Re: Stan Goff's statement

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

Stan writes:

 

"The Marxist doctrinal belief that the working class
represents the potentially liberatory force within the primary
contradiction â a notion that is, in my view, plain mysticism posing
as a 'scientific doctrine' â of bourgeois-proletariat, attempts to
override the demonstrable fact that patriarchy is an older, deeper,
and more durable 'contradiction,' that the most turbulent and
transformative struggles of the 20th Century, while often under the
leadership of Marixists, had a primarily national character, and that
they were more often carried out by majority-masses of peasants, not
proletarians."

 

Comment

 

 

Pardon . . . the proletariat - workers, at least in this country are female.

 

It is of course true for my viewpoint, that no society has been overthrown by the social and economic formations - classes, constituting the social system. That is, the classes and all the human beings constituting the primary classes, which are the economic and social bond of a mode of production, are never free to overthrow the system of which they constitute. The struggle between those that are most intimately connected to the means of production - in the feudal period this was between serfs and nobility - drove a qualitative stage of history along quantitatively. But the struggle between serf and nobility could not end that qualitative period of history most call feudalism or more accurately the agrarian society upon which was erected political feudalism.

 

The feudal political authority and the agrarian system it stood upon were over thrown by classes outside that system - the bourgeoisie and the modern working class. These classes were formed around the new means of production - industrial machinery, rather than early stage or heavy manufacturing processes.

 

Today we are talking about a new class created by another qualitatively new means of production. Rest assured, that in one way or another, every qualitatively new means of production, must be definition create a new class or new class and destroy the previous form of class that arose in corresponds to that stage of development of the productive forces.

 

It is the proletariat, not just "the working class" that is truly revolutionary. It is those proletarians, existing hand to mouth, tenuously and more than less outside the system of bourgeois production, that constitutes the grave threat to the value relations - not just capitalism.  

 

"They" . . . "them" . . . more than less existing outside the legal, moral and ethical dictates of the value relations are the threat and all of us have an understanding of who "they" are.

 

"They don't work like us" or "have stable employment" or "gamble to much," or "are caught in a cycle of poverty" or are really an "underclass," and "lack the discipline and have to many social problems" to me critical to social revolution, so the answer must be me . . . as modern worker.

 

I once thought like that an industrial life time ago. And I mean a 30 year grind, thinking about these basic questions to theoretical Marxism every day.

 

Nevertheless, in the past century and up into Americas 1950s, the most dynamic and insurgents segment of the labor movement was that amongst the industrial workers in large scale industry and that is where the communists properly positioned themselves. That these workers were bascially from European immigrants and not the most poverty stricken in our society has always been understood. As a point of history much of the black and brown masses were rural and outside the industrial heartland going into and through the 1940s.

 

Yes, the struggle between the two basic classes of a social system is by definition a reform movement and incapable of overthrowing the system of which they together two constitute. That is why communists waged the revolutionary struggle for reform, fighting as best as they/we could to win the workers over to the cause of communism on the basis of the struggle in front of us.

 

Still, the American communists were not wrong to fight to lead this struggle along its shortest path. When the sharpest dynamic of the social struggle leaped to that of the African American peoples, exciting imagination, inspiration and adding sparks to all the national movements, the communists took their role in this struggle and fought to win the fighting segment of this social struggle to the cause of communism.

 

So we did not do a very good job!

 

Great . . . sorry it took so long to invent the wheel.

 

There is a lesson here. The struggle against segregation was not waged on the basis of the black masses fighting racism but demanding full entry into American society from different directions.

 

No one is soft on the Women Question, although we - I, commit thousands of blunders.  

 

Fighting patriarchy from the standpoint of the most poverty stricken sector of the proletariat is more than a notion. Yes, . . . patriarchy is slavery across all classes, but the emerging fight is going to take shape on the basis of the most poverty stricken sector of the proletariat, which is female.

 

Now the Leninist form of organization is spent. The main reason is because the Leninist form of organization - the party of a New Type, is conceived as an organization of insurrection during a period of revolutionary upheaval and not just sharp clashes between the primary classes of a social system. We forget that Russia was in revolutionary upheaval traveling the path of social revolution from an agrarian society to an industrial society.

 

In America - (and this is so funny to me in retrospect), the Leninist organization and democratic centralism was not bad or wrong from the standpoint of theory or doctrine of combat, but meant an organization based on industrial cooperation or ... get this ... organized like the internal working of any large factory, rather than the army. Consequently workers and former soldiers were more comfortable in such organizations because they express their conscious understanding of organization as a lived experience.

 

Members of the intellegencia tended to be less comfortable in such organizations and crave broader discussions of complex issues, not because they are lesser men and women but because of their actual life experience. The real problem is that the Leninist "Party of A New Type" (perhaps the most ingenuous political doctrine of combat of the entire 20th Century) is a party of insurrection and not a party capable of waging the revolutionary struggle for remove during each quantitative boundary of the advance of the industrial system and the value relations.

 

We American communist have an enormous amount of history and experience that needs to be communicated and digested by the world communist movement. We are the ones who are going to write some pretty important chapters in our advance to the communistic mode of production founded on a qualitatively new technological regime and infrastructure of social events.

 

OK . . . we get it . . . the struggle between the two primary classes of a social system is not sufficient to overthrow the system of which they constitute. Something else must enter the arena of history as was the case during the epoch of political feudalism. New classes must arise more than less outside how the current system - mode of production, is configured; and these new classes or new class, brings to crisis the systems inability to use the apparent capability of the productive forces to solve basic human problems.

 

Still, we must fight what is immediately in front of us. Therefore we waged the revolutionary struggle for reform and with each generation passing to the next, as much of the Marxist inheritance as possible.

 

Good-bye Lenin?

 

Nope!

 

Good-bye Leninism.

 

 

Melvin P.