[Marxism-Thaxis] (no subject)

[Waistline2]

Subj: Imperialism Today
Date: 1/29/2002 6:35:35 AM Central Standard Time
From: Waistline2
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]




>The communist in Argentina have their work cut out for them in teaching why >capitalism cannot be reformed. I never forget that I am from the most imperial of all >countries and cannot labeled the  Argentina masses and their leaders "petty >bourgeois" without specific definition. Why can't capital be reformed. What is the >Marxist meaning of reform? What are the alignments on a world scale and in >Argentina that clarify this phase of the decay of capitalist property relations? What >are the task of the communist in the trade unions? What is the task of the >communist amongst the unemployed and the mass of unemployable? What are the >new forms of self-organization in formation? How is the revolutionary process >unfolding or rather what are the current dimensions of the process of the state >structures polarizing and splitting?

Melvin


These questions were posed seeking understanding of that, which is "new" in the working class movement. As the author of the questions, they apply to myself with the same force.

Last week a stormy gathering of citizens met in the closed city college of Highland Park, Michigan. Highland Park is a small suburb of Detroit - 2.3 square miles, and was once the wealthiest community in America. Highland Park was the home of Ford's first assembly line plant; former home of Chrysler World Headquarters and major machine builders servicing the auto industry (Excello), with the famous Mr. Thomas Edison living less than a mile away.

As a nucleus for the evolving auto industry Highland Park emerged in the late 1920s with an enhanced infrastructure to accommodate the demands of the "captains of industrial production" and a population of roughly 90,000. This included a separate school system, city hospital, separate water facilities, separate public library, police and fire department, garbage collection, street cleaning, several movie theaters, local shopping centers, etc. For sheer beauty, Highland Park was dubbed the "City of Trees" with thick vegetation surrounding all facets of industrial production.

Today Highland Park has a population of 16,000 with a 63% homeownership rate, has collapsed as an independent financial entity with an unemployment rate of roughly 20% and an anger rate of one hundred percent. Highland Park is under the administration-ship of the state of Michigan and the Mayor is rumored to have recently taken a job at Home Depot selling lumber. Highland Park resembles Argentina with this distinction; instead of carrying pans to bang-on, a core of citizens carry guns led by a small core of the collapsed police department.

The issues of the meeting spanned from the outrageous water bills, abandoned homes to the demands of the police department for continued employment. City employees are on the verge of losing their jobs and face four-day workweek with a reduction in wages and the impending collapse of all medical benefits. The local judge's pronouncements on the collapsing social structures and the abandonment of citizens by the federal government is a call for social change - up to and including social revolution, and is only matched by the tendency of the collapsed police department to exhibit spontaneous impulses towards insurrection. This is no exaggeration.

During the meeting members of the police department - man who are currently unemployed, demanded employment and wanted to know their fate. The city hospital has been long closed and so has the fire department and for all practical purposes the local library. The Movie theaters have been like "Gone With The Wind" for many years.

The administrator of the City pointed out very clearly that there was no money for city service and in thirty days the Sheriff Department would no longer patrol the streets of Highland Park. She stated that in all probability, the State Police would take over the functions of policing and the local police went into rebellion, disrupting the meeting. Enormous contradictions immediately surfaced and the meeting was instantly polarized into two distinct forces.

On the one hand the citizens were sympathetic to the employment needs of the local police but favored street patrols by the Sheriff Department because the local police live in the community and tend to be connected by a hundred threads to crime in the city and harassment of the "wrong people." The "people" and the local police were polarized on the basis to two distinct ways of viewing unemployment. On the other hand allowing the State Police to patrol the city polarizes the State Police department whose specific task is to patrol the interstate system of the state of Michigan, seeking "bad guys" and not petty neighborhood criminals and domestic violence violators. 

Sections of  "the people" - homeowners still employed surrounded by a sea of unemployed and small business owners, made me want to call for the formation of a people militia on the spot but prudence combined with fear of being hit by "friendly fire" from an unconscious mass seized the impulse. Several of us "old reds," "industrial warriors," "pink-o's" and "woman liberationist" eyed each other nervously, which meant time for self-organization and the suspension of ideological lines of demarcation.

"My water bill is $400 every ninety days and I have had enough of this crap," stated an older gentlemen and the mass at the meeting broke into wild applause. The administrator patiently explained that the water system was constructed to service 90,000 and the population is only 16,000 leading to frozen pipes from water stagnation resulting in massive water loss and the city had no money for repairs. The reply came back instantly from within the crowd, "in other words to hell with city services." 

To my ear this was an extremely brief summation of the collapse of the infrastructure, the domination of the world total social capital by the speculative sector of capital, the bleeding of the people at the hands of high finance and I suppressed an impulses to run home and get out all my pots and pans and join the banging masses in Argentina.  Can you imagine that: a sector of the world proletariat banging pots and pans combines with a polarized state sector including the police; in a mass of humanity sprinkled with small shop owners surrounding by an ocean of unemployed, those living at and below the margin and pick pockets picking the wrong pocket.

A mental note was re-enforced, Argentina has inaugurated the new phase of the class struggle and in every Metropolitan area of the planet the movement of masses will conform to the alignment of classes and class sectors revealed in the banging of pots and pans.

I looked around the room again and reflected on the fact that I will be fifty years old this year and remain one of the youngest of the radical generated on the basis of the last reform movement in capital and caught in the orbit of the revolutionary Marx dialectic.

There are no more reforms left in capital . . . there are no more reforms left in capital . . . there are no more reforms . . . capital  . . . decay . . .this phase of decay . . . speculative capital.

A reform movement is a movement that restructures the social contract between capital and labor based on legalizing the unity between the dominate sector of the total social capital and its counterpart - polar opposite in labor. Reform movements stabilize not simply the working of the production of commodities but property relations. The last reform movement in capital was generated on the basis of the aftermath of World War II and destroyed the colonial structure of the world market - in the main. There is even talk of a unified Ireland. In North America this was expressed as the Civil Rights Movement, which intertwined with the legacy of the reform movement of the Roosevelt era, which created the legal instruments for the unity of a section of the working class movement with its counterpart in capital.

In other words organized labor - the trade union movement, was united and consolidated on the basis of the Roosevelt Coalition - a specific alignment of financial industrial capital, whose urgent need was to stabilize industrial production and rebuild a war torn Europe. The direct counterpart of this specific alignment of financial-industrial capital was the industrial proletariat in the largest factories of heavy industry and a narrow layer of state workers needed to stabilize the new social contract.

The reform movement called the Civil Rights Movement was an aspect of the shattering of the colonial structures of the world market and drew an unprecedented number of the colonials into the lowest strata of the proletariat; expanded state employment and unionization of these workers to provide and consolidate the base of support of the ruling party's. The Reagan/Thatcher Revolution shattered the base of support of the Democratic Party and revealed a new partial qualitative enhancement in imperial capital.

The technological revolution increases the productivity of labor; causes further changes in the ratio called the organic composition of capital and increasingly smaller portions of the world total social capital can be profitably invested in living labor. Capital must seek profitability - maximum profits, or die due to inability to expand and currently invests in itself in the form of a million and one investments promising a high rate of return. This capital can become speculative capital, although speculation is as old as the bible.

What is new is the domination - ascendancy, of speculative capital over financial-industrial capital and it's writing the world agenda for the world total social capital. This domination of the world total social capital is the new partial qualitative feature of capital. The old financial industrial capital demanded certain infrastructure improvements as a condition for the expansion of commodity production. Old man Henry Ford needed massive amounts of water for production and everyone could pay their water bill. I can't pay my water bill and speculative capital says "buy bottled water, cause it ain't no money to be made in infrastructure water service."

If speculative capital is capital that is increasingly divorced from the production process its counterpart must be the mass of workers who are increasingly divorced from the production process. There is no social contract that can be created between a mass of capital increasingly divorced from the production process and a mass of proletarians increasingly divorced from the production process because a reform movement in capital restructures the social contract, strengthen the production of commodities and property relations.

There are no more reforms left in capital and the police are almost as mad as the various sectors and sections of the working class.  Where I live at the workers have been more or less armed since 1865 but never polarized to this degree. Even when all hell broke loose when Chrysler went belly up in 1979 this level of polarization and externalization of polarity that is labor and capital was not this intense. In 1980 Chrysler had laid off 41,000 of 87,000 in the Detroit area.

Back then the annual murder rate in Detroit exceeded the annual death rate in Ireland, including Bloody Sunday.  Here is the meaning of antagonism as movement in contradiction - the process evolution wherein polarity emerge as relatively independent of one another, facing each other as external entities, with the previously subordinated pole forced to abolish the conditions of its subordination to further develop based on a new law system. Antagonism can be abolished - not contradictions, and the contradiction complete its development on the basis of a new law system unique to it.

I buried the Marx dialect back into the right side of the brain and looked at the mass in motion. I thought to myself, would the masses embrace the revolutionary demand for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the immediate ascendancy to communism? The answer came back instantly - Yes! if you have bottled water, which I have none of. Just as rapidly came the solution to the question of power;

"Lets us drink water until our bellies are full and demand the Feds pay the bill."  "The government got more money than all of us and the power to get all the money they need and since I haven't a quarter, the money can't come from me."  "Give me water or give me death."

"Wait a minute."  It's the role of government to provide for the safety and care of the people or else why have a government.

My hand shot up into the air and I step forward.

"Look, you are an administrator and I am not here to bust you chops cause ain't nobody elected you to nothing. It is the job of the state and Federal government to ensure that we have water for less than $400.00 every 90 days. The Federal government is the employer of last resort and the last resort came several years ago. Time for us to get organized and I am taking names cause we need to do what they are doing in Argentina for food and water. The police need their job but so do everyone else."

Several days later some of the old comrades met together to prepare a game plan. The program is victory to the workers in their current struggle for water, jobs, getting the Feds to put all of us on the dole. The reason this spontaneous movement is the initial phase of a revolutionary crisis is because there are no more reforms left in capital. A spontaneous movement is not a reform movement although the demand is for the reform - solving of a mass grievance. 

The role of the individual in the social struggle is not identical to the role of the various self-proclaimed parties of emancipation of the working class. I am currently on the path to joining somebody's group but have this itchy feeling that what is needed is a small educational society that knows how to articulate the demands of the workers - without the ideological "ism;" after all my water bill is almost a car note payment; the police are disrupting the meetings cause nobody will give them a job; the mayor is selling lumber at Home Depot; the trade unions are trade unions and the local judge is acting like Patrick Henry.

Where are the communist when you really need them?

Melvin.