Hari reply/bribery and labor aristoc.

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

>Dear Comrade Melvin:

>Let me try to explain my viewpoint more clearly.
>1) However I do not think I should have to explain myself any further, for
asking a question - any further. >After all Marx writes: "If it is scientific
task to resolve the outward & visible movement into the inward and >actual
movementâ.. the conceptionsââ will differ widely from the real laws.." He is
talking here of  "the laws of production" - but I truncate the quote for
convenience to utilize its thrust that it is in fact "mandatory" for Marxists
of all stripes - to ask questions. This is necessary in the question of the
Labour Aristocracy. Since Engels first put his finger on the strategy of
capital in bribing the highest echelons of labour lieutenants; and then Lenin
took the analysis further - there has been an interesting phenomenon. That is
to say that there is a tendency amongst a certain section of the left to
extrapolate Lenin and Engels to the entire 'working class'. Indeed elements
of the Maoist left deny there is an actual working class - except that in the
USA it be black and the most downtrodden. This why I used the term Maoists -
by the bye, I did not really accuse you of being one! However, it is indeed a
relic from the Three Worlds Theory - but this can be put aside for the time
being. To return to the Labour Aristocracy. The problem is how cans such a
conception of the entire working class being bribed; aid us in the strategy
of change? To my mind, there are relatively few studies on the ML-ist left (I
am no economic academic - as my pathetic forays will have by now made clear -
I am trying to glean some pearls here - although the Eureka moments seem
rather few to me thus far! But that is life I guess! So perhaps the analysis
has in reality been made in some obscure & dusty tome that I am blithely
unaware ofââ?), that address the question. Here is one ML-ist study, which
was written by W.B.Bland in the UK in the 60's, when indeed he was still a
Maoist. It argues using official figures, that in the UK of that time, the
amount of total "bribe" to the workers was very low; and that the number of
actual aristocrats in the working class was also very low.

>>There is naturally an evolution from the times of any of our previous great
leaders (I hope no one here can deny that there were such - & thus not object
to the term? I myself do not genuflect to any - but due credit.....). In the
period of the last 50 odd years, there has become a huge problem in my view,
with the 'sociological' attempts to explain class. This has infected the left
with - in my view - revisionist attempts to further narrow the class of
workers by for instance, denying that 'intellectual workers' are workers.
[This is attempted to be dealt with in more detail at this web-address.
http://www22.brinkster.com/harikumar/AllianceIssues/All24-CLASS97.htm ]
Conclusion to this part of my reply: Deciding who are the class forces that
will bring the revolution is a critical part of the strategy and tactics of
moving from our current situation to the phase of re-invigorating the working
class movement and creating the subjective force required for change. I
cannot therefore apologize for asking the questions of: How big is the labour
aristocracy, and of whom it is composed; of what does that mean in terms of
strategy for revolution in the so-called developed world?
2) You say, "Virtually all of us with a little gray in our heads developed a
conception of Marxism based on boundaries within capital that no longer
exist." I think as a vestigial die-hard, that the fundamentals have NOT
changed, & that all economic avenues for capital are ultimately doomed.
Because capital is failing & has had some leeway from the benefits of
Keynesian rescue therapies - but this is ultimately sterile for capital. I do
not think in any way that this is controversial amongst the left [The view of
our grouping is at:
http://www22.brinkster.com/harikumar/AllianceIssues/ALLIANCE3ECONOMICS.html
]
>>And of course the car industrial workers are crunched and are (apparently)
less important currently than other sectors of workers. I am not going to
deny that the unemployment of car workers reflects massive changes in where
profit is highest and into which sectors capital will shunt part of its booty
in order to get more. But this is decidedly not the same as saying that the
industrial proletariat is irrelevant in today's economy in the Western world.
Setting workers apart on the basis of what transparently is petty differences
between them in wage-remuneration - AS COMPARED to the amount of profit they
create for the ruling class - seems to play into the hands of those that
would "divide & rule".  Indeed it seems to me that you well agree with that
since you yourself write:
"Right now the auto industry is in the process of shedding between 150,000
and
>200,000 autoworkers world-wide. Where will these workers go? Where every
>they go into society they take with them a sense of organization and a
superior
>conception of what is possible due to their combination."
>I agree with that.
>3) You wrote: "A new qualitative development must take place within the
working class
>whose growth and development is prevented by the framework of capital.
Electronic-digital production is >its trajectory of development is absolutely
incompatible with a system based on the buying and selling of >labor, further
depresses wages driving greater sections of the class into destitution,
polarized society into >a camp of wealth and poverty and engenders a "new
class" of proletariats who cannot live based on the >purchase and sell of
labor and consequently driven along a logic of fighting for their needs."
>Perhaps indeed 'objectively' the working class is hampered from developing -
in the long run - & that is >why objectively revolution is needed. But while
indeed wages are depressed etc; it is manifestly not true >that
"Electronic-digital production is its trajectory of development is absolutely
incompatible with a system >based on the buying and selling of labor".  I
have not seen the revolution yet in North America.

>Sincere Fraternal Greetings,
> Hari


Pardon the unevenness of my replies. Without question I was part of the labor
aristocracy - a political concept that is part of the doctrine of the class
struggle in the arsenal of Marx and Engels. The political conception of the
labor aristocracy and bribery are not identical concepts although they
overlap. By not making this clear I muddied the water.

I absolutely identify with your expressed feeling of not being an economist;
yet economics as social relations are material categories that constitute the
content of the doctrine of the class struggle. The economist have a very
important role to play, so do leaders in the working class who must abstract
from the vast data base of the economist strategy in the class struggle.

The economist by definition are forced to extrapolate from a mass of data the
specific wherewithal to confirm the obvious and seek to present in detail the
magnitude of value (in its cost-price mode of expression) that constitute the
maintenance of the labor aristocracy and bribery within the working class,
based on the exploitation of the dependent peoples and economies. That is
their job.

Bribery of the working class as distinct from the labor aristocracy and a
stratum of the working class is a political conception of the difference in
the material conditions of existence and consumption levels within the
working class and between the workers in the imperial country compared with
there counterparts in the former colonial world.

History is comical, tragic and absurd. Those workers who are bribed relative
to their counterparts in the dependent countries, for all practical purposes
have nothing to do with the labor aristocracy. Using these two different p
olitical concepts interchangeably in respect to myself, then talking about
the working class and bribery muddied the water and was mistaken.

Certain economists seek the exact measure of money (cost-price modes of
value)  - not consumption level, to ascertain the nature of the bribery and
stability of the labor aristocracy and refute the point of view that bribery
of any section of the workers in the imperialist country exist.

It is not as if a measurement based upon independent industrial development
and capitalist appropriation can be made.  As if Argentina evolved on its own
strength - independent from imperial entrapment, and an "objective"
comparison based on the extraction of surplus value from this or that sector
of the working class and "national wage history" can be made in relationship
to the American workers. Such an approach is hype and a point of view the
Argentina workers have a serious problem with. Not because they are against
the legitimacy of science but the standing army buttressed by American
dollars and terrorist apparatus precludes the possibility of an "independent
study" of the profits carved from their backs.

Bribery in America is a historically evolved social relationship that has
affected the entire social fabric and grew up on the basic of the slaughter
of the Indigenousness bands of peoples. Extending political rights to one
section of the people and denying "the" the same "rights" is privilege or
bribery. In history the black workers in the North of America were bribed in
relationship to the black worker in the deep south. This is not to say that
life was a "bowl of cherries." Bribery is relative and a specific
relationship rooted in money and political relationships.

In the industrial Midwest of America we tend to use the term bribery in
connection to wages. The wage rates I received as an industrial workers (not
as a union rep) in the North, compared with the rate of my counterpart in the
southern states of America. My elevation into the upper stratum of the labor
aristocracy is another matter, but understood by the workers in truck
manufacturing in North Carolina. Compare the wages of the worker in England
to that of Ireland or Japan compared with Korea or Hong Kong. Let us not
speak of China. And what of the workers on continental Africa? Is there not a
world market? Imperial domination means bribery by definition for Marxist.
The idea of an anaylsis of class factors outside the standpoint of the
material relations of the lower sections of the world working class places me
in an absurd position. I do not accuse you of this.

It is of course true that the left and Marxist have been infected by the
degenerate bourgeoisie over the course of the last fifty years. In America
there is three generations that understand nothing about revolutionary
upheaval and the awful sting of poverty due to their relative privilege in
the world system of capitalist relations. Another problem arise because by
"America" is presupposed an understanding between the North and the formers
areas revolving around the old slave areas. It is of course tragic that the
revolutionaries have not understood that the black workers in the North makes
higher wages and have higher consumption level that the white workers in the
deep south of America, but no one can defeat a philosophic conception of
unreality.

Can it be said those three generations of Argentina workers; the Irish
workers, the workers of Korea or the workers in Mississippi know nothing of
the sting of poverty and revolutionary upheaval?  Bribery is not a
mathematical equation but a political conception of the mathematics of being
imperial. A huge sector of the working class in America is bribed relative to
the worker in South Africa - not as "me" as an abstract individual, but "me"
reflected in my counterpart in Japan, England and Germany.
Military force maintains this bribery, primarily the force of arms of "my"
bourgeoisie. Allow me to clear the air. The state of the United States of
North America is the basis organ of violence and repression in the hands of
the Anglo-American imperialist bourgeoisie. This state arose from and was
based on the consolidation of the original separate 13 states. The USNA is a
multi-national state, comprised of areas that were formerly direct colonies;
the old core of slave holding states that were defeated in military conflict,
Puerto-Rico, portion of the Southwest formerly Mexico, the Indigenousness
peoples of all bands, the Philippines and a host of dependent peoples. The
Alaskan Eskimos, the Aleutian and Hawaiian peoples', Samoa, Canton and the
Enderbury Islands, Guam, Pacific Islands, Howard, Baker, Jarvis and Wake
Islands, the Corn Inlands, the Swan Islands, the Virgin Islands and through
the world market have subjected the majority of the people of earth to terror
to achieve its aims of specific property relations, based on their personal
domination.


I of course reject the idea that bribery of sections of the working class in
the imperial country is bogus. The measure - if you will, be the consumption
level of the most poverty stricken workers on earth and the most well paid
workers on earth doing comparative work. Earth is our terrain in as much as
commodity production on the basis of the industrial mode of production and
capitalist appropriation reins supreme. From the preceding sentence, it
follows that "socialism" - in all its glory, is not a mode of production, but
a mode of appropriation of the social product on the basis of an industrial
mode of production. This will be spoken of later.


The state of the multi-national state of the USNA is the enemy of the
majority of people on earth; hampers and block their technological
development, bankrupt countries, deprive the world people of the means to
secure fresh drinking water and subsistence and subject the entire planet to
the specter of fear. This state has the support of a sector of the laboring
class in America and its rule is achieved through individuals based on the
popular vote.

The last reform movement in America occurred within the framework of the last
quantitative expansion of the industrial infrastructure under capitalist
appropriation of the social product and all this entails. During the last
quantitative change in the boundary of capital this bribery of the working
class in America was administrated through the Democratic Party and the
enactment of a system of social protections by reformulating the social
contract.


During the era of the Reagan Revolution a major portion of this apparatus of
material bribery was dismantled, which denied the Democratic Party its
ability to stay "connected" with the working class through bribery on the one
hand and transfer money from the "social sector" to bolster the capitalist
class on the other. The Clinton administration further dismantled the system
of bribery under the banner of changing "welfare as we know it."

The reason for this change in policy was changes in the productive forces and
the ascendancy to the leadership of world capital, speculative capital. The
old social contract expressed the domination of financial-industrial capital,
of which the architect was the old Roosevelt Coalition. You are correct to
infer that the basis of bribery of American society has diminished. Unlike
the old financial (industrial) imperialism, capital under the domination of
the speculator has no interest and no intention in maintaining any section of
the working class whose labor is not actively engaged in production. The old
industrial reserve army of unemployed waiting to be deployed has been
transformed in to so much more than less superfluous labor. When employed
this superfluous labor population cannot makes wages to sustain subsistence
for their family.


Comrade the reason I do not embrace the outlook that says

"Setting workers apart on the basis of what transparently is petty
differences between them in wage-remuneration - AS COMPARED to the amount of
profit they create for the ruling class - seems to play into the hands of
those that would "divide & rule".

is because the differences in wages are not petty or transparent once the
comparison is on the basis of world consumption levels by workers doing
comparative work in the former colonies of imperialism - Mexico for example.
The basis line of comparison is the amount of socially necessary labor in the
production of commodities including the commodity labor-power.

"Wage-remuneration - AS COMPARED to the amount of profit they create for the
ruling class"

seems to pose the problem incorrectly in my opinion. The general context is
similar workers in the same industries in the imperial countries versus the
former colonial countries. In other words the consumption and wage level of
the Mexican autoworker is compared with that of the autoworker in Detroit,
compared with the autoworker in the Southern United States compared with the
autoworker in Ireland and Canada, and then, within the operation of the total
social capital. The comparison of

"Wage-remuneration - AS COMPARED to the amount of profit they create for the
ruling class"

in America, is understood in the context of the amount of workers in a
industry producing a given magnitude of commodities, compared with a
previously existing amount of labor, i.e., what the worker gets and what the
capitalist get. That is to say, the absolute direction and trajectory of
technological development, in all industries and all countries is to
revolutionize the means of production so that an existing magnitude of labor
creates more commodities than that which previously existed. The portion of
the world total social capital paid in wages decreases as a ratio of that
which is expended in the process of production as manifested on an industry
basis. This is ultra clear in the auto industry.

The clear trajectory is an every increasing apportion of the world total
social capital to machinery - technology, or  constant capital (fixed cost)
and a decreasing apportionment of the world total social capital to living
labor or variable capital. This change in the organic composition of capital
(apportionment of the world total social capital to living labor versus dead
labor) is what's happening in all of our faces.
What the workers is paid in the form of wages, versus what the capitalist
receives in the form of profits is a different question than what two workers
doing the same job get in Detroit versus Mexico, which evolved its capitalist
relations under the domination of "my" bourgeoisie.

Pardon my inferring the "the whole working class in America is bribed" - as
an abstraction, when I really do not have a concept of  "the whole America as
such."  Using labor aristocracy and bribery interchangeably really screwed
things up. A large section of the worker class within the multi-national
state of the state of the United States of North America is bribed relative
to many of their counterparts on earth.


This relationship is slowly changing and shifting as finance capital or
rather speculative capital collapses "national barriers" impeding the flow of
capital and draws all kinds of workers into the imperial countries and
refuses to take care of workers who are not producing profits - more than
less increasingly superfluous to the production of commodities. This
phenomenon has worldwide dimensions and cannot be isolated to a national
sector of the economy.


The labor aristocracy is primarily the top stratum of the organized workers
but in yesteryear this was not the case. We have left a period of history
where various Civil Rights organizations were funded to the tune of millions
of dollars to "organize" the black masses. Many of the leaders of these
organizations were labeled - correctly in my opinion, as part of the
aristocracy of labor.

To be continued

Melvin P