Re: [Marxism] YADL (Yet another disillusioned liberal)/Reformism material base

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

The historical Logic of Reformism 
WL.
  
 
Leninâs ideas of the bribery of the working class has to be placed in a  much 
larger and historical context. It is best to start at the beginning. 
 
Marx posed the historical question of class, property and configuration of  
productive forces in its theoretical totality but we have faced these issues  
partially. Marx speaks of social revolution: revolution in the mode of  
production, rather than simply political insurrection. . 
 
Social revolution - (the passing from one mode of production to another),  
comes about as the result of the development of the means of production. A  
revolution in the material power of productive forces is the âabsolute,â 
never  
changing precondition for social revolution. Marx sums this up: 
 
âAt a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of  
society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or â what 
is  but a legal expression for the same thing â with the property relations 
within  which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the 
 
productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. 
 
Then begins an epoch of social revolution.â 
 
The âexisting relations of productionâ is understood to mean classes and  
their location in a system of production and their property rights. Classes are 
 
one way or another connected - interactive, with deployment and configuration 
of  productive forces. Classes are formed by the introduction of new 
productive  equipment in society. That is by the reorganization of the 
production of 
the  means of life. When qualitatively new forms of productive equipment is  
introduced into a society the form of class begins to change and new classes  
arise. Not all at one time, but a change wave is introduced into society that  
must run its course. It is the emergence of new classes in a society that  
captures the meaning of society moves in class antagonism. 
 
No society have been overthrown by the social and economic classes  
constituting the system. What is society? Society is constituted on the basis 
of  the 
unity of the productive forces and the corresponding âexisting relations of  
production,â or as it is called by my generation, social relations of  
production.  No society has been overthrown by the social and economic  classes 
within 
it, making the system what it is. Again, social revolution really  comes about 
as the result of qualitative changes in the means of production.  These 
qualitative changes birth new classes, corresponding to the new developing  
technological regime and this begins the breakup of the old system. The new  
technological regime and classes developing as an expression of the new  
technology, 
begin their growth and expand - quantitatively, in antagonism with  the old 
system of production. 
 
Society is always overthrown by something external to the existing economy.  
The two sides of an existing economy is the way things are produced and how  
production is distributed. The struggle between the basic classes constituting  
the economy of a society or the system - in the feudal period this was 
primarily  between serf and the nobility, drove a qualitative stage of history 
along 
 quantitatively. The qualitatively stage of society that is the feudal period 
is  the long history of manufacture existing in harmony with landed property  
relations. 
 
The serf and nobility did not and could not end that period of history or  
the society of the feudal period.  Nor did these classes begin this period  of 
history. Rather, both classes arose out of the society that proceeded the  
feudal period. The reformism of the serf was rooted in everything in society  
that 
made him a serf. The reformism of the nobility was rooted in everything in  
the society that made him a nobleman. What made both classes what they were in  
their actual life existence was a certain stage in the development of the 
means  of production and their relationship to property in the process of 
production. 
 
Any one that look back on history must conclude that all the classes of  
feudal society could not and were not overthrown by the serf. The dialectic  
between the toilers and the owners of the means of production is by definition  
the 
dialectic of reform or reformism. 
 
The feudal order, which sat upon the landed property relations and a  
configuration of productive forces everyone on earth calls the period of  
manufacture, were overthrown by classes existing outside of and in antagonism  
with the 
feudal order. Marx called these new classes bourgeoisie and  proletariat. These 
classes were formed around the new means of production -  industrial  
machinery. 
 
History shows that a class or classes constituting and defining a given  mode 
of production - the social and economic structure of society, cannot  
overthrown the system of which they constitute. A development - revolution, in  
the 
productive forces must take place that renders the old way of life obsolete.  
The only thing the two basic classes, constituting the social system can do, is 
 conduct bloody struggles over the division of the social product and for 
greater  political liberty. Neither class is ever free to overthrow the system 
of 
which  they constitute because they canât. The motion of the toilers and 
owners at the  base of a system is that of collusion and colliding. One 
thousand 
years of serf  rebellions could not overthrow feudalism. Further, the serf as a 
class could not  convince of overthrowing feudalism or see any further than 
his own Lord. 
 
To overthrow a society - system, involves the dialectic of social  revolution 
in Marx meaning. The Marxists movement faces historical errors  because 
society changes and as it passes through all its successive boundaries  the 
totality of the society process reveals itself fully. That is to say, it is  
virtually impossible to quantify social progress or define a historically  
specific 
quantitative boundary of development until one has passed the threshold  that 
separates boundaries of development. 
 
The organic root of reformism resides literally in the configuration of the  
productive forces and its personification in the flesh as the 
interconnectivity  of classes. On the curve of history, opportunism is an 
ideological and 
political  expression of the inability of the proletariat to leap outside the 
value  relation on the basis its own thinking or self logic. With the rise of  
financial-industrial imperialism a labor aristocracy consolidates as a more 
than  
less permanent  institution mediating the capital labor relation. 
 
Pardon the repetition, but the feudal political order and the agrarian  
system it stood upon were overthrown by classes, birthed outside but living  
within 
the landed property relation. The bourgeoisie and proletariat, and in all  
there phases of development within the feudal order, are classes birthed in  
antagonism - not simply contradiction, with the feudal order. 
 
Society move in class antagonism. 
 
Marx fought for the creation of communistsâ revolutionaries - a Communist  
International, that could function as insurrectionary and train the proletariat 
 
to usurp the bourgeoisie in its contest to consolidate political power based 
on  overthrowing the feudal order. The revolutions of the 20th century have 
the  common content of being the social response to the transformation from  
agriculture to industry. 
 
Two generations of communists have called the October Revolution the  
transition from capitalism to socialism, rather the transition from feudal  
Russia to 
industrial Russia under the leadership of communists. Circumstances in  
Russia allowed the Bolsheviks to seize power within the context of a gigantic  
revolution unfolding for decades; the social revolution away from and against  
the 
feudal political, economic and social order. The seizure of power by the  
Lenin Group was not the social revolution. Seizing power has a word description 
 
- insurrection. Revolutions are crowned by the seizure of power, insurrection. 
 You cannot complete a revolution without the seizure of power, but the 
October  Revolution was not the ârevolutionâ but more properly the October 
Insurrection. 
 
The October insurrection fulfilled Leninâs vision called the passing of the  
bourgeois revolution into the socialist revolution. When revolutionaries in  
America stripped the Russianization of Marxist concepts from the historical  
process in Russia, and place this logic in the context of how the American mind 
 
articulates, we are not dealing with two revolutions at all, but the passing  
over of the insurrection of the bourgeoisie to insurrection on behalf of the  
proletariat. Leninâs old April Thesis is a doctrine of insurrection rather 
than  social revolution. 
 
In the Advanced industrial capitalist countries the October Insurrection  was 
understood as a workers revolution rather than the social revolution from  
landed property to industrial society, crowned by the insurrectionary  
proletariat. A "workers revolution" is impossible. The Proletarian Revolution 
is  not a 
workers revolution, but rather a social revolution where the proletariat  has 
to free all classes of society from the value relation in order to free  
itself. 
 
The insurrectionary force in Russia, consolidated and led by communists  
overshadowed the history process. Two generations later books would appear with 
 
titles like âThree Who Made A Revolution.â Individuals do not make 
revolution, 
 only insurrection. Political grouping would rise and fall believing that 
Lenin,  Trotsky and/or Stalin made or led the revolution, while ignoring our 
own  
historical process. The historical process was further complicated by the  
unfolding material logic of capital expressed in the expansion of the 
industrial 
 system. 
 
Social revolution overturns and overthrows systems, not simply political  
institutions of the superstructure. The power of capital cannot be overthrown  
and abolished from history without the overthrow of the industrial system. In  
1917, no one knew this was the case and earlier Marx advanced a transition  
program based on the proletariat capturing the commanding heights of power.  
Chained within a quantitative boundary of the industrial system - not just  
capital, the vision was one of world revolution, as being sufficient to shatter 
 the 
chains of the value relations. 
 
Failure of world revolution was blamed on individuals and political groups.  
Reformism was understood as wrong policy originating in the minds of men, 
rather  than a structural and institutional relations expressed as boundary of  
development, but immanent to the capital-labor relation. 
 
How can one blame a failure of social revolution on wealth and/or bribery,  
when social revolution is the result of revolution in the productive forces?  
This has to be repeated. The industrial revolution was the result of a new  
technology, not political ideology or "doing the right thing," or the relative  
poverty of the serf. 
 
In America âthe revolutionâ - the real meaning of social revolution, took  
place as the transition from manufacture to industry. This entire phase of our  
history constitutes all of the events leading to the Civil War, which was a  
struggle between capital in landed and human property and industrial 
capitalism.  Nevertheless, the revolution was from manufacture to industry 
proper and 
the  political aspects - the insurrectionary force, appeared as Lincoln, his 
army and  political institutions of the North. 
 
Once industrial capital emerged as victor - with the financier on his back,  
society was firmly and permanently locked into its universal industrial  
development and the industrial form of classes were further institutionalized.  
Once industrial society achieves hegemony over society and the national agenda  
the dialectic of reform confronts the revolutionary as the contradiction -  
struggle, between the two basic class of society. However, this struggle is at  
all times over a greater share of the social product and for expanded political 
 liberties; reform or reformism. 
 
A political ideology evolved - (actually syndicalism), that the workers in  
the advanced capitalist countries could overthrow the industrial capitalist  
system, âif they wanted to,â or it a gigantic strike wave could be 
organized, 
or  if somehow we could apply Leninâs âWhat Is To Be Done,â and compel 
the 
workers  to âleap outsideâ their narrow industrial framework; or if we 
could 
somehow  break with reformism or embed the workers with sufficient 
class-consciousness. 
 
When revolution failed to materialize communists tended to blame each other  
and competing factions or the trade union bureaucracy or the bribery of the  
workers or the lack of fight of my mothers, brother uncle for failure of  
socialist revolution. Since social revolution failed to materialize in any  
advanced capitalist countries, we looked for the reason in the imperial  
relation, 
rather than the material configuration of production. To the fighting  
insurgents in the colonial and former colonial world "the problem with the  
American 
workers" appeared to be our relative wealth. A section of American  communism 
adopted this ideological outlook as explanation of the seemingly  
unexplainable. 
 
The issue became even more complicated. 
 
Each crisis of capital was view as the emergence of the revolutionary  
dislocation and transition in the mode of production, rather than a transition  
from 
one quantitative boundary of the industrial system to the next. The  
emergence of the industrial form of unionism was quietly acknowledged as a  
transition 
from craft unionism and skilled labor as the leading form of union  
organization to mass assembly line industrial laboring and the unionization of  
unskilled labor; and then the implications were forgotten. In this theater of  
industrial unionism, someone screamed, âfire!â - âRevolution!â, then  
anarcho-syndicalism and right wing populist communism triumphed as the official 
 ideology 
of the communist movement. 
 
The industrial proletariat was declared and crowned the vanguard of the  
Communist Revolution, which was rearticulated as the âsocialist revolutionâ 
to  
acknowledge that economic communism was impossible and requires a new mode of  
production by definition. 
 
The industrial proletariat cannot overthrow the industrial system for the  
same reason - history dynamic, that prevented the serf from overthrowing the  
system of landed property and its infrastructure in manufacture. The industrial 
 
proletariat fights for a greater share of the social product and for greater  
political liberty. Period. It is the duty of communists to lead this battle 
as  it passes through all of its boundaries. Capital as the last stage of the 
value  relation cannot be overthrown apart from the overthrowing the industrial 
system,  which is impossible to overthrow until a revolution in the 
productive forces  takes places and begins the decay of the industrial 
configuration of 
productive  forces. 
 
The tendency to blame each other; or the mistakes and/or weaknesses of the  
October Revolution; Lenin or Trotsky or Stalin errors or shortness of vision; 
or  the Third International, or the trade union bureaucracy or bribery of the  
working class for the real reformism of the American workers, can no longer  
serve as a definitive theoretical premise and exhaustive exposition of the  
material basis for reformism. Nor is this reformism exclusive to America. This  
reformism was present in every advanced country on earth and this included the  
Soviet Union during all of its history. The reason the bureaucracy and 
reformism  could not be defeated under Soviet socialism is because such a 
defeat is  
impossible, before society begins its leap to another mode of production.  
Sovietism - industrial socialism, did not have to be overthrown, nor was its  
overthrow by capital historically ordained. This is of course an entirely  
different question. 
 
Reformism is not identical to the meaning of political passivity. Political  
passivity has a highly subjective - ideological, component. 
 
Reformism, - as a real institution, is an expression of a system passing  
from one quantitative boundary to another. The word reform or reformism means 
to  
reform the system without changing the property relations. The need to reform 
 the system arises with each stage of the quantitative development of the  
productive forces.  Quantitative development of the productive is the  
historically specific logic and law of development. An example of systematic  
reform, 
constituting a boundary in the development of capital/industrial system,  is 
the mechanization of agriculture. The entire system had to be reformed and  his 
process unleashed the Civil Rights Movement and the insurgency of the Negro  
People. When this process is viewed in its abstraction, the motion logic is not 
 very different from the industrial trade union movement and its impact on  
government and social relations throughout the country. 
 
Reformism is not based - rooted, in the emergence of a labor aristocracy,  
which in turn is rooted in the imperial-colonial relation. Rather, the labor  
ari
stocracy and the industrial trade unions express and are the inescapable  
materialization of the institutional relations between labor and capital during 
 
the industrial epoch. No one could transform the industrial union movement 
into  a Red Trade Union movement because it was not possible. Even if a group 
of  
workers in a particular union elected all Red leaders, the Red leaders could  
only fight within the boundary of the system itself. 
 
Leninâs ideas of the bribery of the working class has to be placed in a  much 
larger and historical context. 
 
 
WL. 
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