In a message dated 1/24/2010 6:34:30 A.M. Pacific Standard Time, cb31...@gmail.com writes: Setting the record straight
by: Sam Webb January 20 2010 >> President Obama is a reformer, not a socialist reformer, not a radical reformer, and not even a consistent anti-corporate reformer, but a reformer nonetheless whose agenda creates space for the broader people's movement to deepen and extend the reform process in a non-revolutionary period. << Comment Obama is neither radical nor anti-corporate. We are however, in a revolutionary period - era, in real time. In the context of the industrial revolution Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels discovered that social revolution is defined by a series of stages whose fundamental origins are technological revolution in the means of production. As the technological revolution unfolds, the qualitatively new forces of production come into conflict with existing productive relations, and thus begins an epoch of social revolution that ends with new productive relations corresponding to the new technology. This discovery marks the beginning of genuine social science, and is the theoretical foundation for comprehending and facilitating the revolutionary process. The current revolution in the means of production that we are witnessing in the world today is the beginning of just such a process, the beginning stages of a revolution that fully confirms Marx and Engels' scientific discovery. Marx and Engels directly witnessed how the industrial revolution created a new class of proletarians that possessed no property other than their labor power. In the Communist Manifesto in 1848, Marx and Engels projected that this class would overthrow capitalism and create a communist society. We now know that this projection was premature: without the introduction of a new quality into the means of production which could facilitate the overthrow of capitalist relations, the industrial proletariat in Europe, North America and Japan fought fiercely with its capitalist employers for a share in the benefits of industrialization (e.g., higher wages, better working conditions, political rights, and so on). Qualitatively new means of production have come into existence and our society is thirty years deep into applying these revolutionary new instruments of production and the knowledge of the scientific revolution. First comes application of new technology then the social consequences and this cycle repeat itself in stages until the entire productivity infrastructure is transformed. A revolutionary period is a time frame where a qualitative reorganization of the productive forces has begun and classes leap - not all at one time, from contradiction and begin their movement in antagonism as society struggles to complete the evolutionary leap to a new mode of production. The dialectic of the leap is a very complex process revolutionaries debate and unravel so as to figure out their directional line of march. We are living the opening era of a post industrial regime . A major part of the material/political evolutionary aspects of the leap is the emergence of the new world wide non-banking financial architecture. This form of capital is detached from the production of surplus value. During my youth we bitterly hated the financial capitalists, somewhere sitting in his office claiming he was in "mining" because he invested in mining stocks, bonds of various kinds and paper promising to return a profit, indirectly based on brick and mortar production and distribution of real things. Today, the new non-banking financial regime is into money, all kinds of financial instruments and schemes with zero connection - not even remotely, to production. Capital detached from surplus value production writes the international political agenda for capital backed by the aggressive military might of America. Growing sections of the world proletariat lives hand to mouth outside capitals historic social contract. The social contract of capital is selling and buying and buying and selling of labor ability (power) as the driving force behind circulation of commodities. "You work for me and I will pay you and society will grow and prosper is capital’s social contract." There are no new markets to conquer. Under capitalism "the market" is not an area where buying and selling takes place, but all the society transactions where exchange of labor for money for commodities; investment of money for more money drives economic activity. What holds the market together is the social contract. The state - police and military organizations, enforce the legal system holding the social contract in place. Along comes a revolution in the productive forces that disrupt the productive relations driving layer after layer of workers out of active production, while reducing wages across the board. Step by step and stage by stage capital renders the wage form of labor, "work for me and I will pay you wages," superfluous to commodity production, under new conditions of the post industrial revolution. The social contract begins its revolutionary collapse. This defines a revolutionary period. When sections of capital seek profits outside production of real things and workers are ousted from production, these people do not disappear, simply because they no longer engage production. A full 30%, possibility 50% of our working class consist of temporary workers living hand to mouth. This concrete class configuration did not exist when I was first hired into the auto industry. More than 100,000 workers in the financial industry in and around New York City have lost their jobs in the last 24 months, many of them making as much as $100, 000 a year. Sections of the bourgeoisie - capital, and proletariat, including former higher paid workers, increasingly face each other in external collision without the connecting tissue that is the unity of production. The dominating form of capital as bourgeoisie is not connected, interactive with a huge section of the proletariat, more than less cast out of the civic society of the bourgeoisie, with no possibility of achieving economic stability based on capitalist production. This is a new thing in human history. In an attempt to cheapen commodities, realize a profit and deepen the market, each concrete step in further revolutionizing the productive forces exacerbate antagonism; intensify external collision between classes. External collision between classes is how the movement of classes in antagonism takes place. Where classes are united in the process of production and struggle with one another over shares of the social production; better working conditions, more leisure time and greater political liberty, these struggles are the movement of society in contradiction. Contradiction is not antagonism. The former is the basis for the struggle for reform of the system. The latter is a revolutionary struggle to displace the system. A new form of struggle outside the employer-employee contradiction is in birth. Qualitative change in the means of production, the material base for revolution, is irreversible. The disruption - breach, between production and distribution and the tightening cyclical crisis can no longer be ignored. We have entered an epoch of social revolution. Sam Webb is wrong. We are in a revolutionary period. Society does in fact, move in class antagonism. We are also in the midst of a revolutionary crisis, that ebbs and flows and advances in stages. The outbreak of the revolutionary crisis was witnessed a couple of springs ago - 2006, as the immigration movement or the new face of the world proletarian revolution. Protestors, approximately six million strong in America, took to the streets in a movement so large it surprised the politicians, the capitalists, and even the protestors themselves. It was something completely and obviously new – qualitatively new. From Los Angeles to Chicago to Washington, D.C., from Denver to Miami and North Carolina to Wisconsin, people from all walks of life demonstrated their outrage against HR-4337, the draconian immigration legislation that proposes to make criminals out of the undocumented as well as those who aid them in any way. Consider some of the language of the proposed bill, which is nothing more than a modern version of the fugitive slave act. It would be a crime to assist an undocumented person to "remain in the United States... knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such person is an alien who lacks lawful authority to reside in or remain in the United States". The chants of "We are not criminals!" and "We are America!" resounded across the United States. II. Obama was called forth and elected, as was Bush W. in a period of social revolution, where the bourgeoisie is attempting to stabilize itself on the basis of valueless wealth. Upon taking office, a President is immediately hemmed in by a number of forces. Among them is the oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the land. Should that President consider the Constitution "a covenant with hell" it must still be upheld. The President inherits a military and administrative bureaucracy, which, indispensable to governing, may not agree with him and dangerously hinder his capability. Most importantly, no one can govern a people who disagree with them. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
