Venture Communism/morped/ Socialism Betrayed

[Charles Brown <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Waistline2
 cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

>CB: Yes, the South started the Civil War (a counter-revolutionary coup
d'etat see Aptheker) because the slave system could only survive by
constantly expanding geographically ,i.e. by geographical extension, or
extensive development. Marx discusses this in his essays on the Civil War
and U.S. economy at that time.<

Reply

My understanding is that the plantation South attempted to secede from the
Union . . . but that is not the point. By counterrevolution in the American
Union  . . . the Civil War itself is not referred to but rather the period
of history constituting the overthrow of Reconstruction . . . or the chain
of events that was the result of the Hayes Tilden agreement of 1876 . . .
leading to Plessy versus Ferguson.

^^^^^^
CB: Yes, I can see use of counterrevolution in this post-Civil War context.

Aptheker has the thesis that the initiation of the Civil War itself was a
counterrevolution, because the election of Lincoln was essentially a
revolution ( a change in the mode of production because a major form of
property was negated) . Lincoln's election was a revolution, not because the
he and the Republicans advocated abolition of slavery in the South, but
because they were for forbidding the slave system to _extend_ in the
terminology you have introduced, extensive territorial development. And
since the slave form of organization could not develop intensively ( as you
say below), it would die if it couldn't develop extensively, therefore
Lincoln's policy would indirectly "abolish" slavery, was a revolution and
the Southern firing on Fort Sumter was a counterrevolutionary assault. Also,
the slavocracy had been the ruling class of the whole U.S. the period before
the Civil War for , well all of it right back to Washington and Jefferson
really. The South controlled the Presidency and the Supreme Court. The
Democratic Parties were the parties of the Slavocracy. So, Lincoln's
election was a rev overthrowing the slavocratic ruling class. This is
Aptheker's explicit thesis, but really  a lot of it is in Marx's writing on
the U.S. Civil War.

However, I understand your use of "counterrevolution" for
Post-Reconstruction. The Civil War counterrevolution failed,was defeated.
The Counterrevolution you discuss succeeded.

^^^^^^^^^

One aspect - among several factors, of the outward expansion of the system
of plantation slavery is the form of labor itself and the laboring process
of gangs of slaves. The form of the laboring process of the slave system
contains its own barrier that prevents an internal intensive development.
This limitation of the form of slave labor has everything to do with the
tools and energy source deployed by masses of slaves.

^^^^^
CB: Well, it is the property form - human beings owned - that limits what
the masters can trust the slaves with. Marx has a specific passage on this.
I'll look for it. Empirically, slaves would tear up a form of machinery
quicker. Slaves are more readily Luddites. But this is generated by the
property relationship between slave and master , not the form of the
technology.

^^^^^^^

Actually . . . we discussed this issue before . . . Sartesian, yourself and
myself and it is all right to disagree over the form of the laboring process
. . . the economic character of plantation slavery . . . why it was not a
form of primitive accumulation . . . etc.

^^^^^
CB: Right. Slavery in 1860 is no longer primitive accumulation. Slavery at
the time of the primitive accumulation of all capitalism in the 1400 and
1500's is one of the things that Marx terms the chief momenta of the
primitive accumulation.

^^^^^^

Extensive and intensive development of the material power of production are
not isolated categories . . . yet what is being discussed is on what basis
the form of the laboring process itself is changed and what constitute a
revolution in the form of the labor process - the basis or internal
components of it intensive development . . . as opposed to extensive
expansion.

A soft ware programmer in the same building as a machinists is a different
creature expressing a change in the form of the laboring process. The
productive forces are revolutionized . . . sublated . . . and by definition
this takes place incrementally.

For instance, providing the slaves with better plows, hoes, etc., and the
driver man with a better whip, cannot lead to the internal intensive
development of agricultural production beyond the point of human muscle
effort . . . because the form of slave labor as a laboring process contains
its own barrier. This self contained barrier can only be shattered -
sublated, with the development of the means of production . . . that is
tools, instruments and machine development driven by a different energy
source . . . radically different from the tools, instruments and energy
source underlying the form of slave labor.

Providing slaves with a tractor constitutes a revolution in the form of the
laboring process . . . even if he remains a slave for a period of time . . .
and this "period of time" is short because the form of labor corresponding
to a slave mode is not compatible with mechanization of agriculture and the
value system. The form of the laboring process is burst asunder.

The Civil War itself is considered revolutionary because the Slave Oligarchy
was overthrown and shattered as a slave oligarchy and ruling class. In this
sense the abolition of slavery was a social revolution without a preceding
or corresponding economic revolution. That is, the instruments of production
of the agricultural South did not advance, but the North imposed a
revolution in the social relations upon the South with the freeing of the
slaves.

^^^^^^^
CB: A fundamental form of property, a form of property in the means and
forces of production , ownership of laborers, was abolished. Change in
property is a material change. The property relations are a material
category in the Marxist approach.

^^^^^^^^


Every truly great social revolution must proceed from, stand upon and
develop from an economic revolution. It is not possible to truly free slaves
or proletarians without replacing them with more efficient energy. At the
time of Emancipation, there was no such economic revolution in the means of
production connected to Southern agriculture. This truth couple with a
growing domestic and international demand for cotton and tobacco condemned
the freemen to a new and often more brutal form of exploitation.

Without question political alliances between Northern - Wall Street Finance
capital, and the conversion of the Slave Oligarchy into the landlord planter
class has everything to do with the counter revolution in full swing by 1890
. . . but what is being isolated is the conditions by which the form of the
laboring process is transformed.

The tools or instruments of production connected to Southern agriculture
changed very little between 1870 and say . . . 1940. Sharecropping and the
convict-lease system became new forms of slavery for the African American
and this form of labor - the laboring process itself, would undergo
revolutionizing with the invention of the mechanical cotton picker and the
mechanization of agriculture, the development of weed killing chemicals,
tractors etc. These developments in the mean of production change the form
of the laboring process and constitute a revolution in the intensive
development of labor.

The point is that the computer, digitalized production process and advance
robotics - not simply electricity, constitute a revolution in the intensive
development of the labor process that is and must change the form of the
laboring process. We are at the beginning of this process.

^^^^^
CB: There has been a lot more changes in the technolgical regime since steam
and before computers than just electricity. Assembly lines, radioes,
internal combustion engines, jet engines, nuclear powered engines,
telephonic and televised communication, automated production pre-robot,
plastics and thousands of other artificial materials, transistors ,
satellites and that ain't all. I have a book here by Comrade S. Lilley
_Automation and Social Progress_ that discusses the technological changes in
the 1950's. Since 1867, there have been a series of revolutions in science
and technology, all of which combined with the new computerization and
cyberization revolution, but not just the latter alone, have made a number
of modifications intensifying the organization of production, i.e. in
general aimed toward increasing extration of _relative_ surplus value, as
discussed by Marx in _Capital_

^^^^^




The analogy is not the events leading to the Civil War and the overthrow of
Soviet Power. Rather, the analogy is the counter revolution after the Civil
War . . . when the freemen and revolutionary forces came to power in
different areas of the South, and the counterrevolution after the
proletariat attained power. What ties these events together as economic
logic and political doctrine is the difficulty of fighting on the same
economic basis as your enemy.

I am convinced beyond doubt that we are undergoing the beginning of a
profound revolution in the mode of production that changes the form of the
labor process that correspond to electromechanical production.

Melvin P.

^^^^^^^^

CB: There is nothing , excuse the expression, automatic about a change in
the property relations because of the computer revolution. It is working
class consciousness that must develop and change in order to have a
revolution with computer technology or with whatever the next revolution in
science and technology brings.