talented Tenth was a 
euphemism for the one percent of black people who could succeed in society. 
Dubois believed that this talented tenth would become the elites in African 
American society. Adversely, Booker T advocated for industrial oriented jobs 
that would influence a wider base of blacks and situate them to challenge the 
existing structures of society. Within their separate advocacies combined we 
can see the structure of the CPUSA itself. An elite group of communist or 
alleged communist who wish to “enact radical economic reforms, create new 
democratic forms of participation in addition to
 invigorating existing ones; and finish the democratic tasks left behind by 
capitalism…” Booker T and WEB, just like Sam Webb are wrong; struggle cannot be 
relegated to a small vanguard of elites nor can we merely participate or reform 
the existing structures.
            On vanguardism, Lenin failed to understand the necessity of raising 
consciousness as a prerequisite to radical action. A lot of sectarian confusion 
that exist today comes from a misinterpretation of the “Dictatorship of the 
Proletariat.” Comrade Luxemburg tries to vindicate Lenin’s misinterpretation 
when she said "This dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, 
not in its elimination, but in energetic, resolute attacks upon the 
well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without 
which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. This dictatorship must 
be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of 
the class – that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active 
participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected 
to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing 
political training of the mass of the
 people." [1] Ambiguously, Marx wrote little about the actual nature of this 
dictatorship aside from its necessity to challenge bourgeois political 
supremacy. However, In Civil War in France, Chapter 5 Marx’s describes the 
organization that the workers should take which is creating communes; “The 
Commune was formed of the municipal councilors, chosen by universal suffrage in 
the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The 
majorities of its members were naturally workers, or acknowledged 
representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a 
parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.”[2]
On reformism; working within the existing structures is empirically denied. 
Martin Luther King Jr., the new neoliberal poster boy of equality and morally 
relativistic multiculturalism, lamented over the failure of using the system 
after the monetary provisions of the civil rights acts weren’t passed; “You 
can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking 
about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending the slums without first 
saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting 
on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing 
with captains of industry… Now this means that we are treading in difficult 
water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong… with 
capitalism… There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America 
must move toward a democratic socialism.”[3] Reforming the system and trying to 
use bourgeois politics to
 solve workers politics fails Sam. What major accomplishments will the 
democrats bring us as communist? George Bush Senior was a war monger just as 
William Clinton was a war monger. The Democrats are the same as the republicans 
if not worst. The democrats flex around social issues so they can suck up the 
far leftist vote just as the Republicans flex around libertarianism so that 
they can suck up the far right this is the purpose of the parties!! When the 
constitution was written we the people assumed a united singular entity which 
shared common goals the “American Dream.” The U.S political system attempts to 
encompass the entire political spectrum; under the assumption that we all have 
common beliefs and just minor differences. This point is easily proven by 
looking at the history of our political system. We have had several 
realignments in which political parties and platforms drastically shift 
sometimes even switching platforms all together like
 The Republicans and Democrats did after reconstruction. 
I agree with you that we can no longer “simply grab hold of the state.” 
However, this should not be a matter of mere convention, nihilist pessimism, 
culminating in the betrayal of Marxism or the revolution. Rather, it should be 
rooted to material conditions that warrant such aberrations. I then am forced 
to depart with you as you continue; “the institutional structures, laws, 
agencies, and bureaucratic layers of administration took shape over time in the 
crucible of the most powerful capitalist country in the world.” This is not a 
warrant to support abandonment of the revolution. In fact, this reflects a sort 
of pessimism, a nostalgic inability to continue to resist state power; a 
relegation to the increase of the duration of class struggle to ensure a form 
of momentary “peace;” an appeasement that justifies the status quo like France 
justified the expansion of the Nazis pre-WWII. The reality is that peace under 
capitalism doesn’t exist.
 Billions die yearly as a direct result of capitalism which function 
necessitates poverty. We cannot simply grab hold of the state because it is all 
encompassing. What we are noticing is a shift from real subsumption to its 
realization total subsumption in which the economic system spreads malignantly 
into the totality of social life. 
Let us briefly skim the pages of the Grundrisse. In the introduction Marx talks 
about the hegemony of industrial waged labor over all other forms of modern 
labor such as agricultural etc. Today, after the fall of the Soviet bloc and 
the consolidation of the world market we see a new hegemonic form of labor; 
that is immaterial or biopolitical labor. Before I go any further it is 
important to briefly trace the geneology of the emergence of this new hegemonic 
subject through it’s material progression.  I will start with the sixties. The 
resistance movements of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s from the anti-imperial 
struggles to end colonialism and the yearnings of constituents like Franz 
Fanon, to the protests of students and workers in the streets of America, 
Italy, and France; (the list goes on) all represent a crisis in the order of 
capitalism. Here in America the signs of this crisis seem crystal clear. After 
the unity of the multitude in resistance to
 Vietnam and the horrid conditions of the Fordist factory we have seen several 
transitions rather responses to the crisis. The first is Richard Nixon’s 
decision to remove the gold backing of the dollar and replace it with the 
fluctuating  petrodollars predicating a shift towards the international 
accumulation of raw materials; a move which we can still feel the reverberation 
of today. Why are we really in the Middle East? Nixon’s move wasn’t a 
lackadaisical choice. Rather, the resources that were placed into fighting 
Vietnam posed a potential crisis to the order of capital. The massive war debt 
combined with the global refusal to work in factory conditions, the unity of 
grassroots groups, and the global competition with the Soviet Union forced the 
U.S to abrogate a portion of its economic sovereignty to transnational 
organizations such as the IMF; which scrapped the former Bretton Woods monetary 
system which the U.S created after world war II to
 foster the expansion of U.S imperialism. The crisis of capital forced the U.S 
into a situation where it “was better to attack the system than to work within 
it.”[4] After the emergence of this new global form of currency, consolidated 
by the increases in the value of oil on the World Market, the U.S created a new 
transnational monetary system, Bretton Woods II. The purpose of this new system 
was to “free…foreign policy from constraints imposed by weaknesses in the 
financial system.”[5] This “freedom” is the basis of a more totalizing shift in 
the direction of the global economy, what some bourgeois economist call “lean 
production.”[6] Characterized by a shift to post-fordist production and the 
outsourcing of factories to developing countries, (who have undervalued 
exchange rates and unequal development) this shift provides us with the perfect 
place to segue into the second response; the shift towards immaterial labor.
 
Immaterial labor is defined by Hardt and Negri in the book Multitude as 
“biopolitical labor.”[7] Immaterial labor is biopolitical in terms of its 
tendency to produce subjectivity and or social relationships. The labor itself 
is very much material, it requires the intricate and strenuous use of the brain 
and body; while the products in which it produces are not tangible in the 
traditional sense of a commodity, like a widget. However, it is important to 
realize that immaterial labor power and its social products are commodities. 
Immaterial labor thus expresses true alienation in that it creates absolute 
surplus value; “man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which 
enslaves him instead of being controlled by him"[8] A tendency of immaterial 
labor production is its expansion well beyond the confines of the work day. 
This is simply because the time it takes to create subjectivity and new ideas 
can and often occur sporadically; in a dream,
 while your using the bathroom (eureka!). Thus, production extends into the 
duration of the workers social life; representing a shift to “total 
subsumption” [9] under capitalism. The traditional use-value in relationship to 
exchange value, qualitative versus quantitative distinctions has been rendered 
null and void. This is because the shift to hegemony of immaterial labor is an 
attempt to blur the previous hitherto existing hegemony of industrial wage 
labor, which existed and was thrown into crisis by the end of modernity. I am 
not suggesting that Marx’s labor theory of value is no longer applicable. 
Immaterial labor presently represents only a small fraction of the global labor 
force. However, Hardt and Negri make the argument that forms of labor exercise 
hegemony during different periods of time. Waged industrial labor exercised 
hegemony over modernity in that “it pulled other forms (of labor) into its 
vortex.”[10] Similarly, immaterial
 labor has the tendency to pull the existing modes of production into its 
center thus infiltrating other forms of Labor, forcing them “to 
informationalize, become “intelligent…” [11] 
The relevance of my previous segue is to trace the transitions of the system 
materially. My argument is that because we have moved towards immaterial labor 
all people become productive at the point where intellectual labor poses 
hegemony over life in common. Therefore, the traditional structure of the 
workers party is not adequate to account for the productivity of the masses. 
The Communist Party if it wishes to have any real successes must break with 
Leninism. Furthermore, the Communist party needs to build communes that are 
outside of the jurisdiction of the state. Due to word restrictions I will stop 
here but if you would like to continue correspondence please email me at 
Comrade_Ben_morgan@xxxxxxxxx
In solidarity,
Comrade Ben 12/14/07
 
                                      Notes
1.      Rosa Luxemburg. The Russian Revolution Democracy and Dictatorship
2.      Marx, Civil War in France, Chapter 5
3.      Frogmore, South Carolina, November 14, 1966. Speech in front of his 
staff 
4.      James, H. (1996). International monetary cooperation since Bretton 
Woods, Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund p. 203
5.      James, H. (1996). International monetary cooperation since Bretton 
Woods, Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund p. 203
6.      Gowa, J. (1983). Closing the gold window: Domestic politics and the end 
of Bretton Woods. Ithaca, New York, USA: Cornell University Press.1983, p. 69
7.      Hardt and Negri, Multitude War and Democracy in the Age of Empire 
Penguin Press 2005 p.109
8.      Marx and Engels 1845-6, 159-160
9.      Hardt and negri Empire, Harvard Press 2000 (A new form of sovereignty 
composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a 
single logic of rule." The authors call this new, global reconfiguration of 
sovereignty Empire. This shift both enacts and results from "the real [as 
opposed to formal] subsumption of social existence by capital," wherein there 
is no longer any "outside" to capital. Everything is always already subsumed 
into the capitalist network.)
10.  Hardt and Negri, Multitude War and Democracy in the Age of Empire Penguin 
Press 2005 p.107
11.  Hardt and Negri, Multitude War and Democracy in the Age of Empire Penguin 
Press 2005 p.109


      
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