All socialists are anarchists and all anarchists are socialist.

 

Radical Left is a

 

The Future

 

From morality to ethics

 

Nationalism vs. nationalism

 

Minimum Program

 

Appropriation with fair reimbursement or expropriation without compensation

 

Dual Movement

 

Socialism’s Principles

 

My mind Wanders when Reading Hegel

 

Property

 

Marx opens the door

 

Underdevelopment of Dependency vs. Capitalist Global Development

 

Lenin

Articulation of Modes of Production

What a Marxist Professor Should Teach

 

Marxism and daily issues of the women’s issue

 

All socialists are anarchists and all anarchists are socialist.

 

Socialism without democracy is a lie and democracy without socialism is also a lie. This is a restatement of Bakunin’s famous quote “Liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.” To keep things clear socialism is not government ownership, and democracy is not the right to vote.  Public ownership is not really public unless it is democratic. The right to vote for a office once every so many years and which campaigns and legislation is taken care of behind our backs and without the transparent view and direct input of the rank and file citizens is nothing close to democracy.

 

Radical Left is a

Activism that embraces the vision of the following:

 

1. Small d democrat (Direct and Participatory democracy).

2. Small s socialist (Public Ownership of key industries, social services and financial institutions).

3. Small c communist a synthesis of the first two above.

4. Humanist, human welfare, values, and dignity comes first.

 

The state is the government and administrative offices that run society. State has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in order to maintain order. Thus power is used to keep troublemakers in line and enforce laws.  Those who control access to the resources used in production and distribution, those with a vested interest in maintaining existing relations of power have the greatest influence in the day-to-day decisions governing the state operations.

 

Public ownership goes beyond government agencies running different aspects of the political and economic goods and services needed by society. That is not yet socialism. Only when people served have an increasing input into the administration of the services do we approach socialism. The direction is toward participatory democracy and collective proprietorship. At first compensation would need to be from each according to her ability to each according to her contribution including hours, skill and intensity.

 

But, fighting for fairness and basic human rights, compassion and social responsibility we move in the direction of from each according to her ability to each according to her need.

 

 

Also with the increasing direct democracy and collective ownership with worker councils, we have employee direct control of the job and job site. By replacing private ownership of business or industry, self-management becomes achievable. Bureaucracy private or public becomes the issue of democracy. Though to be honest democracy is a public issue. The private often lacks accountability. Democracy then is public, accountable and non-hierarchical and egalitarian. The goal should be to bring the economy home to all the people particularly the poor and the vulnerable. This makes all of us responsible for designing an economy to meet the needs of all the people beginning with the destitute and the defenseless. This requires public control over key financial institutions, core industries and social services. With democracy there is accountability. We can now move to direct participatory democracy not only of these sectors of the economy, but guaranteed distribution of these goods and services to those who need them. Democracy at the shop floor level means not only a right to a meaningful job but a say on what happens to us at the job site.  Democracy in the neighborhoods, communities, the nation and the world begins with living like we have a right to this. The economy belongs to all of us not the Wall Street gamblers, thieves and gangsters. Through a revival of radical and militant labor unions operating as candid employee working groups to make decisions on income, working conditions, what is produced and how and the distribution of these products and other benefits. Community groups to make decisions on how what is produced is distributed beginning with the needs of the disenfranchised, dispossessed, deprived and those without property or status.

 

Next the separation between mental and physical labor becomes progressively settled. Through rotation of jobs and skill upgrading as part of the job description of all employees shop floor democracy is possible. All supervisors, directors, and administrators are to be elected from within the rank and file. Often with term limits, for example any position can be served no more than two non-consecutive terms. Terms being a set time like two, four or five years. The idea is work is also art, play and a sensuous connection with nature, fellow human beings as the creative work process. At this point it becomes possible to organize distribution based upon from each according to her ability, to each according to her needs! What was seen before as the state; now is expected to wither away. When labor has become so productive that we will voluntarily work according to their ability.

 

Horizontal organization will replace vertical structured authority. The new society is highly organized on the basis of free and equal associations. That is combining worker control of the work sites through worker councils or committees, federated through elected representatives at each succeeding level all the way to the global. The rank and file and transparency are the control factors. Authority is situational, temporary, rotating and always subject to recall by the rank and file. At this point the state, as we know it begins to fade away being replaced by knowledgeably chosen amalgamation and association. The hierarchical state structure is now a historical footnote.

 

The democratic state run by working people and for working people will become more and more democratic. More and more functions are taken over directly by the people through the worker councils and citizen councils. But this can only happen in a truly democratic and socialist revolution in which the expanded public sector is control directly through worker, citizen, liberties, and environment councils or advocacy group democratically selected to e for d rank and file. As socialism is assembled through the action of the rank and file, the responsibility and reach of the state transforms because class differences lessens as power and income founded on the ownership of capital assets used to produce wealth such as materials, tools, buildings, land and money resources slowly depreciates due to the concentration of processes of manufacture in state controlled public ownership in the hands of the general public. From the point where all means of production become public property, the character and main purpose of the state now changes from political rule and coercion by enforcing the law to being one of advocacy and coordination of material and processes.  Governmental rule over the people by police, courts and prisons declines. Now we increasingly see administration by the construction and managing of organizations into a scientific management of non-human objects and how and what is produced and how these goods and services are distributed. What was formally the state become an organizing economic unit and no longer a method of political control by one class over the most exploited class.  We have organization, we have long term planning, we have democratic control over the economy by all the people and this would no longer be a state in the old fashion sense.

 

Both socialists and anarchists agree upon the above. The main agreement is two fold. First one is over strategies. Both socialists and anarchists disagree among themselves. For example non-violent resistance or armed struggle, direct action at the point of production or popular pressure being brought to bear on the established government or revolution vs. revolutions. I choose not to debate this.

 

Second how fast can we move from a market economy based upon production for profit and private property to true communism i.e. stateless worker councils? Replacing from each according to her ability to each according to work performed. Moving towards from each according to her ability to each according to her needs. While many socialists of today think true communism will never be achieved they still use the above model to measure what to do our process and how much more we need to accomplish. Therefore All Socialists are Anarchists and All Anarchists are Socialist.

 

 

Socialist Sources:

 

Karl Marx Critique of the Gotha Program

Frederick Engels Anti –Duhring Part III Socialism; The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State chapter ix

Karl Kautsky Class Struggle

Lenin State and Revolution

Leon Trotsky Terrorism
and
Communism [Dictatorship versus Democracy]

Editor Jaroslav Vanek Self-Management

Editor Gerry Hunnius Workers Control

 

Anarchist sources:

 

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon What is Property

Michael Bakunin Statism and Anarchy; Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism

Peter Kropotkin Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow; Revolutionary Pamphlets; The Conquest of Bread

Alexander Berkman What is Communist Anarchism

George Woodcock Anarchism

 

The Future

 

Democracy is a movement and not a product. Democracy is not a verified fact with the formation of the right to vote.  Democracy is the on going process of taking charge of one’s own life and the day-to-day decisions we collectively make. The revolutionary transitions from less to more democratic structure require not only a commitment to the democratic possibility, but a mind set of acting democratically.

 

The first paradox that comes up in living life as a democrat is the conflict between democratic control of the work place and our communities and protecting individual civil liberties. Being born from the conflicts inherent in a market economy, an ideology of individualism, hatred of the less fortunate, competition, private property and production for profit in which democracy is seriously handicapped at first. We begin as defining freedom as a collective project, rather than an individual accomplishment. Social responsibility replaces individual obligations.  Work and wages become two important but distinct issues. Everyone wants a comfortable income. We can set up our next project in which work now becomes more humanized and working conditions becomes more humane. Pride in the craft becomes possible as skills are up graded and rotations of jobs lessen the drudgery of menial labor. A relationship between social responsibility and the social benefit of the job and a feeling of importance is developed.

 

In the beginning reforms to lessen the more pitiless and grave distress of capitalism on the wageworkers is important. Next increasingly more say by workers about their wages, working conditions and benefits is also important. Followed by legislating protection of worker rights, sanitation, enforced safety measures and regulation of employment.

 

Progressively this is an escalating demand for public control over the economy for the benefit to the workers, citizens and consumers. Employment must be protected and guaranteed weather it is wage labor or work of the self-employed. While doing this action should be taken to close the income gap between the rich and the poor. Equality of opportunity becomes a generation-by-generation commitment. If not, those born in privilege have an unfair advantage in the distribution of life chances and meaningful employment. Use rights over property must replace absolute control of private ownership of the property. The community ultimately must look out for the interests of all its’ citizens against ruthless exploitation of the advantages of private property at the expense of the rest of us. Financial firms must not only be carefully regulated, but become publicly owned as soon as possible. As soon as this is done then the public utilities, social services, public transport and public communication must become in fact public. Public possession of and public monitoring of this essential part of the economy is paramount. The same is true of the key industries and major industrial corporations so central to the over all economy. Following this of course, all boards of authority need in the short run equal representation of labor unions with voting rights. At this point the divisions between skilled and unskilled labor, mental and physical labor are to be dealt with directly through education, up grading of skills, and rotation of jobs. The differences between rural and urban employment must be addressed in order to ensure if there are any gaps in the progress of creating a more compassionate and democratic society is taken seriously. Education is central to all of this. Education must be free from pre-school through PhD’s. Schools must remain under the control of the educated communities free from state or religious control.

 

The above is only the first stage of the transformation of society to a true democracy. The above is the only way of protecting human rights, community based self-determinations and civil liberties. This is only the beginning and not the final goal.

 

Government is always a dictatorship and can be nothing else. The state, all states demand a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in protecting the state and enforcing its’ laws. To protect short-term gains some sort of government is necessary. The state still requires a control on the lawful use of power in defending the command structure and carrying out its’ regulations. This becomes less and less important as people grow up under a new democratic and secure life. The coercion of the state becomes less important as worker and community councils become more important. The councils in which everyone has a day-by-day say over the decisions affecting their lives as such replaces the state as a relevant reality.

 

As the economy changes, so does power relations and political culture. As these changes come about there can only be a shift in the underlying culture. As everyone’s needs are met and everyone who can work has a job, economic insecurity is put to rest. As a creative effort replaces the drudgery of work by a more artistic joy of labor, wages and work are no longer connected. Economic equality and this cultivated and inspired connection with nature work become a deeply enjoyable and meaningful part of life. No on worries about who is working harder than whom. From each according her to ability to each according to her work performed can now be easily replace by from each according to her ability to each according to her needs. Not until this final stage can council communism replace state socialism.

Sources

Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1844 by Karl Marx

Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx & Frederick Engels

Critique of the Gotha Program by Karl Marx

Civil War in France by Karl Marx

From morality to ethics

 

Morality is often associated with an individual obligation to particularized kinds of personal conduct. Often, though not always it is of a sexual nature. I will not engage in this kind of behavior, even if no one else will ever find out. This is great so far, except when this is imposed on others who happen not to share your religion or core values. I use ethics as being different. Ethics is often a social statement about collective behavior. This also is always changing. Commitment to others as an ethical consideration evolves as who is our sister and brother evolves. From family, to clan, to tribe, to nation, to humanity to life on this planet grows to answer the question am I my sister’s and brother’s keeper. In a history of revolutions and movements ethics evolve. In the following I use ethics and morality different than my sources in order to simplify the debate.

 

Social movements is the concerted effort by a large group of people to bring about a important transformation in the existing social structure in relation to wealth, income, power and property. Labor however defined is central. We begin with an increasing impression of association of characteristics in common and a feeling of far reaching comradeship. This solidarity unites individuals in an agreement of collective goals and a feeling that we are all in the same boat. United in joint sentiments brought to life through action. “We” replaces the “I”. The “we” become our reason for living. Our consciousness is altered.

 

This conflict is in fact a response against unfair and unsatisfactory social conditions.  The professed estrangement causes psychological and public tension and a culture of alienation. The main social groups include economic classes, ethnic groups, gender and sexual orientation that come to feel disadvantaged by the dominant society. Class being central to the over all economy of a society more often than not provide the model for action for all deprived groups.

 

Association being a natural part of social life, it is natural that we come together in order further to address our grievances and expand both our democratic participation in those decisions that affect our lives and expand our personal freedoms so that we can take part in those choices. Cooperation and organization leads to collaboration of ideas as well as efforts and symmetry of action.

 

But, before that the spirit of rebellion must be awakened. When consciousness liberates herself from the manacles of mind with that deadening outlook that is swayed by sovereigns, counselors, members of the clergy, entrepreneurs, office-bearers, capitalists and news reporters that have carefully coiled about the people with attitudes of compliance and servility. An awareness that exposes all pervious truths to stern examination is born. All that has been taught in the past is fond out to be empty of the hollowness of the spiritual, partisan, permissible meaning. The social bias within which the human mind has decomposed lies festering upon the heart. The rebel begins to investigate in innovative passages to a better life. This struggle develops our new wisdom of ourselves and of our world.  With every fresh revolution, generates new science of understanding.

 

Forces of reaction including the ecclesiastical order, the government, and administrators’ of commerce, manufacturing, the bankers, commercial investors, criminals and journalists cooperate to regain the momentum and to try to resurrect the dark ages. Financiers and cowardly strumpets of private enterprise who profit by the toadying of philosophy and of the debasement of personal character work for the master to make timidity and servitude okay.

 

But belly rot blocks the bowels and the pain of law and order out ways its’ benefits. Insurrection, rebellion, insurgence, sedition and revolt become our banner of beautiful music. The “Rebel Girl” becomes the standard of beauty. The “Red”, the militant, the revolutionary are the roll models for our children.

 

The quest of pleasure can lead to good or evil, depending whether our joy comes from working for the health and well being of others or to fulfill a craven taste for personal wealth or over indulgent gluttony. It can only be stated those who finds their pleasure in compassion, empathy or a strong commitment for equality and social justice is more sustainable then the spiritless predilection for private trinkets and an extreme permissive avarice of vain narcissism. Pursuit of happiness is the foundation of both ethics and crimes, good or evil. But, good can be empirically specified and the criminal is instinctively apparent. Also it becomes plain that the sympathetic is more joyful than the depraved.

 

The foundation of social ethics is born in the concept of “Other”. It is the “Other” that is evolving. Social ethics creates it’s own definition of justice.  From vengeance that unites the clan in opposition to a wrong against the defining core values to universal equality founded on compassion justice grows. From the “People” being my clan, to the “People” being all of humanity justice evolves. From people to life in general compassion also grows.

 

Sources:

Kropotkin, Peter (1970) Anarchist Morality: New York, Dover

Trotsky, Leon (1938) Their Morals and Ours: The New International Volume IV, number 6 June 1938, pp. 163 - 173

Baum, Gregory (1996) Karl Polanyi on Ethics & Economics: Montreal, McGill Queens

 

 

 

Nationalism vs. nationalism

 

 

In the very short run nationalism can be a progressive force of those oppressed national struggling to just survive. Nationalism of the powerful nations is always evil. When a victimized nation joins the community of important ant powerful nations of the world, nationalism is always evil. Nationalism at this level not only victimizes the weaker nations that get in the way of imperial dreams of avarice and supremacy masquerading as defending democracy around the world. Spreading civilization and the white man’s burden were the lies that the powerful told in the past. But it was just a mask covering the face of majestic visions of acquisitiveness and authority impersonating as the protectors. Provocative private enterprise, and its’ government supporters is reinforcing its malevolent efforts more dangerously than ever. Crimes of the wealthy leaders are swept away by the big lie called patriotism. Old men who are cavalier with young men’s lives, lead the nation. Even good causes become evil when led by evil men.

 

We arrange our life decisions around a deep sense of justice and equality not for ourselves but for the protection of the welfare of the horribly abused individuals and require their cultural, public, economic, political and social liberation along with deep-seated demand for self-determination.  To struggle for the idea that every person must have both the material and proper resources to acquire a full measure of the supplies required for the cultivation of a decent life must be more important than impulsive chauvinistic dullness. 

 

The patriot is the mindless pawn of the conventional xenophobic capitalist. Nationalism at its’ core is exclusive. People are urged to adhere to commands of those who speak on the nations’ behalf. This takes place in spite of the hunger and pain of the poor. Nationalism focuses on perceived wrongs done against a nation and forgets the wrongs visited upon the less advantaged within that nation. Wrongs that the better off members of that nation visit on the rest of the tribe. This ignores that cross national alliances are possible if we can only see that the poor of our enemy have more in common with us than the affluent leaders of our own nation. Both sets of victims require that individuals need to demand to have open access to the equal means for the promotion of her wide-ranging abilities and the full use of her labor for her betterment and that of the community. Having the resources desired to shaping social relations making impracticable for the exploitation of anyone's labor, so that all the benefits of being a citizen of society is evenly distributed.

 

All people at all times have an interest in social justice. That ensuring everyone has food, housing, education, health care, security, meaningful work, and the pursuit of happiness. Not because we are a member of a specific tribe but because we are living things that feel, because we are human.

Reciprocity and redistribution is the necessary cornerstones of real and lasting democracy. This is the only possible long lasting economy.  Mutuality and reorganization of democracy becomes not an end but a lifestyle. Allocation of social benefits includes understanding of the need for collaboration in this mutual aid. Nationalism asks us to limit our final loyalty to members of a nation. But, for the greater good we are asked to look the other way when members of our own nation are exploited to further the aims of our leaders. This is absurd. Our friends and allies are the poor among our enemy, not the generals and presidents of our country, and of course not the op-ed patriots of our national news media.

 

Nationalism when it becomes exclusive leads to the utmost conceivable brutality towards those enemies the leaders choose to call enemies. Nationalism is a very recent historical phenomenon. Always nationalism harms the poor and working people within the nation itself. Nationalism finally keeps the needy and workforces in line for the advantage of the class that control society's governmental procedures in the interests of the social class who owns the capital assets used to produce wealth.

 

This is not to say that national discrimination, imperialism and racism is not a critical problem. In the short run nationalism of the weak and victimized nation is a very progressive force, but as soon as national liberation is achieved, nationalism soon turns into its opposite. Now the same passion for fairness and egalitarianism for self-determination and end to oppression is now turned against internal minorities.

 

National liberation must go beyond nationalism as soon as national liberation is achieved. Anti-imperialism is never enough. Unless the recently emancipated become the champions of their own persecuted subclasses within their own civilization they soon join the neo-colonial client states of a post-colonial world. The reality unless victims stick together they soon become the blood sacrifice on the alters of a false freedom called national independence. What has changed is now a new national elite can bargain with the financial moguls in the megalopolis of international capitalism for a few more crumbs thrown their way.

 

 

 

 

Source: Le Socialisme, November 2, 1912; Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor.

 

Source: Karl Liebknecht, Ausgewählte Reden und Aufsätze (Selected Speeches and Essays), Berlin 1952, pp. 296-301.

 

Source: Marxism, Freedom and the State  Publisher: Freedom Press, London; 1950

 

Source: Politics and the State (1871) in Bakunin's Writings Publisher: Modern Publishers, Indore Kraus Reprint Co. New York, 1947

 

Source: The National Question - Selected Writings by Rosa Luxemburg, edited and introduced by the late Horace B. Davis, Monthly Review Press, 1976.

Source: V. I. Lenin (1971)Theses on the National Question Lenin’s Selected Works International Publishers

Source: V. I. (1971) Lenin  Critical Remarks on the National Question Lenin’s Selected Works International publishers

 

 

Minimum Program

 

`

 

Even modest reforms once achieved must be defended. The more ambitious the accomplishments the more likely the reactionaries will fight to repeal them. Raises are lost often by rising prices of consumer goods. Civil rights legislation is reinterpreted to lessen their impact. Success in a progressive struggle requires us to push ever further towards our ultimate goals or else gains are soon lost. Employment is a dependency on the employer who exist for profits i.e. exploitation of the workers.

 

Always reforms only come about during times when discontent is on the rise and threatens the profits of the affluent and the security of the influential. Revolutionaries can take advantage of this by not only supporting reform movements, but by using these victories to secure struggles for further demands. With each victory the relationship between the producers of wealth and the owners of that wealth is altered. Workers get stronger in relation to the capitalists through reform. Said another way, there is increasing control over job sites and communities by those who create the large quantity of resources necessary for the wealth of the bankers, speculation advisers, and tycoons. The capitalist, financiers, investment brokers, and industrialist have no wealth without the labor and spending of working people. However, with each victory comes push back by those who own the wealth. It is more then fighting to keep what we have gained. Left to his own devises the capitalist continue to lead us into one economic crisis after another. Through overproduction, irresponsible speculations with our hard earned capital, and a direct attack on the incomes of the laborers, the capitalist steals the wealth of labor and creates yet another economic crisis through stupidity.  

 

Democracy is ever the aspiration and the fortitude. Yet it is constantly turned into a cartoon caricature of make-believe. The deception of democracy is what keeps the exploited docile.

 

Before the existing government as we know becomes more democratic, more direct participation both at the work place and in the communities we live in becomes a way of life. Production for needs and even desire is seen as the obvious way to produce things. Profit is at that time becomes either theft or just reward depending on two things.  First how much is enough; inequality comes about when some one does not have enough to live a healthy and comfortable life. Second how is the profit shared? For example a cooperative belong equality to all the employees of a firm. If it is true that socialism will lead to communism and this will lead to the withering of government, as we know it, then democracy will outlive the State, as it has existed up until then.

 

That may be utopian, but as a long-term goal it serves as a road map for reform. However, wages and benefits are always important issues. But, with each reform victory the power of workers, professionals and the self-employed is strengthened. This is important as more and more say in the day-to-day operations of the firm must meet the approval of the collective employees. The employees must see past the division of labor and competing interests, to embrace industrial unionism not just one firm or industry, but labor in general. The old saying “an injury to one is an injury to all”. Democracy becomes a continuous gala of evolving conquest and never a completed project. During very long struggle a coalition between wageworkers, professionals, self-employed, intellectuals, small farmers and small business must be formed. There are real differences between the needs of each group; therefore any alliance form will always remain delicate, provisional and in need of incessant renegotiation and understanding. 

 

All working people are workers, citizens, and consumers. Thus any councils set up along the lines of participatory democracy would require representatives from those three bodies. In addition civil rights and environmental concerns need to be represented. A true economic foundation that will be humane and sustainable is embedded in social responsibilities and concern for a greater good and community well being. Not profit, but over all welfare of the community. We have a narrow interpretation of a market economy that lets investors off the hook for their self-indulgent narcissism, avarice, and faith in an economic system that will breed poverty, exploitation and despair. An immoral economy that has always failed with out continual big government intervention because it does not work and that it can be repaired is the lie we are forced to swallow. In the private sector bureaucracy is even more recalcitrant than the public sector because of its lack of accountability. Ever deal with private insurance? Even though I am a fan of the public sector and think it should be greatly expanded. Bring back the WPA. To the public employees social needs are more central to the economic concerns of the people than profit. Work is driven by concerns for social responsibility and community protections.  Having said that I imagine that the issue should be democracy not bureaucracy. Private investments should be carried out with public responsibilities being most important. The first concern should always be would it provide good jobs with good wages and benefits. Secondly will it provide the general public with affordable, safe, and reliable goods and services? Profits then and only then should be considered. What is needed is a radical and militant rank and file run unions, with in your face shop stewards, Civil rights advocacy groups, civil libertarians, environmentalists, feminists, consumer groups, community rights and client rights action groups as a real power to be dealt with in managing the economy. True economic democracy requires no less.

 

Production of goods and services in the private sector is the employment of workers at a rate to insure a profit. The direct motive of employment and production is that profit. In the public sector the motive, its bottom line, is service. The public sector provides those goods and service essential to the community. Because the inspiration is public service rather than profits it is cheaper and more efficient to support the public sector as is. Out sourcing only complicates the issue without providing any real benefits. In the long run it costs the public more and the over all quality of the services declines. Most public servants understand this and choose to work in the public sector because they care about the public they serve. With recent history in mind where major international investors speculated irresponsibly on high return and unsafe speculation for quick returns on investment without creating jobs or any long-term benefits to society. They gambled and lost only to be saved by big government, driving the global economy into the toilet. So why are we as a nation beating up on public employees while openly supporting the criminals that ruined the economy?

 

The conflict between consumers and workers remains. But, because every worker is also a consumer the conflict is between capitalist and both the consumer as well as the worker. Without the capitalist the conflict is between the worker and consumer who are the same person thus we negotiate as both producer and consumer. What is class struggle in one setting becomes an attempt to generate everyday civility or congenial empathy in the other. Until then wages and benefits of group of employees should compete with another.

Source: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution

Source: Leon Trotsky: The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution

Source: Peter Kropotkin: The Conquest of Bread

Source: Karl Kautsky: The Labor Revolution

 

Morris Hillquit: Socialism in Theory and Practice

 

 

 

Appropriation with fair reimbursement or expropriation without compensation

 

Reform always costs those who are to benefit from the reform. Thus those who are required to give up their benefits need be compensated for the loss of their privilege. Those who are fighting the good fight for the benefit for the destitute, labors and the wounded of the current economy must carry on the struggle beyond the victory or loose everything. Reform can happen in no other way, as the powerful will compromise only when forced too. Then the will give up only what they have to. With each victory begins the next battle.

 

The issue remains both resources at hand for transforming society, and the relative strengths of the contesting parties. First even revolutionary success has to face the lack of existing resources and institutions for the socialization of the economy. Public ownership is not enough, because unless it is managed by direct democratic participation then it is not really public ownership and thus it is not socialism. With the absence of current reserves and organizations for this conversion from private to public, bureaucratic to democratic, from government to popular control no socialization of the economy is taking place. Reform or revolution the results are the same. Step by step each win must be followed by yet another contest over assets. When the relative strength of employee improves and education and skill allows the administrative functions to be not understandable but measurable, accessible and to direct producers will accountability be in the handoff the general population.

 

Yet power is defined as and by the comparative disputes and associations between not only the two major classes, but also the contacts between all the classes and class factions in society. Each class and each fragment within each class has its’ own welfares to protect in the supervision of the economy. Both negotiation and cooperation are important strategies for the laboring multitudes in the ultimate contest between the exploited and the exploiters. Some will call this egalitarian others will say it is administrative control. A number of people will claim this democratic others will speak of it as bureaucratic. The reality it is both. As democracy increases bureaucracy declines. But, democracy is a process and a lifestyle and not a product. The economy compels us to realize endless examination and modification of economic choices to meet the real needs and issues that arises from unanticipated consequences of previous decisions.

 

The revolution can only attain, what the preexisting resources will allow. Economic and political strategies must be guided with real and objective information. This genuine and factual data must be gathered and studies using a combination of historical and scientific methods. The historical sociologist then shares her findings with the public.

 

At every point reform or revolution, forces of reaction are mobilized. Irrational emotional appeals mobilize those looking overly simple answers to complex problems to reactionary naïve catchphrases.

 

 

Source: Karl Kautsky: The Labor Revolution

 

Source: Nikolai Bukharin: The New Economic Policy Of Soviet Russia

 

Source: Clara Zetkin The Situation in Germany

 

 

Dual Movement

 

In reality capitalism left to its own devices will cannibalize itself. Because it is silly to assume free markets are free. It is equally stupid to presume markets are self-regulating. Keynesian economics begins with this concept markets are not self-correcting. Because of this unemployment is a natural part of capitalism. Wages are downwardly inflexible because workers will resist any wage cut backs even if the solvency of the firm is a stake. Workers fight for their very survival through employment.

Most capitalist are not risk takers. Investors for the most part do not like gambling too much on dicey markets.  However, when they do gamble they turn to the government to bail them out. If transferring the risk to the taxpayer socializes the risk, risk is minimized.

 

Hedge Funds are the use of advanced investment strategies in derivatives or leveraged investments. This is unregulated and unprotected selling securities from a third party, buying the assets and selling them back or selling to another party. In order to borrow heavily then to buy still more shares to sell them at a profit. A firm with more debt than equity is leveraged. Buying up bad mortgages, in the hopes some one will buy you out, or the government will bail you out.

 

Collateral Debt Obligation (CDO) this credit protection allows selling of bad credit. Failure leads to super profits if you buy debts at a fraction of their original worth and then sell them still below their original value but at profit. The last guy standing hopefully will be bailed out buy the government. Either giving you loans at such low interest rates that when things turn around you own assets now worth more than what you paid or government insures your losses.

 

Hedge funds, overproduction, use of advanced investment strategies in derivatives, leveraged investments, unprotected selling of securities from a third party, bilateral contracts transferring risks to some one else and ultimately the government and on the backs of working class tax payers. It appears to me it is the conservatives who are all for big government when it helps investors without a conscience and against any government if it only helps real living working people.

 

Think about this next time you talk to a fiscal conservative talking about paying down our debts by cutting social programs, only to give more to the financial investors, i.e. the criminals who got us into this mess into the first place.

 

If all wealth is theft, then we need to abandon the evil global empire of the IMF, World Bank, WTO, Citigroup Inc., Hedge Funds, Derivatives, and Collateral Debt Obligation (CDO).

At this point both the capitalist and the workers look to government regulation to save the day. But, regulation to limit labor demands and protect unstable markets or protect the general population from speculative investments.

 

Polanyi studied the Capitalist economy as a self-regulating market economy in his book Great Transformation. In this this study it was shown that an economy free of government regulations needed direct government intervention, sometimes with a great deal of coercion, to get started in the first place. Social obligations taken for granted needed to be eliminated. Free markets needed to be establish over local opposition. Creating artificial markets out of land, labor and money threatens nature, people and the economy.  Because of including these three as commodities sold on the market the cultural fiber of society is rent asunder. The heart of the community is cleaved in twain. The bowels of the human race are ripped in pieces.  All protections against hunger are eliminated. Money becomes a speculation for gamblers and not a means of exchange. Land and nature is polluted and defiled to the alters of the gods of greed and avarice. Free markets would destroy humanity and the planet very shortly if were not for direct intervention to stop the worst excesses of the market. From the beginning of the free market, regulation became central to survival. This is the dual movement of free market capitalism.

 

Unregulated markets cannibalize themselves in a very short period of time. Social disruption of cultural obligations undermines the basic principles of democracy. This makes a lie of the liberal revolutions. Democracy and a free market cannot go together. Competition leads to oligarchy and not democracy. Democracy threatens the oligarchy and must be kept in check if wealth and power are to be maintained. The political democracy becomes its’ opposite a morally impoverished waist land of competing rational egoists or losers. The ravages of the business cycles replace protections of nature and community. Counter movements begin immediately. With cultures eradicated, social bounds destroyed and life stripped of all meaning anomie becomes the norm. Resistance movements spring up. Reform movements counter what would otherwise lead to revolution. The annihilation of culture and society is because humans are not commodities and labor is nothing more than human biology in motion. Robbed of the protection of culture and social responsibility the wage labor would starve because of the lack of employment when the market no longer needs her labor.

 

Historically regulations of markets, labor unions, factory legislation, environmental regulations and the ”welfare state” are a few examples existing in one form or another from the beginning. Social movements, failed revolutions and reform lead to protectionism.

 

Fall in the demand labor is caused by market insecurity and a lack of demand for what labor produces. This leads to a permanent state of underemployment. With fewer consumers non-productive investments in account not related to employment becomes more attractive.

 

Changes in demand do not cause changes in prices. Ability to buy is more important if a rise in price does not overly stress the consumer. Most people continue to buy a product they like. If the consumer is employed there will be a demand for desired products. In this way demand is critical in determining both output and thus input. Because income is important in influencing both consumption and savings, people save only when they have enough income to meet their other basic needs. When investments increase so do interest rates stimulating more investments. The meaning of all this is speculation and investments happens most when risks are minimal making best guess outlay of assets conservative thus risk avoidance.

 

By insuring demand production and employment is insured. Full employment further increases demand, which increases consumer spending. The hazard here then is overproduction leading to a failure to sell and thus economic recession. The government then has the responsibility to further create demand through government spending. This helps to sustain full employment and thus maintaining consumer demand. The market economy left alone develops an economy that leads to stagnation and underemployment because investments are always unreliable and overly cautious.

 

The Substantivist Economists built on the writings of Karl Polanyi. The most prolific would be George Dalton. Like his mentor Karl Polanyi using data drawn from cross-cultural studies in anthropology and historical economics this group of economists openly dispute key concepts of formal economics outside a very narrow historical and cultural application. Marginal utility, supply and demand, cost vs. benefits fit market capitalism well, but not so well in other cultural and historical settings. Traditional economic systems are and were embedded in culturally defined social obligations.  Economic relations are part of socially defined arrangements. Because of this until very recently a free market would be seen irresponsible, dangerous and even immoral.

 

With the spread of global capitalism everywhere traditional economies and societies are incorporated into a capitalist economy.  But the already existing economic traditions do not die out entirely.  They are radically modified. The result capitalism is a global phenomenon that is going to be quite different in each locality. Capitalism started out in Britain, spread to Western and Northern Europe, North America, Common wealth nations and Japan. From there it spread to every corner of the world.

 

A grand economic theory is lacking. This is an empirical approach to economics. Each economic setting is going to requires its’ own set of categories and combination of categories to study the local economy. Empirical data and not analytical logic, induction rather than deduction, specific and not general is their approach. In the “real world” there are several sorts of interaction between a household economy, a community sponsored redistribution, and kin related reciprocity or an exchange to make each economic system culturally and historically specific.

 

 

Formal economics was designed to study capitalism. In addition formal economics is often pure economics independent of sociology, cultural anthropology or history. A formal economist focuses on the individual acting economic agents.  Production, distribution, and consumption are considered as connected to calculations of costs vs. benefits.  Even under a fully developed capitalist system many decisions are imposed by external concerns dictated by the effects of a market economy, and not a matter of personal choice. This is often ignored.

 

In most economies the major economic decisions governing economic behavior are integrated into very specific rules governing both production and distribution. Social obligations, the surrounding ecology and even technology all are more important in controlling the principles directing the economy.  Choice is not as important as consumer preference in capitalism. Most we can say it is not as obvious. Most traditional economies are both restricted and regulated by concerns about social obligations. The technology and ecology are often far more restrictive than under global capitalism as international trade greatly expands local possibilities. Choice as central to consumer-based capitalism is a minor part of a peripheral market, if it exists at all.

 

Because within a community a people share a common social and cultural identity the rules governing economic behavior is well known.  How important these rules are to survival are also well known. In traditional societies, the distribution of labor and labor obligations, the way work is organized, rules governing the distribution of goods and services are an index of political culture, religious beliefs, or kinship obligations. Economic rules are defined as the moral responsibilities of group members.

 

 

Market economy or capitalism is an economic system that is, ideally, both self-regulated by market prices and the production for profit is the major goal. This was traditionally seen by all traditional societies as dangerous. Thus, up until modern times, markets, where they did exist, were a secondary part of the over all economy and carefully controlled. Even local markets were peripheral to subsistence.

 

Social relations in any community are more vital and valuable than profit to the economic concerns of the people. The economy everywhere is primarily submerged in the social relations of that society. Economic activity is motivated, for the most part, by concerns for social responsibility, social prestige, and social security. In tribal and peasant societies the economy remains an adjunct of the sociology of the community. Production is not for profit in the majority of economic activity, and the distribution within society never reflects wealth for wealth’s sake. Social interest of the whole must be used to justify the economy, including systems of production, distribution, or exchange. All social relations within the economic system reflect a person’s moral position within the community. Social ties are social security. Social obligations are reciprocal in both the material and the moral concerns of all, and affect each individual of the community. Economic self-interests threaten the community and the individuals within the community by undermining the collective identity and solidarity of the community.

 

Polanyi

1.  Production

2.    Distribution

3.    Consumption

 

Production:

How people organize themselves to provide for their needs and desires, through the tools and resources used in production. Therefore we have social organization, technology and their social and natural environment.

 

Distribution:

 

Generalized Reciprocity is when individuals or groups give each other culturally established and obligatory altruistic way of doing business, this is the "true gift" without thought of making a profit.

 

Balanced Reciprocity is a direct exchange where the two or more individuals or groups exchange for goods or services that are agreed upon as being the same over all value, neither side wants to make a profit, but maintain friendly relations.

 

Redistribution:

Tribute or levy are paid in money or in kind to a central location and administered by a big man/ woman or a central authority. From there resources can be distributed to the people in need when required,

 

 

Consumption:

This is the final use of goods and services by individuals and groups. What determines what and how much is consumed including income, availability of the goods and services and choice if any of what is obtainable.

 

 

Economics is the study of how people provide for there needs and desires in their social, cultural and environmental setting. Through social organization, the technology and cultural values strategies are established that are defined historically that are adapted to a specific environment.

 

Trade

 

Gift trade is like balanced reciprocity but is formalized by custom lasting several generations through repeated transactions.

 

Exchange through administered or negotiated trade also called port trade in which prices, trade items and quantities are politically negotiated, agreed upon and set independent of supply and demand or other market forces.

 

Market exchange

Markets are created for the production for sale and distribution for profit. Markets are designed and operated for profit.

 

Theft includes looting, racketeering, extortion and blackmail.

 

 

Source: Polanyi, Karl (1944) The Great Transformation Boston: Beacon Press

 

Source: Polanyi, Karl (1968) Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economics Boston: Beacon Press

Source: Chayanov, A. V. (1986) The Theory of Peasant Economy  Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press

 

 

Socialism’s Principles

 

Liberation is both international in scope and flexible in its’ application thereby meeting the specific requirements of national, ethnic, religious, gender issues locally and regionally. National liberation is built on international solidarity and respectful of the internal ethnic and religious differences. Taking into consideration gender and sexual orientation is a must. In any liberation movement democracy is critical. Democracy must include at a minimum all of the following, economic, political, cultural and intellectual. In saying this it becomes obvious that socialism and democracy can be used interchangeable.  One cannot exist without the other. Capitalism is always anti-democratic, oligarchical, and autocratic. This is because the twin cabalistic impediments to democracy private property and profit. Production for profit requires putting social needs over personal greed. The short-term aim of socialism is decent incomes for everyone, meaningful employment for all who are able to work, lifetime security, access to any and all resources necessary to live and to work for everyone, and the active pursuit of happiness.

 

Labor unions, consumer unions, citizen unions, civil rights advocacy groups, and environmental watchdogs are necessary for our mutual endurance.  This requires community tenure of important segments of the economy. Public ownership or stewardship is not government ownership. Civic tenancy and sovereign of that part of the earth we live and work on is not a proprietorship of a regime of intimidation.  It is always and must be democratic control of the economy. This maybe worker councils, consumer cooperatives and municipal enterprises working together for a common goal, or it would be possible that it maybe nationalize firms. These nationalized firms must be administered through joint representation of labor unions, consumer groups and community advocacy organizations.  Through collective discussions and joint negotiations of the above groups democracy is possible.

 

Local interests must always be taken seriously.  Individual civil liberties can never be threatened, while protecting gains against reactionaries trying to destroy democracy. Balance is difficult by essential.

 

Rewards for doing one’s job must be fairly distributed including wages, enjoyment of the job, pride in the craft and self-respect in accepting social responsibility. In doing this all and any ethnic groups, religions, gender or sexual orientations within each nation must be respected. Finally any form of imperialism is evil and we must diligently work to bring it to an end.

 

The desire of most people and the main goal of democracy/ socialism is happiness. Happiness of the extensive diversity of life and continual font of delight is mastered only through education. Because people are a product of their social environment, education as well as the rest of the environment is the raw material in the formation of the human soul. There is only two ways that this can become possible either through democratic socialism or the struggle to establish democratic socialism.

 

Public education must be liberated from political control of the existing state, church or other power elites. Education is the source to the hope of deliverance from servitude.  Democratic education is the solution to allowing children or adults to learn to live in an egalitarian and democratic society. Socialism in the classroom is the best way to learn.

 

Let’s talk bottom line the production of goods and services and the hiring of a work force in the private sector is profit for the business owner. In the public sector the bottom line is service. Because the public sector is inspired by service not profits it is often cheaper and more efficient then the private sector. The community servant chooses the life of public service over income because she cares about the greater good. This is the true economic foundation of any economy. This economy is both humane and sustainable because the job is embedded in social responsibility, concern for others and the community wellbeing. The private sector is also vital to a sound economy, but its’ role must always remain supplemental to the public sector. Small family businesses are the moral center of our communities.  It provides places where public employees can buy certain consumer items. Beyond this a market economy out of control is both immoral and unsustainable. Major international investors speculated irresponsibly on high return and unsafe speculation for quick returns on investment without creating jobs or any long-term benefits to society. Throughout history they gambled and lost only to be saved by big government for example in the years 1873, 1929, 1949, 1973, 1987, 2001, 2008. The Public sector is the ethical and economic bedrock of our nation as a whole. Lets see what the candidates in the next election have to offer in saving the family farm, family owned small business, and most important expanding public employment. To the public employees social needs are more central to the economic concerns of the people than profit. Work is driven by concerns for social responsibility and community protections.  Having said that, I imagine that the issue should be democracy not bureaucracy. This can be maintained by rank and file run unions, with shop stewards, Civil rights advocacy groups, civil libertarians, environmentalists, feminists, consumer groups, community rights and client rights action groups as a real power to be dealt with in managing the economy. True economic democracy requires no less.  Private investments should be carried out with public responsibilities being most important. The leading concern should always be to provide good jobs with good wages and benefits. Furthermore it will provide the general public with affordable, safe, and reliable goods and services.

 

 

Frankfort Declaration

Declaration of Principles

June 30 – July 3, 1951

 

Norman Thomas Socialism Reexamined

 

V.I. Lenin: One Step Forward and Two Steps Back

 

William Godwin: Enquiry Concerning Political Justice

 

Epicurus: The Essential Epicurus

 

Albert Camus; The Rebel

 

 

 

 

My mind Wanders when Reading Hegel

 

“You only lose what you cling to.” Siddhartha Gautama Buddha

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” Epicurus

“Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”  Epicurus

“Of all the means to insure happiness throughout the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.”  Epicurus

“It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.”  Epicurus

“It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.”  Epicurus

“If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.”  Epicurus

“Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far as he knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres about which he knows nothing, he translates his ignorance into Greek and calls it agnosticism.”  Friedrich Engels

“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims”. Friedrich Engels

“Property is theft” Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"The philosophers have only _interpreted_ the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to _change_ it." Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

“The revolutionary petty bourgeoisie must be capable of committing suicide a class in order to be reborn as revolutionary workers, completely identified with the deepest aspiration of the people to which they belong”. Amilcar Cabral, The weapon of Theory

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." Marx

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weights like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language." Marx

Liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.  Michael Bakunin

“We are not enough for ourselves: we have more tears than our own sufferings can claim, more capacity for joy than our own existence can justify”.  Peter Kropotkin

“Equality in mutual relations with solidarity arising from it, this is the most powerful weapon of the animal world in the struggle for existence.  Equality is equity”. Peter Kropotkin

 

 

 

I

The Phenomenology of the Mind vs. Science of Logic

Hegel

 

Content and form are words used interchangeably to describe what something is. The differences are important only in the minds of specific philosophers and can easily be disregarded. External reality is understood through metaphor in which form and content are wrapped up in poetry and myth, making reality understandable in a cultural context. Then through culture people adapt to a real material environment. Nature is real and physical, but understood through the mind as molded through culture. Yet culture is cast by the interaction of thinking human beings interacting with Nature. Logic, math, science and knowledge are formed within this social environment.  This relationship is on going and always changing. Even with the best tools of objective science we can never and should never escape the necessity of interpretation.

 

Even as our understanding of the external reality and nature, which we are apart of, is always changing, we are constantly trying to discover continuity.  The closer our beliefs match this external reality. There is something existing prior and continuing after our life. Subject and Object is expressed as being the same as Thought and Being. Areas under discussion and its’ Purpose is then articulated as a way of understanding life similar to the Accepted Wisdom of Existence. People accept this as given as they grow into members of society. Yet interpretation and the need to improve on our understanding of reality are always leading us to a changed knowledge and explanation of reality. Thus, no matter how accurate our current set of understandings are at this time it never fits perfectly.  Both because reality is always changing, and our knowledge of reality are never totally complete.

 

Thus, while we act upon nature and interact with each other in order to achieve certain goals, we constantly are evolving along with the changing environment and our understanding of that environment. Cronus overthrew Uranus. Then Zeus over throws Cronus.  Jesus over threw Zeus.  Jesus was replaced by science and humanism.

 

However, we are looking for a type of an arrangement of knowledge in a way that can transcend both the specific historical setting or the cultural background of the investigator. The problem with tradition or scripture is it only works for the believer. Different sets of believers have different sets of scripture.  The attempt of science is to use empirical investigation and careful and detailed notes on our observation to create testable hypothesis.  If successful, the hope of a scientist is to develop a theory that will generate a set of hypothesis that can be studied by anyone no matter her preferred scripture. Then with math, logic and science we can find a place to start.

 

 

II

The Phenomenology of the Mind vs. Philosophy of History

Hegel

 

 

All that really exists in a society is individuals. But, an individual is a social product. Society exists before an individual is born. Social groups and any interaction within and between groups’ mold what becomes an individual.  Thus, an individual continues living as part of a group of interacting individuals. The mind of an individual is based upon the experiences of that individual. Among the raw materials going into forming a mind is the physical neurology, an individual’s experience of a world outside the individual and the social interaction with in a group of interacting individuals. Language, math, logic, philosophy, art even self-reflection is the result of all of the above in its’ most essential raw form. Our most abstract concepts are on some level grounded on an individuals experiences of material reality, i.e. existing outside the individual and the mind.

 

Consciousness is formed and lives only in these relationships. The individual exists in the context of the “Other” and thus is a social product. Then ideas, even abstract ideas are formed within a consciousness that is itself a social product. Even our interpretations of a strictly personal experience are itself the product of a social individual. Simply existing does not lead to consciousness until it is interpreted by the mind of an individual.

 

Experience without interpretation is only potential. Once it is interpreted it is defined, even if the definition is only very rudimentary. Through discussion or interaction with others this definition becomes a shared concern. The “Other” is central to going beyond a strictly personal sensation to a culturally significant wide-ranging impression or a universal.

 

Through this interaction the concrete becomes abstract. Because of this communication the real turns into the summarized set of notions, feelings, attitudes and worldview. This abstract is still real. For example everything that can be defined has its’ boundaries. Beyond these boundaries it is no longer the thing we are looking at. Thus, secondary concepts like finite can now be assumed. What is “is” because something else is not. If there is a finite now we can talk about the infinite even though no one can see or touch the infinite except mystically.

 

As soon as you have an interpretation of a thing it can now become defined. With this definition I can share my experience with others. It can be discussed as a shared understanding. Now we have a history as we can talk about a thing’s past or present and we speculate about its’ future. Communication becomes possible.

 

Because individuals are involved the interpretations and definitions varies even among those who agree on its’ essence. Along with the continuing changing material and social reality our knowledge of reality is also changing. This association of like minds is further challenged when they meet an active opposition to this shared identity.

 

Characteristics, differentiation, disagreement will in part outline the intrinsic variations that becomes its’ elemental character this also can be called contradiction. This logic becomes a way to understand that not only is the external and social worlds are always changing but the individual interpretation of events is always changing.

 

III

The Phenomenology of the Mind

 

 

People from lived experience define essence. Lived experience can be reduced to stimulus response, but can only be understood through interpretation. One thing is not another because we see it that way. But, at times one thing becomes another, we then must define the boundaries separating something existing from what it will someday become. Larva and adult for example as one replaces the other. What exists is negated by what it becomes.

 

Once something is defined it also defines both the limits of that definition and its’ negation. This opposition is part of the quality being defined, as everything breaks down, to be replaced by something new. Every definition is situational and temporary. We impose identity on our perceived reality. To understand we look at something as if it was forever, this clearly is false. Change will require new definitions and new understandings. But, first it must be realized a thing is not first one thing then at a future date will become something else, this cannot be because to look at this way ignores how things change over time. Something is both itself and something else at every moment of time; otherwise we miss the defining motion.

 

Because birth, growth, maturity, decay, death and rebirth are concepts we create to understand life, they will work for everything that exists. The full range of origin, evolution, development, breakdown, conclusion and renaissance always exist at the same time in everything. It is only a matter of perception which stage gets our attention.

 

 

“Self “and “Other” stands opposed as opposites, but they are really the same. Each Self is the “Other” to someone and the “Other” is really a Self. Then purpose has before it an opposing force, each conflicting energy is part of the other conflicting identity, and each harmony is situational and life form is not antithetical but impassively essential to itself. Even if the observer is not aware of the changes taking place, this in no way changes the fact that change is taking place. Only by taking a longer view does change become obvious. At that time the total lack of permanence of everything in the Universe becomes understandable.  Decline, death and decay are a much a part of everything as birth, growth and vitality.  When the various conditions of a movement becomes the principal subject matter of contradiction with an entity do the parts become functioning and energetic in the direction of a mutually interaction on all parts of a larger whole.  Thus creating a paradox in the reversal of its’ inner activity of the rhythm of self-movement and impulsive movement has both forward motion and reverses, both being itself and its’ opponent. Time itself is a continual process of coming into being and passing out of existence in the same way at each moment. What we see is not really there, but it looks like it is as it passes by, becoming something new. When we see it, it is a set of connections that are always diverse; it is limited, and this will signify a conflicting existence.

 

As the old dies it begins to decay providing nutrients and sustenance for the new. This is true in both the natural world and the world of ideas. In culture this is the world of specific common belief. This will set up the tangible collective impressions. This is the awareness of humans in their everyday lives. This awareness is ripe with potential. But, the potential is not yet real, but in the process of becoming real. Logic is part of the process used with the potential becoming the actual. The objective logic is in the process by using a method of ideas that is built upon a propositions and set of relations that moves toward consciousness.

 

Now with the rational federation of Human Beings, Worldwide is a core of a large historical trend standing behind a social movement and the social organizations within that movement.   Specific lists of items on agenda continue existing systematically in the events of people’s lives. They are also understandable as "genuine ideas".  These are the ideas that people deal with as if they were things that are real, because they are.

 

Each individual has their own take on the events leading up to and continuing through the actions of the movement. Yet there are a enough similarities to call this collective sets of actions a movement. In turn all movements are set in a larger historical trend embedded in an even larger sets of historical developments. "The maximum conscientiousness leading to the principle phase of any movement means we have achieved all we can hope for at this time be it a success or failure.

 

These are brought together in a unifying ideology that describe and gives good reason for the movement. Completeness, idiosyncrasy, and distinctiveness are noted by having defined limits and Accepted Wisdom, with this shared ideology. Adapting into entirely remote and reciprocally homogeneous cause and effect relations between the ideologies, the people and the historical setting become understandable. The fact is that dissimilar Ideas are basically the same Notion.

 

The common element is the shared set of ideas among many distinct individuals, each with their own understanding shares enough in common to support understanding and agreement. When ideas motivate large numbers of peoples to take an action that is in some measure organized the subjective including both ideas and feelings, become apart of very real and objective social environment. Ideas change with action of individuals involved in the communication necessary for a coordinated effort of the people participating in this joint action. Disputes arise and are settled or they are not. The communication between individuals continues and the ideology evolves. All social or personal relationships require opinions that engage us in certain associations linking the Personality, the Collective and the Accepted Worldview. The reason that is reserved in common sense is the life form, which is the establishment of the Concept in the Ruling creating a recognized line of reasoning consisting of a main, and resulting principles founded on a set of assumptions is now revealed. The evolution of the Decision is one of succeeding concretization. The Constructive View and the Destructive reply to the Judgment stand opposed but mutually support each other. This contradiction becomes necessary for change and change is always happening. How this contradiction resolves itself determines the on going historical trend. This in turn affects all of the parts of that trend. On the individual level this determine both the environment we are working within and the options that are available. While choices for the individual are unavoidable, the options are always limited. This make obvious through the Individual Opinions, Exacting Verdicts about final decisions and actions taken, and Worldwide Common Sense taken as given becomes part of the leading philosophy governing a movement around which the diverse differences of opinion can agree. Some purposes of the leading Ideas on balance remain in opposition to the other parts of the leading Ideas and are as a result limited and should be gone beyond. This growth of the Careful View of Need thus becomes the resolve of an innovative and profound vision of the future. The Decision of Requirements and the Conclusion of Concepts used are further refined.

 

Culture is embedded in a material environment. Mind and the brain are inseparable unless brain dead. Actions are born for ideas even if unconscious. Energy and matter interact in such away as contradictions truly make sense. Death and birth are one movement everywhere in the Universe. Thus ideas held by the individual relate to social ideology and cultural worldviews even in protest. Ideas affect action and action changes the environment acted upon and thus culture, ideology and ideas in the future. The use of the idea that ultimate sources are real is an artificial construct serving to indicate a plan of the dialectical understanding of Processes and Conclusions. There is never a conclusion, but only a process leading to that conclusion. There is only means and never ends. Each ends is a means to a new ends. Each struggle for social justice leads to new struggles. This is importance because ethics requires ethical actions. When victorious new opportunities become available. If further action is not taken then all we can hope for is defensive moves not to lose what we have gained. At this point defeat is guaranteed.

 

A person when born is born into a culture, with its own defined collection of feelings, attitudes, beliefs and worldview. Into this interpretive caldron of boiling stew a child is socialized. The replication is never perfect and rebellion is always possible if not unavoidable. Yet it is culture that molds the consciousness of the individual. Because it is through culture that any people adapt to their environment, and that environment is always changing, culture is always a misfit. This creates dissidence and a reinterpretation of the cultural meaning as a people readapt to the changes in their environment. The conclusive is never complete. There is no Hegelian Absolute, as in Nature a climax community is but a longer-term serial community. God evolves along with culture. Assumptions interpretation, speculation, explanation and understanding are central to life in any culture. Thus, children receive an incomplete roadmap to life as she grows up. The Absolute cannot avoid being redefined and thus never absolute this is the fatal flaw of Hegel. Yet reason in Hegelian logic comes close to reflecting real life in the mind, culture and nature. Marx was right in giving this logic a materialist orientation.

 

The raw material called “culture”, interacting in a historical and material environment by itself has no meaning until interpreted. This interpretation is the product of an individual’s interpretation of cultural interpretation. The teleology is not just self-contradictory and thus source of the internal contradictions that is the driving force of history, but seeks resolution in to make sense of this mess. This in turn creates another set of difficulties that needs to be resolved. Beginning with stimulus response, never ends there. Stimulus response remains meaningless provocation reaction until it is interpreted through matching the current with experiences of the past. Thus, the first defines the second and learning begins.

 

The mind is formed within a material environment. The mind is embedded in action that changes that material environment. We cannot understand this material environment without being able to interpret the experiences we have of that environment. The immediate perception become meaningful when interpreted.

 

Thinking may begin with stimulus response, but thinking itself is an action. Acting on the environment, the individual is a cultural creation that interacts, acts and changes that environment. Knowing, is part of thinking, is itself an action thus it is something we do in a historical, cultural and environmental context. Then culture is joint action in an ever-changing environment. The awareness, the wisdom, the reflecting of our individual existence generates our occurrence in current self-aware consciousness. In a cultural setting the movement of thought corresponds with the imagination of synchronization with “Persuasive-Understanding”, in the appearance of the wide-ranging awareness of our characteristic custody of our self-defined essence.

 

Thinking is also a process of defining. What is and what is not included in the definition of any entity allows us to process information without being overwhelmed by unconnected data. In this process “Is” and “Should” come into play. Not only do we define what exists before us, we also must decide if things could be better. Values become a part of the mental processes and the cultural field. From defining values an ethical code is developed.

 

The ethical code becomes both hypothetical and actual. In its’ abstract form an ethic is an ideal existing nowhere, but only offers an approximation of how we should behave. In its’ concrete framework an ethical is very real deeply root in our emotional and psychological moorings. Any violation fills us with visceral rage coming from deep within our subconscious.

 

The mind is now supplemented by emotion. Emotion is a part of the mind. Values become embedded in the very way we perceive the real world around us. Now we react as much to how we chose to observe reality as anything real. This reality then is the world we react to. What is real then depends on both an independent objective reality and a subjective interpretation of that reality. From this then good or bad, pain or pleasure requires both halves of the whole to be complete. Not only objective and subjective, but something and its opposite are required in order to make sense of the world around us.

 

Nature now becomes a cultural artifact. Every culture has its own meaning of nature or the natural. The very concept of culture is a historical product, born at attempt of self-reflection. Culture becomes a topic of study when Consecrated Scripture, is confronted by contact with others not sharing your beliefs. Then it is seen what is obvious is not obvious at all. The mind is a cultural product. But, culture exists only through the mind of many acting and interacting individuals. Culture defines the mind and the mind defines culture. Ethics is a mental construct born out of a historical and cultural context. Yet, ethics sets in place the worldview of that culture in its’ own historical setting. When this cultural hegemony begins to breakdown alternative ideologies develop that not only challenge the dominant ideology, but creates an entirely distinct frame of reference. The material world not only appears differently, but also because of actions of this dissent elemental reality itself is altered by the actions of the rebels.  This alternative soon becomes two worlds that collide and the conflict resolves itself in the formation of a new culture and the historical setting evolves in just that way.

IV

Karl Max: Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

 

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people”. Marx

 

Humans struggle and survive, only to struggle again. What is important is how to incorporate the concept the Pursuit of Happiness as our calling card. If pleasure is the highest virtue, it must be a non-exploitive, non-oppressive happiness that is easily shared. It must be judicious, practical and sustainable in a way others are not harmed. This can come about only when democracy becomes an on going life style and not an achievable goal. To learn to accept contentment is founded on peace of mind and equanimity comes from harmony based upon sympathetic understanding. Empathy, Sympathy, Understanding comes from friendship founded upon comradeship among companions.

 

“The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.  If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then God does not exist”.  Michael Bakunin

 

Religion has often supported a status quo of hierarchy and domination. This existing state of affairs of class structure of power and despotism often led to either an ant-clerical movement or an open rejection of theism. The replacement doctrine places human concerns as being the primary issue facing liberation. Science replaces revelation as being the center of knowing.

 

“Men of courage, not satisfied with words, but ever searching for the means to transform them into action, --men of integrity for whom the act is one with the idea, for whom prison, exile, and death are preferable to a life contrary to their principles, --intrepid souls who know that it is necessary to dare in order to succeed, --these lonely sentinels who enter the battle long before the masses are sufficiently roused to raise openly the banner of insurrection and to march, arms in hand, to the conquest of their rights”.  Peter Kropotkin

 

This new philosophy becomes the motivation to take action against what once was revealed truth and are now seen as crimes against humanity. Now new heroes replace older ones. Revolutionaries that lead the insurrection replace martyrs for the faith. These rival ideologies are not reflected in the group identities but also reveal the competing substantial awareness of any substance experience people in the everyday environment.  Everyday lives are determined by the any core knowledge of individuals in their ordinary situations. 

 

“We are so perverted by an education which from infancy seeks to kill in us the spirit of revolt, and to develop that submission to authority; we are so perverted by this existence under the ferrule of a law, which regulates every event in life -- our births, our education, our development, our love, our friendship - that, if this state of things continues, we shall lose all initiative, all habit of thinking for ourselves”.  Peter Kropotkin Revolutionary Pamplets.

 

Anarchism, socialism, communism, humanism are just words until they are seen as a direct challenge to religion, government, property, privilege, rank, and wealth. The old and the new cannot co-exist without major changes. Either the old is replaced by the new, or the old adjusts by incorporating enough of the new to buy time to create a mid-way point. Always the new evolves through its’ struggle with the old.

 

Humans struggle against established institutions that are historical and cultural constructs that were created at an earlier time as one group gains dominance over another division. As this happens new sets of clashing replies acquire distinction. New conventional and public concepts replace previous traditional and national perceptions.

 

“The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo”. Marx

 

Only when real people come to see that there is a real possibility of changing their lives foe the better will these same folks embrace a new culture.  Until then most cling to whatever helps get through lives. A philosophy is not enough, what is needed is a game plan. Until people see hope they would be foolish not to clean to whatever gives them meaning in the here and now.

 

“We have considered the act of estranging practical human activity, labor, in two of its aspects. (1) The relation of the worker to the product of labor as an alien object exercising power over him. This relation is at the same time the relation to the sensuous external world, to the objects of nature, as an alien world inimically opposed to him. (2) The relation of labor to the act of production within the labor process. This relation is the relation of the worker to his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to him; it is activity as suffering, strength as weakness, begetting as emasculating, the worker’s own physical and mental energy, his personal life – for what is life but activity? – as an activity which is turned against him, independent of him and not belonging to him. Here we have self-estrangement, as previously we had the estrangement of the thing.” Marx

 

“Estranged labor turns thus:

(3) Man’s species-being, both nature and his spiritual species-property, into a being alien to him, into a means of his individual existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect.

(4) An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man. When man confronts himself, he confronts the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labor and object of labor.

In fact, the proposition that man’s species-nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature.

The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man [stands] to himself, is realized and expressed only in the relationship in which a man stands to other men.

Hence within the relationship of estranged labor each man views the other in accordance with the standard and the relationship in which he finds himself as a worker”.  Marx

Humans are both natural animal and social beings. But we are always a part of nature. As a part of nature human activity is needed in order to live. Action becomes what we do. Action is both labor and art, enjoyable in its own right. The challenge of creative problem solving and providing for ourselves, and those that we care about is twice as rewarding. However, when humans become exploited by work for another who controls the access to the resources we need the produce for ourselves then work becomes toil. This drudgery is painful the resources and tools belong to another who is in a position to tell us what to do. The product we make then also belongs to another, which provides this other with wealth at our expense. Our own labor now enslaves rather than frees us. My body is no longer mine. My creative abilities are used against me. I am a stranger unto myself.

 

My labor, my own life, my friends and coworkers also stand against me. I work not the for joy of it, but to survive. Other workers compete for a limited number of jobs. My joy is on my own time and becomes an escape from the pain of my real life. Nature is alien to me as private property cuts me off from my own life and the environment that sustains that life. My coworkers, the environment, my creativity, my labor are all stolen and all I get is what the dominant culture will allow until I embrace a new and revolutionary ideology.

 

That which stands in the way of our full emancipation, at some point becomes the chains that hold us down.  You only squander what you keep hold of the slave owner in our heads. The insurrection is the way to happiness. The slave becomes fully alive in rebellion. Try not to ruin what you should attained in insurgence by demanding what you have yet to accomplish. Without losing sight of the ultimate set of goals celebrate the day-to-day accomplishments. But keep in mind what you have was achieved already was only a hope in the recent past.

 

We all are more human than we can imagine the single greatest talent is our imagination. Our most vital and supreme strength is our empathy born from imagination. Our joy and our sorrow when shared make us human. We have justice and fairness in our reciprocal dealings with companionship resulting from from our commonly shared humanity. Our inspiration born from solidarity keeps us strong.

 

The tragedy often oppression is either backed by love of one’s country or one’s god. Either terrible action is justified by claims to the highest virtue. But there is hope in a commonly shared humanity. Today the rebellion is global. The universal shifts from a tribal god to the scientific method. The connection is what can be shared across language barriers, cultural divides, and social histories. Tribal gods are now private affairs.

 

We can now see people always had choices however limited. Until there was hope this remained hidden from view. Fate it was believed by most people to be ordained by God. Now all that is changing. Hope means thing do not have be as they are. We were born into a world not of our making. But, past struggle are like beacons in the moonless midnight.

 

Time is to stop ideal philosophical conjecture and to start a real movement for change. The radical intellectual is not free from obligation. They too give themselves over to a social movement leading to change. Their live of comfort at the university is no excuse. The movement cannot fall into a trap of pop culture or radical chic. We cannot hide what we are. We must openly acknowledge being radical socialists, democrats, communists, syndicalists, anarchists, and humanists working together for common goals.

 

Life is to be enjoyed and anything that prevents that is wrong. Each day is a new day, to be met with celebration. When we are not free we cannot enjoy life. But, in rebellion against our enslavement we become free while under the yoke of enslavement. At the end of life we have fought the good fight. We welcome death not as a terrifying evil, but as an old friend. When we die no one can hurt us, and we die free.  Our life was good our friends, comrades, family, loves, supporters and entertainers brought contentment and enjoyment while alive. We help others and they help us. We are our sisters and brothers keepers and they are ours as well. We chose to live the good life by fighting for world of freedom, equality, uniqueness, fairness, and the pursuit of happiness.

 

 

 

Property

 

Private Property is an illusion that creates its’ own reality. Individual human beings are cut off from the biological connection with nature. In the new artificial relationship between people and nature, people are reduced to the social relations to one of possessor and possessed. There is now established a society in which human worth itself is related to the quantity of possessions in the form of capital, or private property used in the generation of wealth. Those lacking ownership of capital now must sell their labor in order to earn a living. Their labor time is now the private property of another and thus sells themselves piece by piece into slavery during the time they are at work.

 

Humans are a part of nature. Society is tied to both culture and nature. Like any species humans interact with their environment. A human through culture and society are molded by their environment and in turn shapes their environment. This is in essence historical as the only constant then is change. Dialectical in the Hegelian sense and materialist in the Marxist sense change is created by life itself.

 

Separations of peoples from their access to the natural resources needed to live makes a mockery of what it is to be human. Nature becomes an enemy and labor becomes toil. As life is no longer a celebration but a burden we need to reconnect to nature. People are social and as social animals people find themselves in other people. Labor and creative artistic activity becomes unnaturally estranged leading to enduring alienation and abnormally dissatisfied unfriendliness of daily labor.

 

The separation of the individual from a collective existence because of private property creates the “Other”, who is both the oppressor and the parasitic dependent that is the true explanation and spirit of the ruling class the owner of capital. Those who own the capital necessary for production control access to jobs the worker needs to live. The owner then has it in his power to keep the supply of labor above the need for labor. Workers compete with other workers for jobs. Whether through immigration, deskilling and improving technology labor shortages are routinely turned into surplus labor. Even competition between capitalists leading to centralization and concentration of capitalists leads to a surplus population through creating larger more capital-intensive firms. This in turn crates relatively speaking less demand for labor, driving wages down. Workshops, crafts, farms increasingly become operating under the capitalist model with large firms doing better then the self-employed. Soon many are without income and forced to migrate in search of jobs. These migrants create a surplus population in regions where a labor shortage exists. This may lower wages a near universal.  As the supply of labor increases wages are easily forced down. This becomes an on going strategy of capital as a class.

Private property in the form of capital is defined as sacred and the survival of real human beings is now no more seen as valuable. Now the cost of doing business is more important than living humans.

 

Employers employ only for the sake of profit. The resource owned by the industrialist is also a product of some one else’s labor. It is now forgotten that labor creates all wealth. Because of this we can foresee wealth without capital or the capitalist.

 

Absurdity becomes a way of life. The financial capitalist need not invest in productive investments in order to make a profit. Speculative investments on fantasies still make a profit without putting one single laborer to work.

 

Hedge Funds are the use of advanced investment strategies in derivatives or leveraged investments. This is unregulated and unprotected selling securities from a third party, buying the assets and selling them back or sill another party. In order to borrow heavily then to buy still more shares to sell them at a profit. A firm with more debt than equity is leveraged. Buying up bad mortgages, in the hopes some one will buy you out, or the government will bail you out.

 

Collateral Debt Obligation (CDO) this credit protection allows selling of bad credit. Failure leads to super profits if you buy debts at a fraction of their original worth and then sell them still below their original value but at profit. The last guy standing hopefully will be bailed out buy the government. Either giving you loans at such low interest rates that when things turn around you own assets now worth more than what you paid or government insures your losses.

 

Mean while back to the world of the worker. Capital gives the employer more power to negotiate than the employee. The employee who quits her job has no income to live on until she finds another job. Because of surplus labor another out of work laborer easily fills her position. Mean while the worker joining the ranks of the unemployed now must compete with other workers. She will replace the job she left with another low wage position.

 

Property becomes identified with the owner of that property. This becomes a mask for anti-social attitudes and behavior. The collective unity between the human community and the natural environment becomes concealed and confused, but never lost. Greed once a vice is redefined as a virtue. Property divides the natural community against itself. Providing for the public need is no longer an obligation, but commodities that are sold for money. The very human beings now become investment resources calculated against the profit obtained by the owner of capital.

 

The more profit the worker generates for the investor the more she produces her own hardship and dependency on the owner of capital The owner increases his power and wealth at the expense of those who employees he employs. He is the master, and workers mere investments. Thus by going to work the workers create the wealth of society, the wealth of the capitalist, the wealth used to create this relationship between ruler and the servant of capital and all the necessary resources for both the capitalist and the necessities of life for the rest of us.

 

Because labor of the worker is sold for a set price, the goal of the employer is to get as much work as possible in as short as time as possible. This means the more labor a worker produces the less she gets in relation to the employer. Because labor time is sold like any other commodity supply and demand determines price. Because the employer has more power in determining supply than the worker it is in the employer’s self-interest to set the wages as low as he can get away with.

 

The commodities that labor creates being necessary for her job, become the chains that hold her in bondage. What are real are the objects she makes for the employer to sell for his profit. What is not real is her personal life. Only as long as there is a market for the products that the capitalist brings to the marketplace can the worker keep her job. Her life is possible only if market trends and profitability allows her to live. It becomes true that the worker forges her own chain through her toil that is sold to her oppressor. The worker become separated from the products she produces and her labor used up in this production process. What the worker loses the capitalist gains. The slavery of one becomes the emancipation of the other. The true producer becomes dependent and the true parasite becomes the master.

 

The worker is in fact an active and creative force with in nature. The worker takes from nature what is needed and changes it through and vigorous and artistic process into supplies needed and consumed. It is only by standing between the creator and the creations can the owner gain power over creation and the creator.  Thus, the very process of earning a living the master and slave forms a relationship of servitude. True, free labor is only under the command of capital during the working day. But, during that time the worker follows orders, if she quits she must find another employer who will treat her in the same way. Work is not an artistic pleasure. She is forced to work by her biological necessity. Work is toil in which the worker makes all the sacrifices necessary just to survive. What could be an enjoyable expression of her humanity becomes difficult and painful only entered into to support herself and her children.

 

Nature the home and soul of humanity becomes an alien and hostile force. The resources necessary to work belong to another, as does the reserves needed to exist and endure. The worker then has access to needs supplied only through an alien hostile to her happiness. Her employer supports a comparative existence of himself to the external world as an opulent glutton to her pain and poverty.  She relates to the objects of nature, as an alien world unfavorably hostile to her.

The action of the worker establishes self-separation, self-disfigurement, self-alienation all needed in order to survive at the most basic level. Her humanity is reduced to an investment of another. Her labor is an article of trade an asset of advantage to the stockholder and not the employee. The animal called human breaths, eats, drinks and seek shelter in the storm and thus human lives within nature as apart of nature and through nature the meaning of life is made manifest. But, through the institution of private property and the wealth that goes with ownership this spiritual connection is severed. Thus, her humanity is denied the worker who is reduced to a draft animal and an ill-treated one at that.

The human has a need to create beauty while laboring within nature. With private property, separation of work and the resources of work, production for profit for the benefit of the owner of those resources the worker no longer creates her freedom but her own corruption. In debasing the voluntary, spontaneous, and free activity to a method and means of living, the alienated labor will replace group living into a means of physical existence without a potential for that spiritual connection with nature. The consciousness, which the worker has of her class, is thus distorted by estrangement in such a way that group survival becomes for her an outline for subsistence. Workers compete for jobs, turning her sisters into the “Other”. Her relationship with her employer is her central relationship. Her oppressor is her savior and the prophet of a false god.

 

This false prophet has joy where she knows only pain. Here poverty creates his wealth. Her loved ones and family being her responsibility becomes her burden. Until the manacles of slavery are undone and she tastes genuine happiness and self-determination her bully continues to be her untruthful redeemer.

 

 

Karl Marx Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

 

Peter Kropotkin 1920 The Wage System in Freedom Pamphlets No. 1.

 

Mikhail Bakunin The Capitalist System

Karl Kautsky The Class Struggle

Marx opens the door:

 

Human needs and basic human nature are socially fabricated, shaped or transformed.

 

Humans as animals have basic animal needs.

As social animals humans have needs of other people.

Society has created cultures that define the individual.

 

Economics is the study of how humans provide for themselves from their environmental surroundings both social and natural. In doing this people through their cultures are too able to adapt to their environment. The material conditions and necessities of life provide the raw materials for societies and their cultures to evolve. Outside of a coherent market economy economic decisions are based upon moral values, ethical concerns, social relationships, community dealings, religion, spiritual importance, political concerns and social cultural standards. Core principles like redistribution and reciprocity founded upon mutual exchange of goods and services as part of a continuing association of people working because of social obligations.  Types of these codes differ drastically cross culturally and historically but the basic logic is nearly universal. Capitalism being unique in that profitable investments trumps social concern for others wellbeing. Economics for a market economy is the study of decision making of cost vs. benefits or rational choice between the alternative uses of limited, scarce, and imperfect insufficient income.    In non-capitalist societies this maybe true by definition, but it only leads to a meaningless tautology because our terms become too broad to have any real meaning. A society that value prestige based upon generosity will produce different personalities than a culture whose economy reinforces individual responsibilities to produce wealth fore wealth’s sake. Radical individualism is a true revolution. This circumlocution and this teleological epistemology and ontology is a belief that purpose and design are a part of a quest to free human nature for the advantages of capitalism.

 

Under all economic systems production for use is the cornerstone of the economy. Under a market economy production for exchange takes a primary role. Profit is the primary goal of production. One commodity is sold for money and can be used to buy another commodity. The rate of exchange is the exchange value. Exchange value is independent of use value up to a point. Exchange value can be realized only if there is a demand for the product. Price is indirectly related to exchange value in that both are abstract concepts are disconnected of any unique specifics of the product other then its’ cost. Exchange value is determined by the amount of labor time necessary in creating that artifact.

 

 

 

 

Marxism uses Historical Materialism to explain social change. Which reflects how people are organized to produce the basic necessities of life, how control of the production process is organized and what is produced is distributed. This economics and economics are the studies of economic class and class conflict.

 

History of how these relations changes over time and reflects changes over control of the production process and distribution of the necessities of life.

As changes to economics leads to changes in the social-cultural world of the people, and then human nature is both a historical and social product.

 

Human needs and basic human nature are socially fabricated or transformed; human nature is also, at its core, universal. Marxist Anthropologists have come to believe that Formal Economic theory is next to useless in explaining historical transformation from pre-capitalist to capitalist economic systems, political domination, state formation, ideological systems that legitimize exploitation, or how dominant beliefs evolve jointly with changes in economic social relations of society. Over long periods of time there are conflicts inherent within society, and because of these conflicts all societies are changing.

 

Property relations are social relations, and as such have socially defined rights. These rights are distributed among groups and individuals, and at the same time these rights limit access to productive resources.

 

A social system also interacts with other social systems. The result is that the environment of a social system is altered because of the interaction between these two social systems. Expansion of the market economy of Europe until it consolidated the entire earth into an integrated world economy is such a case. The development of capitalism on a world scale brings even the most remote people under the control of a market economy, creating areas of relative wealth and other areas of increasing poverty.

 

Lenin’s theory at first looks at the older form of capitalism when free competition prevailed, and the export of manufactured goods was the core of Europe’s economic relations with the less developed parts of the world. Then Lenin examines modern capitalism, when monopolies dominate, and the export of capital has become the typical feature.

 

According to Lenin, the competitive capitalism of the early 19th century became increasingly centralized (fewer competitive firms) and concentrated (larger firms). This centralization was accomplished through combines (the grouping together of related or dependent industries), cartels (large firms cooperating in the same industries and dividing up territories), and trusts (many firms operating as a single firm).

 

Monopoly capitalism, when a few highly centralized firms effectively dominate the economy, creates imperialism out of its own needs. In order to find continued profits in an already overly developed economy at home, investments flow to less developed areas of the world where the capitalist economy has not reached a saturation point, therefore making profits much higher. Export of capital is the fundamental principle of imperialism. The export of capital greatly influences and hastens the growth of capitalism in those countries to which it is exported. Monopoly capitalism and imperialism are a stage of capitalism, which reaches a point that is the beginning of a complete international socialization of production. Production becomes social, but the seizing of the profits remains the private property of the capitalists.

 

Luxemburg saw capital had to be expanded outward to survive, until the whole world would become a single capitalist system. Lenin saw imperialism as a necessity only under the conditions of monopoly capitalism; the Luxemburg model shares the point in common with the Dependency Theorists, that imperialism is as old as capitalism. According to Luxemburg, imperialism is the political manifestation of the accumulation of capital. The less developed parts of the world remain attractive sources of future profits, because accumulation in the earlier capitalist nations reached a point where profitable markets became saturated, and capital must move into the less developed regions in order to take advantage of greater profits. This movement of capital helps speed up capitalist development in the less developed areas. With the expanded economic development of the capitalist countries, and their heightening of extreme competition in gaining control over non-capitalist areas, imperialism increases in its tone of strife and savageness. Capitalism grows both in its aggression toward the less developed areas of the world and in its continuous struggle among competing capitalist countries. The more violently, ruthlessly, and thoroughly imperialism brings about the disintegration of non-capitalist nations and peoples, the more speedily it undermines the very basis for capitalist accumulation. Imperialism is a major strategy for prolonging the life of international capitalism, but it also destroys the very foundation of capitalism. Capitalism needs non-capitalist social structures as a market for its surplus value, as a reservoir of supply of raw materials for its means of production, and as a source of labor power for its wage system. For each of these requirements, modes of production grounded in a natural economy are useless to capital. In all modes of production where natural economy predominates, relations of production are basically in reply to domestic necessity or production for use; therefore there is very little desire for foreign goods, and even less local production for market exchange.

 

A natural economy resists the demands of capitalism with uncompromising barriers. Capitalism must confront traditional modes of production with a struggle of subjugation, opposing any natural economy that it meets. The cardinal process in these conflicts remains political coercion. In Europe, there were revolutions opposing feudalism; in the non-European nations this capitalist development presupposes the formula of colonial policy.

 

The second condition of importance for acquiring means of production and realizing the surplus value is that commodity exchange and the commodity economy becomes accustomed to economic activity in societies based on natural economy as soon as their independence have been abolished. In the course of this disruptive process of coming under the control of a world economy, natural economies become dominated by capitalism. Capital growth requires the ability to buy the products of, and sell its commodities to, all non-capitalist strata and societies.

 

To Andre Gunder Frank, the problem is underdevelopment, brought about by the export of capital from the poor countries to the rich ones, which allows for the economic over-development of the rich and the increasing economic underdevelopment of the poor. Underdevelopment is the inevitable outcome of over four hundred years of capitalist expansion and of the inherent contradictions of capitalism itself. The capitalist system is separated into a metropolitan core and peripheral satellites in the rest of the world. There is the perpetuation of the essential organization and inherent contradictions of the capitalist world economy throughout the history of the development of capitalism and its exaggerated growth. Capitalism’s continuity is due to the reproduction of these contradictions throughout the world in modern history. These capitalist contradictions and the historical development of the capitalist system have given birth to underdevelopment in the peripheral satellites, whose economic surplus is expropriated and used to produce economic development in the metropolitan centers, which appropriate that surplus.

 

The first contradiction is what is called “the expropriation and appropriation of a poor country’s economic surplus.” This is an extension of Marx’s labor theory of value, in which the capitalist expropriates the surplus that is created by the worker.

 

The capitalist of the rich metropolitan center expropriates the surplus from the poor peripheral satellite. In both Marx’s and Frank’s theories, the expropriated surplus is saved by the capitalist and reinvested, increasing the power and the wealth of the capitalist. Once established, this exploitative relation extends capitalist relations between the rest of the world and metropolitan centers, with regional centers being an intermediate position. There are firmly established international, national, and local capitalist relations who produce economic development for a small number at each level and underdevelopment for the masses.

 

Frank’s second contradiction is based upon Marx’s concept of the centralization of the capitalist system. Both are the necessary result of the contradictions that are central to the capitalist system worldwide.

Development and underdevelopment are the products of a single dialectically contradictory economic system of capitalism. The same historical movement of the development of capitalism throughout the world has concurrently created both economic development and underdevelopment.

 

The third capitalist contradiction is based on the mutual interrelationship of the first two contradictions throughout time. Once established, the capitalist system continues to reproduce itself based upon exploitation, which is the process of expropriation of economic surplus of the poor producers, and the appropriation of this surplus, by the owners of capital. Historically, what are created are the developed metropolitan centers and the underdeveloped peripheral satellites. This creates a continuity that runs throughout the entire history of capitalism.

 

Underdevelopment of Dependency vs. Capitalist Global Development

 

Dependency Theory sees the world as a single capitalist economy that has increasingly controlled the world since 1500, when Europe began colonizing the Americas and established direct trade routes to Eastern Asia. The Dependency Theorists claim capitalism is the production for profit maximization in the world market. Capitalism, even though it is a system of dependency, domination, and subordination, is a system of full integration into a world wide capitalist system. The dominant nation is obliged to protect the markets upon which its internal economy is built. This leads to potential rivalry among capitalist nations and forces them to protect their markets either by annexation of territory or by obtaining economic and political influence over other countries.

 

This became the major debate between the Orthodox Marxist-Leninist and the Marxist Dependency theorist. Where Lenin and his followers saw capital flowing from the advanced capitalist nations to the areas now called Third World, or less developed nations, and creating distorted capitalist social relations there, the Dependency Theorist sees capital flowing from the poorer nations to advanced centers of capitalism. Frank claims that what was created in the Third World was not distorted capitalist relations, but underdevelopment within capitalism. The distinction between distorted capitalist social relations and underdevelopment is subtle, but important. Underdevelopment means the poor nations provide the surplus for the advanced nations to further their economic development (Frank, Wallerstein, Baran and Sweezy are the major Dependency Theorists).

 

The world capitalist economy, with its own logic, eliminates the competing economic systems from the start, according to the Dependency Theorist. Profits are controlled by worldwide trends that are dominated by the center of world capitalism. The capitalist owns the means of production (the raw materials and tools necessary, as well as the labor power purchased from the worker). Capitalism becomes production for profits in a market economy.

 

This, as Fernandez and O’Campo claim, obscures the analysis of the development of social relations of free labor to capital. Dependency Theory eliminates the transitional periods from pre-capitalist to capitalist eras, because they claim capitalism was fully developed at the end of the feudal period. In addition, Marx, as claimed by Fernandez, writes that social relations are the necessary definition of capitalism or any economic system. The worker must be free to sell labor power to the capitalist, also the capitalist must be able to introduce the past labor of others in the form of the means of production. This is important because the surplus value or the profit created is the driving force of the capitalist economy.

 

 

Lenin

 

The Leninists claimed that what is central to the Marxist definition of capitalism is the productive relationship of workers owning nothing but their own ability to labor or to sell labor power for a wage. What the worker creates above a wage goes to the capitalist in the form of surplus value. The capitalists control, if not own, the means of production. The means of production is past labor embodied in the raw materials of current production, including land and tools necessary in that production, as well as the labor purchased from the worker. Social relations in production are central to the relationships between people.

 

 

Dependency Theory, by focusing on the flow of excess profit out of the Third World, explains the lack of capital necessary for the poor countries to control their own industrial development directly. In Dependency Theory, far from being a sign of decadence, imperialism is a part of a market economy and is a sign of the vitality of the capitalist system. What the Dependency Theorists miss is that, in point of fact, subsystems with their own logic exist; however, any sub-system remains dependent on the larger capitalist system. Both Dependency Theory and Marxist-Leninist Theory can supplement each other in a more complete theory of imperialism.

 

The control over the economy rests with outside major corporations. Profits generated in the less developed nations increase the wealth and power of the major corporations. Profits generated in these poor nations are reinvested anywhere in the world. There is clearly the export of capital from the dominant culture to the less developed nations, creating a strong money-based market economy that is highly stratified, and that affects the very fiber of the everyday life of all people. Traditional social relations, while still present, are weakened and continuously redefined over time.

 

 

 

Articulation of Modes of Production

 

The interrelationship between local modes of production and the dominant economic logic is an ongoing historical process, changing constantly in an interactive relationship. According to Rey’s model, the first contact between capitalism and other modes of production begins with commercial exchange where the needs of the larger capitalist system reinforces the pre-capitalist modes of production. This is followed by capitalism by becoming firmly established, subordinating the pre-capitalist modes but still making use of them. Finally, in Rey’s model, there is total incorporation into the world capitalist system with the complete disappearance of all pre-capitalist modes of production. Rey closely follows Marx’s study of British colonial relations over India. Marx claims that, at the first stage, trade is in luxury items benefiting the capitalist of a richer country because of an unequal exchange. With industrialization in the advanced nation, the colonial nations serve as markets for the manufactured goods coming from the industrialized centers. This has a devastating effect on the local social structure and modes of production in the non-industrialized areas. The pre-capitalist modes of production are then transformed to meet the needs of the capitalist centers. Up until now, in the non-developed areas of the world, exploitation has been primarily an unequal exchange, followed by unequal exchange and markets for manufactured goods. In the expansion of the Industrial Revolution, British investors controlled the extractive industries, which resulted in the beginning of a wage labor force to work in these industries, i.e. the beginning of capitalist social relations.

 

Rey’s first stage of incorporation into a worldwide capitalist system is the initial link with capitalism through commercial exchange. The second stage is the subordination of pre-capitalist modes of production to the needs of international capitalism, which have already happened in most third world countries. The third stage is the total disappearance of all pre-capitalist modes.

 

Francisconi claims there is a constant restructuring of existing non-capitalist modes of production to meet the conditions of trade and to withstand the impact of direct capitalist investments. Corresponding to this restructuring of existing modes of production is a continual reinterpretation of local tradition. Through this restructuring and readjustment, there is a continuous adjustment and resistance to the expanding capitalist penetration into the local political economy. The reproduction of the non-capitalist modes of production is the result of capitalist expansion into local economies. The above is equally important in understanding the history of articulation of modes of production, as a functional explanation of capitalist exploitation as well as local resistance to capitalist expansion.

            The incorporation of the world into a single world capitalist system develops through tensions and contradictions that are inherent in the logic of the capitalist system itself. Wars, conquest, imperialism, and neo-colonialism are deadly necessities for the continuing expansion of industrial markets. All small nations come under the control of more powerful capitalist centers. The ruin of non-capitalist nations begins with the first contact of commercial trade. The carefully manipulated use of symbols of self-determination, by preserving pre-capitalist modes of production and traditional ideology, have been used by colonial administrations to continue the power of international capitalism.

 

The Neo-Marxist Modes of Production Theorists investigate the structure of economic relationships of local communities. The Dependency Theorists study the world economy of international power relations. In both these Theories, social relations become something that is neither fully capitalist yet, nor are they traditional. Capitalist social relations remain underdeveloped. Traditions are redefined.

 

Marx, Karl (1967) Capital Vol. One New York: International Publishers

 

Lenin, V. I. (1939) Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism New York: International Publishers

 

Luxemburg, Rosa (1951) Accumulation of Capital New York: Monthly Review

 

Frank, Andre Gunder (1967) Capitalism and the Underdevelopment in Latin America New York; Monthly Review

 

Szymanski, Albert (1981) Logic of Imperialism New York: Prager

 

 

What a Marxist Professor

Should Teach

 

 

From the Left: Section on Marxist Sociology of the American Sociological

Association Summer 2005

Volume 26, No. 1

 

 Page 4   From the Left  Summer 2005    

 

What a Marxist Professor

Should Teach

 Michael Francisconi

 University of  Montana-Western

 

Political Sociology is the study of power in a social setting. Power is the use of political capabilities to achieve particular goals. This political contest is carried out in a competition between diverse groups over, among other things, economic resources. Power is used to pursue a course of action against the interests of others. In doing this, use of cultural symbols charged with emotional significance is central. Political sociology explores the lived, everyday experiences of people as they are shaped by their economic position in a particular society and the world economy, which molds most political issues. The state is the tool of the dominant class or classes. Under capitalism the class that owns and controls corporate capital clearly dominates, either directly by providing leadership, or indirectly by defining the issues.

   Sociology analyzes the historical juncture between worldwide trends and local issues. Anthropology gives this analysis a historical and cross-cultural reference point, supplementing sociology. Social movements are domestic affairs of local or national substance, created out of national manifestations of international trends. The fate of a social movement must resonate with the local situation, but is ultimately determined by global events. The capitalists and their supporters gain the means of support for their economic and political dominance by maximizing the illusion that their narrow interests are the national interests as a whole. This is done not only by control over economic production and distribution, but by physical means of coercion and education. Thus the capitalist state betrays its democratic justification.

   Because class is the relationship to the means of production and distribution, competing classes have competing interests. Competition between capitalists is minimized long-range view, which is not limited by the short-term profits of the individual capitalist. The state can make concessions to rebellious sections of the working class to preserve capitalism even when many capitalists may disagree.

   Control over the labor of the direct producers by an elite leads to resistance to domination. Ideologies of legitimacy lessen the problem, but imperfectly, because suffering is real. People create their lives through conscious action. Insight into inequalities and oppression may exist while knowledge of

possible solutions is often hidden.

   Social equilibrium is always threatened. While the dominant ideology legitimates existing inequalities, different classes will develop different interpretations of this ideology. These diverse interpretations of traditional dogma develop into rival opinions.

   The state is the organized control over classes, class factions, and ethnic groups. In this contest competing groups do not have equal power. The dominant group controls the resources necessary for production and they define the logic of stability. The rules of political behavior are agreed upon; to go beyond the rules is to undermine the security of the whole of society. 

   Any collective action by the masses short of social revolution requires the strengthening of the existing state institutions and the economy upon which they rest. Every government strives for social, political, and economic order. The rules that protect the ruling class are the only acceptable political behavior In any state society.

   The claim is that the state is erected outside of the daily needs of any element within society to protect the social whole. In fact it is the capitalist class that is protected from individual capitalists and other classes antagonistic to capitalism. Laws reflect these relationships. This is what gives the state its measure of autonomy.

   Through the control of the popular media, churches, and schools, the capitalists make their interests appear to be that of all of society. Popular culture supports much of the                         

               (Continued on Page 15) Page 15  From the Left  Summer 2005    

 What a Marxist Professor Should Teach (Continued from page 4)

upper class values. Morality is culturally defined in this way. When education fails, coercion will be used to maintain order.

   Capitalism incorporates other economies to meet its needs. The logic of capitalism redefines other moral traditions to support private property and production for profit. Alternative visions are neutralized, incorporated, or defined as subversive. Through hegemony all other ideologies seem silly. At present those who would challenge the logic of capitalism are weak and poorly organized.

   The political and economic institutions supporting capitalism ultimately control the Universities, for the benefit of capital. Like government the anti-government and ant- intellectual business leaders mask the fact that, the University, like government, exists for the benefit of big business. Dissent among government employees or University intellectuals have been, at times, defined as irresponsible and unprofessional.

   There is a resistance by people in authority to real emancipation of the oppressed classes. In modern society continual use of power com- bines ideology with concentrated and organized use of force to a point where the citizens do not always know where one begins and the other stops. The state creates government to establish policies, administration to carry out policies, and the military or police to ensure conformity to these policies. Because of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force controlled by the state, any revolution would require the elimination of the existing state. The old state reflects certain relationships of exploitation; when these relations change, the old state can no longer function properly.

   In US history, Immigration laws to keep out or expel dissidents have been used. The extensive denials of due process and exaggerated use of police powers are widespread. Trial by exhibiting rumor at the expense of legal procedures has been common throughout the 20th century. Public hearings to ruin the reputations of either the defendant or any witnesses who fail to provide what the government expected have been a major strategy. The use of covert police surveillance is still common. Every time working people in the US gain more control over parts of the state, the capitalists increase their efforts to maintain control over all functions of the state.

   The totalitarian power of capital flourishes in a bourgeois democracy. Capital becomes politically more powerful than government, and somewhat independent of the state. Capital is free to move anywhere, but the state is limited by geography. The needs of the bourgeoisie in a capitalist state deform and limit political democracy. Hostility and violence, supported by liberals who espouse democracy, is directed against anyone who, in reality, defends authentic democracy. Institutional violence used against democratic movements in the US has been central to the formation of “American” political culture. Political parties and elections become the sum total of democracy. To move beyond the two party electoral processes is considered subversive.

   Law and order has become the main justification for the violation of basic human rights in the US. Any group that is perceived as a threat to private property or questions the assumptions of a capitalist economy is treated as seditious. Mass culture has been manipulated to create popular demand for the suppression of alternative views of life. The open support for neo-colonialism around the world with violence as the official policy while preserving a world empire is one example. Life in liberal society is mystified; in a way that creates a total culture of support for a capitalist economy.             

   Ignorance is the main goal of liberal education. Education at its core is a lie.

                                            (Continued on page 16) Page 16  From the Left  Summer 2005     What a Marxist Professor Should Teach

(Continued from page 15)

Liberal education is designed to limit debate.                              

Education supports the ethics of private property, market economy, and an elite hierarchy. Education as it stands is mis-education. The moral foundations of the core values of “American” society need to become openly questioned and debated in the classroom. The professor must join the intellectual struggle against the highbrow millstone around every student’s neck. If education is to become a medium of liberation, the University must expose it as an agent for class oppression.

   The cooperation of many University professors with policy makers during the cold war seriously compromised the moral justification of higher education. The University participated directly and indirectly in worldwide aggression and state supported terrorism. The

primary concern with many in administration was to protect the University’s source of income, thus creating a loyal slave of Empire. The Community College was created at the other end of the academic spectrum to “cool out” working aspirants, who received an education that did not threaten the elite.

   We professors must engage in seditious sabotage within the ranks of the University. Everything must be called into question, including higher education. We must explore the historical and sociological roots of all academic departments. Who benefits and who doesn’t by the underlying assumptions? How does what we teach fit into the ideology of hegemony? Education that is not subversive is not education.

 

Originally published: From the Left: Section on Marxist Sociology of the American Sociological

Association Summer 2005

Volume 26, No. 1

 

 Page 4   From the Left  Summer 2005    

 

 

 

References

Afanasyev, V.G. (1985) Historical Materialism New

York: International Publishers.

Bakunin, Michael (1970) God and the State New York:

Dover.

Bottomore Tom (1993) Political Sociology Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.

Bukharin, Nikolai (1969) Historical Materialism Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Cabral, Amilcar (1969) Revolution in Guinea New

York: Monthly Review.

Careron, Kenneth (1995) Dialectical Materialism and

Modern Science New York: International Pub-

lishers.

Donham, Donald L. (1999) History, Power, and  Ideol-

ogy:  Central Issues in Marxism and Anthro-

pology Berkeley: University of California

Press.

Domhoff, G. William (2000) Who Rules America? :

Power and Politics Fourth Edition Boston:

McGraw Hill.

Engles, Frederick (1955) The Conditions of the Working

Class in England New York: International Pub-

lishers.

Engles, Frederick (1965) Peasant War in Germany New

York: International Publishers.

Engles, Frederick (1970) The Role of Force in History

New York: International Publishers.

Engles, Frederick (1975) Origin of the Family, Private

Property and the State New York: International

Publishers.

Engles, Frederick (1978) Anti-During New York: Inter-

national Publishers.

Foster, John Bellamy (2000) Marx's Ecology: Material-

ism and Nature New York: Monthly Review.

Francisconi, Michael Joseph (1998) Kinship, Capital-

ism, Change: The Informal Economy of the

Navajo, 1868 –1998  New York: Garland Pub-

lishing.

Kropotkin, Peter (1970)  Revolutionary Pamphlets New

York: Dover.

Lenin, V.I. (1973) What is to be Done Peking: Foreign

Language Press.

Lenin, V.I. (1970a) The State and Revolution Peking:

Foreign Language Press.

Lenin, V.I. (1970b) Left Wing Communism: An Infantile

Disorder Peking: Foreign Language Press.

                                          

Luxemburg, Rosa (1970) The Russian Revolution and

Leninism or Marxism Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press.

Luxemburg, Rosa (1971) Selected Political Writings

Rosa Luxemburg Edited by Dick Howard New

York: Monthly Review.

Luxemburg, Rosa (1976) The National Question: Se-

lected Writings by Rosa Luxemburg New York:

Monthly Review.

Marx, Karl (1967) Capital Vol. One New York: Interna-

tional Publishers.

 

 

 

  Page 17   From the Left  Summer 2005    

 Marx, Karl (1967) Capital Vol. Two  New York: Inter-

national Publishers.

Marx, Karl (1967) Capital Vol. Three New York: Inter-

national Publishers.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (1947) The German

Ideology  New York: International Publishers.

Polanyi, Karl (1944) The Great Transformation Boston:

Beacon Press.

Szymanski, Albert (1978) The Capitalist State and the

Politics of Class Cambridge, Massachusetts:

Winthrop.

Trotsky, Leon (1969) The Permanent Revolution and

Results and Prospects New York: Pathfinder.

Trotsky, Leon (1969) Terrorism and Communism Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Turner V. W. (1996) Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life

Oxford: Berg.

White, James D. (2001) Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution Hampshire, England: Palgrave.

 

 

Marxism and daily issues of the women’s issue

 

This model offers the most sophisticated, persuasive and straightforward model for examining social change.

By working within working class movements the other issues regarding most democratic movements become embedded within the struggle for equality.

 

Materialism: begins with control over access of the power to operate and control the resources necessary for life is the roots of exploitation, hierarchy and domination. Working class women who are forced to work outside the home may have their own source of income, but are still dependent upon a job for that income. Like men then they reliant on an employer for that work. It is the continuing search for cheap labor that in part defines the issue of why on average women traditionally got paid less then men of equal skill levels. This created a double exploitation both as workers and as women workers. Most poor women work for survival, and not personal enrichment. Reduced to the lowest common dominator, the unskilled workingwomen is degraded to little more than an underpaid machine. If she has children they to suffer because like a man at work she is not at home, and at home she is exhausted and chastened by her depleted silhouette. She finds the origins of liberation in union movement as women’s issues can, and should be incorporated into the larger labor movement.

 

As this the relationship to resources changes the relationship between groups also changes. As women in the work force become both leaders and rank and file activists there comes a real possibility that gender specific issues can be included in the larger struggle. Family issues like living wage, childcare or birth control are central to working class concerns. Issues like respect, comparable wage, opportunities for education and skills upgrading must also be included.

 

Beyond the job site, the economy is global in its origins. Marxism not looks at the relations of capital to labor on the shop floor level, but capitalism in the search for cheap wages and resources and investment opportunities has always from the earliest days of the industrial revolution been global in nature. Industrial and financial capital building upon mercantile capital has always been about World Empire.

 

Nationalism is limiting in the effort leading to liberation because it leads to xenophobia and exploitation within a group between those who control the resources and those who are dependent on those who do.  National liberation solves that problem by a two-stage revolution. First, it is anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and anti-neocolonial. Second, class struggle moves to the forefront.

 

Radical social organizations in the larger anticolonial movements have had direct participation of women as founding members and central players. Both types of Anarchism Communist and Syndicalist as well as Revolutionary Marxism women characters played an essential, valuable and undisputable part. The women’s issue is not only moral but it is imposed upon the circumstances out of necessity. We need all the fighters we can get. Thus, as the Wobblies use to say we do not put the women the front of the fight, we do not hold the back.

 

 

Gender issues are both central and embedded in class issues. Capitalist class, professional class, and working class women face different issues within each class.