[PEN-L:27349] Re: Re: Workers get poorer-part 3-New

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"But the perfecting of machinery is making human labor superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845, available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead weight upon the limbs of the working-class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital."


In the above Engels is referring to his book "The Conditions of the Working Class in England" and his observation of the historic trajectory of value. Value is the amount of socially necessary labor in the production of commodities.  Engels therefore theoretically grasped the logic of the historical trajectory of the socially necessary amount of labor in the production of commodities and with this understanding crystallized a conception of the working class as a historic product of the capitalist mode of production.  

It was Karl Marx who worked out the law system that governs capitalist commodity production and that which evolves the commodity external form of movement. It was the gigantic intellectual capacity of Marx that unfolded the law system governing the societal advance from one form of production to another and formulated this as the law of society.

The contradiction between the view of Marx and Engels is that of the first man - the genius, and that of the second man - the lesser genius, on the one had and individual developmental process as living beings. Without question Marx is the greater man, who grasped the totality of the process and unfolded its external forms from the standpoint of the assertion of the productive forces becoming public property.

As individuals we come to the intellectual movement associated with the name of Marx from all sides of the social equation. My particular route was through the writings of Engels, which introduced me to the writings of Marx, specifically, his articulation of the materialist conception of history. That is to say my sense of the role of machinery and technology in its quantitative and qualitative features - through which value is materialized, is much keener than my understanding of the various modes of accumulation of capital. I still have problems remembering must less consistently grasping the distinct stages - simple, developed and universal form of the external form of value. (And probably screwed it up again.)

Specifically, what has been articulated as a Marxist standpoint on my part is a conception based on distinct boundaries in the quantitative and qualitative development of capital as a historically evolved mode of production. That is my particular signature. The general boundaries are: handicraft, manufacture, and industrial production. The transition we are living is from industrial production (electromechanical) to electro-computerized production, whose planetary establishment is decades away and requires reconfiguring the energy source that is as different as stream power and horsepower versus fossil fuel electricity.


On this basis a new proposition is put forth: what is taking place today is not merely a cyclical crisis of capital as it completes its qualitative and qualitative expansion - boundaries. Nor is this simply a contraction in the mode of accumulation characteristic of "credit capital" or its domination by speculative capital.  

What we are experiencing is the first stage of transition to a new mode of production. This proposition is new within the framework of American Marxism. The transition to a new mode of production does not grow out of the mode of accumulation but arises on the basis of the injection of a qualitatively new technology into the productive forces. The mode of accumulation drives the transition. Capital as the form in which the productive forces operates is driving this process of transition and will mean unimaginable misery for the world working class.

The transition from electromechanical production to electro-computerized production process qualitatively reconfigures the worker class and will absolutely render billions superfluous to the production of commodities. Engels grasped this logic in 1845 and Marx unfolded its law system. The machine under capitalist property relations increases the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, and ruins the masses of workers. The mode of accumulation is dependent upon a certain technological development of the productive forces, although the process is interactive. Production, distribution and accumulation are interactive with production providing the fundamentality of the social process after capital has adapted to the mode of accumulation in existence with its emergence, stands on its feet and regulates the preexisting mode of production to antiquity. The dialectic of value - not its external form, but the relationship between "man" and machinery (referred to as the!
 organic composition of capital) as it is manifested in what is socially necessary labor is unfolding the process for everyone to witness.


Like any process, the social (technology) revolution goes through stages.

A qualitatively new motive power is inserted into the production process. The second stage of the revolution is the first visible one -- the old production processes remain intact, but driven now by the new technology. A restructuring or reorganization of the process to take better advantage of the new technology follows this stage.

One stage doesn't end abruptly and a new one begins.

The stages overlap and world wide the process is uneven by definition. It is simply impossible for everything to be applied every where at the same time and not desirable by capital.

Automated production by robots and computers cannot develop further without digital networks. With new communications technology, the technology revolution enters a new stage where the entire organization of the economy is transformed.  Every aspect of the economy is touched -- production, distribution, markets, finance.

Where goods can be rendered digitally -- e.g., motion pictures delivered as digital bits over the Internet to movie theaters instead of as celluloid, old forms of distribution are completely replaced.

The maximization of profit is the prime directive of capitalism.

The basic law may once have been obscured by shifting the pain to colonies (direct and otherwise), by a social welfare net, by regulated industries, by markets clearly defined by both geography and chemistry. But the new technology climate strips away these market barriers that grew and took shape based on the "old" central technology, under a previous boundary in capitals or rather values evolution.  

With increased direct access to consumers, workers, and financial markets; with the increased speed of the economy, the new technologies flush the basic law of capitalism out into the open. There are many consequences of this law at this stage.

Capitalism in the age of electronics - what is inaccurately called globalization -- expresses itself most profoundly not in employment statistics, but in the polarization of wealth in the first stage. The handful of billionaires at one pole, and the vast majority of the rest world's population on the other is one _expression_ on a global scale (200 people own more than 2.5 billion of the world's poorest). Polarization takes place also within the local economies -- in the US, the share of wealth of the top 10% continues to grow, while the share of the bottom 90% continues to shrink, according to a 1998 Federal Reserve report.

The qualitatively new unemployment appears and is transformed from unemployment to exclusion from the means to rise above the margin and this can only take shape in the emergence of billions cut off from the system of creating wealth on a capitalist basis. These people who are cutoff are called the new class, which is only in its elementary stages.

I do not desire to put words in anyone mouth but Comrade Miyachi Tatsuo described this process primarily as it takes shapes driven my the mode of accumulation peculiar to this stage of capital and based on Marx Capital, articulated the concept called the "alternative economy."  Nay, Miyachi Tatsuo describes the evolution of the alternative economy forced to evolve first inside and then out side the production and exchange of commodities based on the money system. Miyachi says "look at Argentina" and what people must do to survive.

People - the working class, in fact get poorer because the productive forces are contained within private property relations. Poorer is a relationship with something else that is not poor or moving in the reverse direction - wealth. One aspect of this process is the cheapening of labor power by reducing that labor content of the social product or driving down value. In capital's evolution the trajectory of the production forces is in the direction of zero value as opposed to an increase in the labor content of products or there would be no impulse to revolutionize production. The external form of the impulse takes place on the basis of competition in search of profits. We are undergoing the revolution from one mode of production to another and revolutionary crisis are breaking out on a planetary scale.

You ask:

>Does the LTV show that the rich and the poor are directly connected in that the more the rich get, the less the poor get? If so, why? If not, why not? <

The answer reformulates the question. The capitalist shell in which the productive forces operates as means of production contains a law system that creates a barrier to the expansion of the production forces by restricting the growth to consumption - not supply or demand, although consumption appears as supply and demand to the capitalist as the problem. Consumption is based on the money system or the sell of ones labor-power.

The transition to a new social formation - mode of production, contains profound implications in the political arena. The political categories called "left and right wing" which grew out of the old bourgeois revolution or transition from the feudal social and economic relations to that of capital are going to be rendered obsolete. Transitions momentarily turn everything upside down and destroys old categories in the ideological realm.

There is no left wing of capital. What was called Neo-liberal policy was not liberal but the greatest polarization to take place since the October Revolution of 1917.  Neo-liberal financial policy indeed was the voice of the bourgeoisie and this is slowly becoming clear to the world masses. There are no reforms left in capital. This category of left and right is historically spent. There are no liberal sectors of capital when view from the standpoint of property relations, the dismantling of the colonial systems and the completion of the boundaries of capitalist expansion.  There exist no new areas to expand the market.

There is emerging and must emerge, a battle for public property - revolution or counterrevolution, and the liquidation of the "middle." The problem is that in the subjective arena (ideological sphere) this is not understood. I would dare say that 90% of our task is to convince the working class of this proposition because the revolution is underway.

The working class in our country believes that it must work for means of subsistence and the problem is lazy people, bad people and bad luck. Imperial bribery has our class disorientated. We do not create the revolution but consolidate the subjective factors needed to shatter the barriers to the new qualitative features of the productive forces.

The form of the new social movement has yet to unfold clearly so it is impossible to avoid the old forms of the social movement that appear in the ideological realm as left and right.


Melvin P.