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

[PoliticNow@xxxxxxx]

I am not sure I understand much of what you have written here, but what is  
this "we" that have moved to "immaterial labor"--do you mean what has been  
called the "unproductive labor" of the growing mass of service workers in  the 
strictly financial sectors of the economy or people who are living on  trust 
funds and reading Lyotard or just the intellectual work of  self-interpretation 
and world interpretation that all economic and political  actors need to do?   
I lift boxes all day long--some of which seem  pretty damn heavy for 
immaterial labor, although I can also get pretty weighed  down by thoughts as 
well--which is one of the reasons I sometimes really love my  work--it takes my 
mind 
off of everything else.  From the point of view  of one relatively 
insignificant 
reader, I think you should re-write  this--thin out the prose so it is 
understandable and not outsmart yourself in  your analysis.  I will for my part 
re-read what Web has to say and your  response, right now I am just puzzled.  I 
don't know exactly how we  build socialism in our new century--but I am not 
sure 
that your analysis helps,  Ben.   

Mark  Derderian

"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.  In practice 
there is." 


 
In a message dated 12/15/2007 2:53:22 A.M. Mountain Standard Time,  
marxism-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

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







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