[Marxism] African American History Month 2209: Intro (2) dialectics of

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II 
 
There is a need to speak of the precise meaning and definition of terms we  
use. 
 
The difference between a reform movement and a battle for concessions, with  
neither one more important than the other, is that a reform movement "realign  
social relations in society without changing the property relations,"  while  
concession battles do not involve realigning social relations; a  stop sign, 
wage struggles, housing, books in schools, etc. 
 
I for one cannot say what the new forms of struggle will be, that must take  
shape expressing the changes in the productive machinery of our society. Nor,  
can I say if capital has no more reform left within it, although all the 
signs  point to the beginning of the class struggle in America. Some comrades call 
any  struggle between worker and employer the class struggle or a 
manifestation of  the class struggle. 
 
I do not. 
 
Wage struggles, which communist must fight to keep on track and lead and  
complete their own logic have, hardly ever involve the working class as a class,  
at least his has been the case during all of American history. I suspect the  
same is the case with the British labor movement. 
 
This understanding leads to another law that departs with ideas that has  
been fundamental to the articulation of Marxism for the past century. 
 
The struggle between workers and capitalist express the most basic and  
fundamental contradiction of capital and capitalism. Capital rest exclusively on  
wage labor, its purchase as labor power and then deploying the worker as 
laborer  producing commodities. As the contradiction - (contradictory classes), 
governing  the entire process of reproduction in our society, neither can break 
their  relations - bond, with the other. 
 
Individual can cross the threshold or boundary of class, but just as it was  
impossible for the serf to walk out of his "serf ness," the industrial working 
 class could not walk out of "classness" as modern proletariat. The unity and 
 strife - contradiction, between worker and capitalist, their collision and  
collusion drives the capitalist system through all of its quantitative  
boundaries. What this struggle is about at all times is a struggle for either to  
secure a greater share of the social product and for greater political liberty,  
but neither can overthrow the system of which they constitute. 
 
The struggle to secure a greater share of the social product and to expand  
political liberty, is more or less an equality struggle. 
 
The projection that one of the two basic classes of any system - (mode of  
production), can overthrow the system, of which the two basic classes  
constitute, is wrong, for the exact same reason that the serf could not over  throw 
feudalism. Something else - another development had to happen to bring the  
quantitative expansion of the feudal system to an end. Even though it was the  
change in the form of wealth, from landed property to movable wealth in the form  
of gold that began the break-up of the landed property relations, it was the  
introduction of new machinery within the feudal order, that created new 
classes. 
 
Classes are formed by the introduction of new productive machinery -  
equipment, and the new classes generated within the feudal society were the  
capitalist and modern proletariat. The capitalist and modern proletariat of  which 
Marx writes are not birthed in contradiction with the feudal order.  
Contradiction is a concept of unity and strife within a thing rather than  between things. 
Only the serf was birthed in contradiction with the nobility, as  the unity 
and strife driving the system of feudalism.  Rather than being  birthed in 
contradiction with the feudal order, bourgeoisie and proletarian are  birthed in 
antagonism with the feudal order, but in contradiction with each  other. Being 
birth in antagonism with the feudal order meant a series of  conflicts in 
external collision with all the customs and ritual, the social  pecking order, 
that made feudalism, well feudalism. 
 
The dialectic of revolution, real social revolution is that contradiction  
between the two basic classes of society, drives the system through all its  
quantitative boundaries, and with the emergence and then increasing quantitative  
expansion of new class(es), the new classes collide in external collision or 
the  contradiction of feudal society is replaced, not extinguished, superseded 
by  antagonism of the new classes and this constitutes an era of political  
revolution.  A reexamination of all of Lenin’s writing on the Russian  
revolution conclusively reveals that his program in respects to the serf was to  win 
them over to the cause of proletarian revolution and this program became the  
heart of the doctrine of political Leninism, the worker-peasant alliance. A  
thousand years of rebellions by the serf could not overthrow feudalism, nor  
could the serf conceive of himself outside his feudal character and nature. In  
the historical meaning of class, the modern industrial working class was/is no  
different. 
 
How does Marx and Engels explains this external colliding, that is  
antagonism? 
 
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all  
feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the  
motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left  
remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than  
callous "cash payment". It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious  
fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy  
water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange  
value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set  
up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for  
exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted  naked, 
shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. 
 
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured  
and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the 
lawyer,  the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. 
 
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has  
reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. 
 
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display  of 
vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its  
fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show  
what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far 
surpassing  Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has 
conducted  expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and 
crusades.  
_http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm_ 
(http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm)  
 
The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie, known, since Marx, as  
the capitalist mode of production, was incompatible with the local privileges  
and the privileges of estate as well as with the reciprocal personal ties of 
the  feudal system. The bourgeoisie broke up the feudal system and built upon 
its  ruins the capitalist order of society, the kingdom of free. competition, of 
 personal liberty, of the equality, before the law, of all commodity owners, 
of  all the rest of the capitalist blessings. Thenceforward the capitalist 
mode of  production could develop in freedom. 
_http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm_ 
(http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm)  
 
Lastly 
 
Originally an oppressed estate liable to pay dues to the ruling feudal  
nobility, recruited from all manner of serfs and villains, the burghers  conquered 
one position after another in their continuous struggle with the  nobility, 
and finally, in the most highly developed countries, took power in its  stead; 
in France, by directly overthrowing the nobility; in England, by making  it 
more and more bourgeois and incorporating it as their own ornamental head.  And 
how did they accomplish this? Simply through a change in the "economic  
situation", which sooner or later, voluntarily or as the outcome of combat, was  
followed by a change in the political conditions. The struggle of the  bourgeoisie 
against the feudal nobility is the struggle of town against country,  
industry against landed property, money economy against natural economy; and the  
decisive weapon of the bourgeoisie in this struggle was its means of economic  
power, constantly increasing through the development of industry, first  
handicraft, and then, at a later stage, progressing to manufacture, and through  the 
expansion of commerce. During the whole of this struggle political force was  
on the side of the nobility, except for a period when the Crown played the  
bourgeoisie against the nobility, in order to keep one estate in check by means  
of the other [71]; but from the moment when the bourgeoisie, still 
politically  powerless, began to grow dangerous owing to its increasing economic power, 
the  Crown resumed its alliance with the nobility, and by so doing called 
forth the  bourgeois revolution, first in England and then in France. The 
"political  conditions" in France had remained unaltered, while the "economic 
situation" had  outgrown them. Judged by his political status the nobleman was 
everything, the  burgher nothing; but judged by his social position the burgher now 
formed the  most important class in the state, while the nobleman had been 
shorn of all his  social functions and was now only drawing payment, in the 
revenues that came to  him, for these functions which had disappeared. Nor was that 
all. Bourgeois  production in its entirety was still hemmed in by the feudal 
political forms of  the Middle Ages, which this production—not only 
manufacture, but even handicraft  industry—had long outgrown; it had remained hemmed in 
by all the thousandfold  guild privileges and local and provincial customs 
barriers which had become mere  irritants and fetters on production. The bourgeois 
revolution put an end to  this. Not, however, by adjusting the economic 
situation to suit the political  conditions, in accordance with Herr Dühring's 
precept—this was precisely what  the nobles and the Crown had been vainly trying 
to do for years—but by doing the  opposite, by casting aside the old mouldering 
political rubbish and creating  political conditions in which the new 
"economic situation" could exist and  develop. And in this political and legal 
atmosphere which was suited to its  needs it developed brilliantly, so brilliantly 
that the bourgeoisie has already  come close to occupying the position held by 
the nobility in 1789: it is  becoming more and more not only socially 
superfluous, but a social hindrance; it  is more and more becoming separated from 
productive activity, and, like the  nobility in the past, becoming more and more a 
class merely drawing revenues;  and it has accomplished this revolution in 
its own position and the creation of  a new class, the proletariat, without any 
hocus-pocus of force whatever, in a  purely economic way. Even more: it did 
not in any way will this result of its  own actions land activities—on the 
contrary, this result established itself with  irresistible force, against the will 
and contrary to the intentions of the  bourgeoisie; its own productive forces 
have grown beyond its control, and, as if  necessitated by a law of nature, 
are driving the whole of bourgeois society  towards ruin, or revolution. And if 
the bourgeois now make their appeal to force  in order to save the collapsing 
"economic situation" from the final crash, this  only shows that they are 
labouring under the same delusion as Herr Dühring: the  delusion that "political 
conditions are the decisive cause of the economic  situation"; this only shows 
that they imagine, just as Herr Dühring does, that  by making use of "the 
primary", "the direct political force", they can remodel  those "facts of the 
second order" {D. Ph. 538}, the economic situation and its  inevitable 
development; and that therefore the economic consequences of the  steam-engine and the 
modern machinery driven by it, of world trade and the  banking and credit 
developments of the present day, can be blown out of  existence by them with Krupp 
guns and Mauser rifles. [72] 
 
_http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch14.htm_ 
(http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch14.htm)  
 
For the last two decades we have witnessed the systematic ousting of the  
proletariat world wide from the productive machinery in society and the  
conversion of a full 30 % of our working class into temporary workers due  exclusively 
to the slow but steady development of a new technological regime.  Given that 
the blacks were the last ones to enter the industrial social order in  our 
country, and amongst the first pushed out, the color factor obscures what is  
profound changes in the productive machinery of our country. 
 
Classes are formed by the introduction of new productive machinery into the  
production process. This quantitative injection of a new quality of machinery  
brings to an end quantitative expansion of the productive forces on the old  
basis. Not all at one time but inexorably. Then begins a period of social  
revolution. 
 
We are a full decade or so into such an era. 
 
Our working class is in the process of finding its political legs. The  
communist are the teachers of the proletariat. 
 

Proletarians Unite.
 
WL
 
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