Re: We are all Highland Parkers/economic origins of communist class - 2

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

>Three years ago, the city was taken over by an emergency financial manager, Ramona Henderson-Pearson, who remains in charge. According to a document prepared in February, she found money missing and records in chaos.<

MP. Sister Ramona aspires to be Condensing Rice and fired the entire police  department. I said to myself, "Damn this is a new level of struggle. We been fighting police brutality for decades and she fired all of them. What would Lenin do about this shit."

Then the city start sending high water bills. My was over $40,000 dollars. OK
comrades this is not a misprint - forty-thousand dollars. I wrote about this
on Marxmail over two years ago. When I complained to the City I was told to
"just put something down on it." The water demonstration would emerge about a year later after the original article to Marxmail.


>Yet Titus McClary, Highland Park's new mayor, is optimistic, . . ."I think we've turned a corner," says McClary, 66, whose mother moved to Highland Park in 1952 because the schools provided free books. He was happy because the city was allowed to issue some bonds in January and could start paying pensions on time again. But he knows the depth of the challenge.<


MP. Turned the corner? TURNED THE MUTHERFUCKING CORNER . . . What street do you live on? There ain't no  more corners you ignorant fuck. When damn near all the houses are burnt down  there is only open fields and no corners. When you turn the corner you haven't went anywhere.

Titus is a retired cop that used to jump on us when we kids. I campaigned my
ass off against this guys passing out mountains of literature. He still won about 60% of the vote. About 80 people voted - I voted nine times, and I think
they stacked the ballot.

Comrades think the desperation in my writing is pure communist propaganda, when I periodically scream "Victory or Death . . . Victory to the Workers and World of the World Unite." 

 

 "Melvin P is so colorful and descriptive, with his nice working class logic."

 

Yea . . . right!

 

The evolution of Highland Park, Michigan is from the most prosperous community in America to the worse. More than so-called "white flight" is involved. I am not white, have never been white and in all probability will never be white. I fled - proletarian courage and all. Changes in the technological regime has a real meaning. These changes alter the composition of classes and classes are composed of real flesh and blood human beings. And these human beings are being pushed - more or less, outside the production logic of capital.

 

This is how bad it is: in the Movie "8 Mile" featuring the rapper Eminence (M&M) there is a graphic scene of a house burning. I swear to God, the movie producers shot this scene in Highland Park. They figured, "hey the city is already burnt down." A small group of residents opposed shooting the scene in Highland Park because they thought that their houses might get burnt down by mistake. There is no fire department.

 

When someone screams "fire" everyone in the city runs out of their house.

 

When I found out a house was to be burnt down I tried to get the producers to pay me to burn down my house. See in Highland Park no one will give you homeowners insurance - in the main, because their is no police department or fire department. The replacement value on my barely standing house would run about $150,000 - $180,000. About $50,000 is the most insurance you can get, for rates sky high. Auto insurance on the Van and another car runs $6000 a year . . .yep. <

>What tiny fraction, I wondered idly, of the money we spend killing people in
Iraq would suffice to make Highland Park livable again? (Less than a day's
worth would do more than nicely.) <

MP. The bourgeoisie is tricky and plan on killing everybody anyway. In Highland Park he does not want to spend money on sending in troops. The cost of bullets, water rations, etc., could be better spent in Iraq, which has turned out to be faulty thinking. Nor is he willing to spend money on Regime change in Highland Park. The next uptick in the social movement is going to involved a hell of a confrontation with women.

 

You can call this emergent strata anything you like - welfare bums, lumpen proletariat, the class of unemployed . . . but how do you explain all the other layers of society intersecting with the absolute bottom? Part time professors are only 24-36 months away from the bottom and gravitate in and out of the same economic conditions, as does that part of our society making less than $10.00 an hour with children.   

 

The bourgeoisie is not going to be able to get away with machine gunning American women and children. They tried beating women and children doing the Civil Rights Era and it altered American history.

 

>"What kind of society could allow such a perverse stark contrast to exist?
Where is the justice, where is the compassion?<

MP. I asked myself this exact question when I left Michigan for good and
headed for Texas - after giving CB some of my books and abandoning the kids - the girls, who are adults and a hellava lot stronger than I. A lot more than "racism" is involved, because this same social process is affecting all of society.

 

The existence of an enormous mass of capital accumulating outside the material logic of material production - speculative capital, is having a devastating impact on society and indeed the entire world.

 

The economic collapse of the Soviet Union after years of stagnation can be understood on the basis of the necessity for changes in the technological regime to restructure the material organization of production. Screaming Stalinism is childish and an excuse not to look at economics. Nor is oil the underlying economic reason for the dislocation. More fundamental is the economic logic of industrial society and it now appears that the Soviets hit the wall first, in front of bourgeois America.

 

Industrial socialism is a property relation or a value producing society and all value producing societies contain similar - not identical, economic logic, because we are speaking of the production of commodities and exchange. The property form and political organization is important but cannot be confused with the hard facts of commodity production as the exchange of values.

 

I plan on getting the wife in three weeks. She has been literally shipping all her belonging to our apartment. Yesterday 23 boxes arrived. I plan to fly into town under the cloak of darkness . . . take a taxi from the airport and call the wife when I am ten minutes from arrival so that she can have the car running when I pull up.

I told Comrades I was moving to Texas to help defeat Bush in his home state:
Bolshevik courage and all that. The truth is that taking my chance with a stay at Huntsville Penitentiary is safer and might just help cure me of a reoccurring dream of being burnt up while asleep: there was no fire department and the fucking police were demonstrating like communist radicals.

AaaaaaaaaaaaaH, the glorious city of my youth.

Here is the place where one can witness with their eyes the process that birthed the communist class in America and it is related to the "demise" and or contraction of the auto industry as the driving force of industrial capitalism. Living the economic reality of changes in the structure of capital - year after year, gives one a certain meaning of Marx Das Capital and Theories of Surplus Value.

Strange but true.

Melvin P.