Re: [Marxism] Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood [was:The'turn to...

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 5/17/2009 12:59:29 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
jbustelo@xxxxxxxxx writes:

>> Under certain conditions --but not always and inevitably,  contrary to 
what
Marx and Engels wrote in the Manifesto but would later  implicitly revise in
their comments on the English workers movement in the  second half of the
1800s-- this economic struggle gives rise to a class  struggle.

The sine qua non for workers waging an actual class political  struggle is
that they have a mass class political instrument. <<
 
 
Comment
 
So the truth is hit upon a little bit. 
 
What is the meaning of this economic struggle that gives rise to a class  
struggle? My answer to this question is the reason for avoiding much of  this 
discussion. I cannot think of one single instance of class struggle in  
America during my entire lifetime or during the last century in America. 
 
Not one! 
 
The closes thing to anything resembling class struggle in our history was  
the Pullman strike and this was limited to the Chicago area and not even the 
 entire Midwest. Every time a group of workers goes on strike someone  
screams "class struggle."  The reason we do not know what class struggle  is, 
is 
precisely because we have not witnessed it in America in the past 100 or  
so years. 
 
The economic struggle is not the struggle between workers and capitalist. 
 
The economic struggle is not the struggle over wages. 
 
The economic struggle is not the struggle for greater political liberties  
or marching on the government or the white house or the struggle for health  
care. All of these are struggle for reform. This is neither good nor bad  
but our field of operation. 
 
Economic struggle means the struggle the erupts within the economy.  

The economy is the "thing" our society is constructed around. The two broad 
 aspects of the economy is "how and the means by which things are produced" 
and  "how that which is produced is distributed." How things are 
distributed means  the property relations that underlying who is distributed 
what and 
on what  basis.  
 
Economic struggle means the antagonism  - (as motion, movement,  impulse, 
tendency, conflict etc.) that is the separation and  polarization or breach 
between "old forms of production and old modes  distribution," versus "new 
forms of production and new modes of distribution".  

Some call the wage struggle or any struggle of the workers for "economic  
and political reform" the class struggle and/or the meaning of "economic  
struggle," as it gives rise to class struggle.   
 
I do not. 
 
What creates the economic struggle that gives rise to class struggle is a  
qualitative reconfiguration of the productive forces as it disrupts and  
polarizes the existing social relations of production, and as this motion -  
revolution, permanently cast segments of existing classes outside of the  
existing production relations, or create new classes, and a period of  external 
collision between classes begins.  A period of external collision  begins 
because their is nothing connecting either to old and new classes  together as 
the unity of the mode of production.  
 
When Marx writes about social revolution he really means a revolution in  
the productive forces as a precondition and "the material transformation of 
the  economic conditions of production, (i.e. the productive forces) which 
can  be determined with the precision of natural science," has come into 
antagonism  with the property relations and its expression in the 
superstructure, 
as this  superstructure is the mode of expression of old classes.  
 
This is why and how economic struggle gives rise to class struggle. 
 
Class struggle does not mean that the workers leap outside of their  
economic struggle with their employer and march on Washington, although this is 
 
an aspect of the collusion and collision of workers and capitalist as the  
underpinning of the industrial system/capital. 
 
Class struggle does not mean the same thing as class contradiction. 
 
Class struggle means antagonism or what Marx and Engels called, "as society 
 moves in class antagonism." Class struggle is not the fight over wages and 
 conditions of labor; or a struggle over civil rights; processes that take 
place  throughout all stages of the development of capital and the 
industrial system.  Fights over wages, conditions and for greater political 
liberty 
is what  drives the industrial/capitalist system through all its quantitative 
boundaries  of expansion and is important in the working establishing a 
higher floor for  wages.
 
Here is the dynamic being described.  
 
The serf and nobility fought for thousands of years and neither could  
overthrow the feudal system or even desired such. For class struggle to take  
place (as society move in class antagonism) a revolution in the productive  
forces have to begin, creating new classes, existing and evolving in external  
collision (antagonism) with the old classes forming the mode of expression 
(self  movement) of the feudal property relations and the configuration of 
the  productive forces underlying political feudal as an institution. This  
configuration of productive forces within feudalism is called manufacture, 
which  as Marx writes can be determined with the precision of natural science. 
 

When classes struggle it is a contest for political power that arises as a  
result of their external collision.  Class struggle is only possible during 
 periods when the productive forces move into antagonism with the existing 
social  relations. 
 
Our historical problem is that every crisis of capital was viewed and  
treated as proof of "antagonism" (revolution) in the productive forces. This 
was 
 so because the crisis of overproduction expressed the germ crisis of value 
 production. 
 
However, if the bourgeoisie and proletariat were the classes evolving in  
external collision with the classes of the feudal order, and constituted the  
antagonistic classes of feudal society, how can these very same class  
constitutes the antagonism of the system which is constituted on the basis of  
their mutual unity and strife? 
 
Yea, I know . . . all of this sounds funny. 
 
Is any of it plausible?   
 
The October Revolution was the industrial Revolution led by communists  
oriented by an earlier boundary of development of the industrial system.  These 
communists had their vision shaped as they existed at the back end of the  
industrial curve.  
 
However the October Revolution was not a response to antagonism between  
workers and capitalist but rather a direct response of worker and capitalist 
to  the feudal order and the wartime defeat of Russia in the WW 1. In their 
mutual  vying for power, the communist outflanked the representative of the 
bourgeoisie.  Then the real problems began, because society cannot leap over 
the harsh school  of value. 
 
In America of the same period  (1920) we were experiencing a boundary  of 
development of the industrial system and as it unfolded were trapped  within 
all that boundary of development called the transition from craft to  
industrial unionism. No group of workers sought to overthrow the system . . .  
period. And we pushed the hell out of the boundary which accounts for it only  
lasting a few decades. Once a quantitative boundary of a system entrenches  
itself political overthrow is generally out of the question as the mutual  
classes struggle to reform the system to complete that stage of development. 
 
Outside a terrible wartime collapse and dislocation of a country by an  
external enemy, a transfer of political power is basically impossible.
 
The Stalinists CPUSA, "working for the KGB," did not stop the  
"revolutionary workers" from seizing political power in America. The Trotskyite 
 "agents 
of the bourgeoisie," working as "front men for the CIA,"  did not  sabotage 
the workers movement and prevent a transfer of power to the workers.  

Some fell it was possible to overthrow capital on the basis of 1936 - sit  
down strikes in the Mid West, and on the basis of the struggle for 
industrial  unionism. I
 
 do not. 
 
To each his own. 
 
Why do we still use outmoded political conceptions and theoretical  
propositions appropriate to a boundary of development 90 years ago? 
 
Talk about falsehood. 
 
 
WL. 
 
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