From mim3@mim.org Sat Jan 24 02:00:29 1998
Date: Sat, 24 Jan 1998 02:00:17 -0500 (EST)
From:
>MIM3 replies: True, MIM opposes this demand [higher wages] except for the real workers >here in the U$A, like the orange, strawberry and flower pickers getting >paid a dollar an hour and the sweatshop workers typically referred to as >"scabs" by the chauvinists like Proyect.
[Proyect says:] What a shocking anti-working class statement. No solidarity with $8 per hour hospital workers who empty bed-pans, change soiled sheets and scrub dying patients for a living. No solidarity with $15 per hour coal miners who risk being buried alive or coming down with black-lung disease. No solidarity with $18 per hour autoworkers who work on an assembly-line, spray-painting cars in 100 degree temperatures, while inhaling toxic fumes.
MIM replies: MIM had just gotten done saying that it supports the struggle for the environment. We also make temporary alliances with the petty- bourgeoisie IF those alliances have an internationalist orientation. Notice he had nothing to say about that, like what is wrong with REQUIRING a "worker" struggle to be internationalist?
On this point, it's Proyect's pursuit of cash for more VCRs for the U.$. "workers" that is counter to the environment. His position is closer to Rolf Martens's in that it is ultimately imperialist economism. RM sees that the productive forces suffer under environmentalism and is unwilling to have workers pay the price from lower wages. MIM on the other hand is willing to support paying the price for the environment and peace.
What he really wants the reader to forget is that it was the revolutions in the tradition of Stalin and Mao that actually DID something about what he is talking about with workers' conditions. Proyect has spent most of his life opposing those revolutions as a Trotskyist and ex-Trotskyist while trying to ensnare us in intra-OSHA politics-- i.e. social-democracy.
The fact that he did not reply to our other five points on the Detroit mouthpieces' strike is not on account that he has recognized the evils of his ways on chauvinist rumors and supporting imperialist politics in striker newspapers. (Readers should be aware that MIM is talking about what these strikers put in their own newspaper once they LEFT the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press -- the same old crap they were saying before as imperialist mouthpieces in those multi-million dollar enterprises of imperialism. Oh and Proyect has the gall to call MIM the enemy while backing these mouthpieces who NEVER changed their ways.) ***************************
[Proyect says:] All these workers are the enemy? No, it is MIM that is the enemy.
[MIM says:] >1. You tried to mislead people on this list and count journalists as >workers. We showed the Marx quotes that demonstrate he did not count >journalists as workers--thereby raising once again, why are you trying to >smuggle bourgeois classes into the trade union movement?
[Proyect answers this one point:] When the ruling class attacks more privileged layers of the working class like airline controllers or reporters, the goal is to drive down the wages
[MIM replies:] See there it is again: "THE working class." Can Proyect read? Marx said journalists are not in the working class. Proyect does not know how to respond to that idea, the idea that he actually has to investigate and delineate the class structure. He should call himself a Marxologist and "Marxism Space" should be renamed "Marxology Space" and then we at MIM and others can cut Proyect and "Marxology Space" some slack. The "-ology" suffix means "the study of."
The people Proyect champions are at BEST semi-proletariat. Every major leader of communism signed on to the definition of semi-proletariat and the program for it while Lenin was still alive:
Lenin's COMINTERN's definition of semi-proletariat from section titled "Our Attitude to the Semi-Proletarian Strata."
"In Western Europe there is no class other than the proletariat which is capable of playing the significant role in the world revolution that, as a consequence of the war and the land hunger, the peasants did in Russia. But, even so, a section of the Western-European peasantry and a considerable part of the urban petty bourgeoisie and broad layers of the so-called middle class, of office workers etc., are facing deteriorating standards of living and, under the pressure of rising prices, the housing problems and insecurity, are being shaken out of their political apathy and drawn into the struggle between revolution and counter-revolution."
Alan Adler, ed., ITAL Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International END (London: Ink Links, 1980), "On Tactics," in Adler, op. cit., p. 293.
[continuation] "It is also important to win the sympathy of technicians, white-collar workers, the middle- and lower-ranking civil servants and the intelligentsia, who can assist the proletarian dictatorship in the period of transition from workers, the middle- and lower-ranking civil servants and the intelligentsia, who can assist the proletarian dictatorship in the period of transition from capitalism to Communism by helping with the problems of state and economic administration. If such layers identify with the revolution, the enemy will be demoralized and the popular view of the proletariat as an isolated group will be discredited."On Tactics," in Adler, op. cit., p. 294.
[Proyect says:] When workers don't have a union to defend them, they are forced into accepting lower wages. When a boss forces his workers to accept lower wages, it is a victory for our enemy. The only defense workers have is
[MIM replies:] Here is Proyect effecting a tough syndicalist pose again, but let's follow this logic through. So whenever someone is paid less all workers suffer? Excuse me, they may have taught you that at the AFL-CIA, but that has nothing to do with Marxism. When you get paid in the means of production like baseball players obviously do, we should not be supporting your strike for your class demands. Funny, every single Trotskyist newspaper here supported the baseball players' strike with exactly this reasoning here by Proyect.
Why poor Lee Iacocca, he worked for $1 that year as chair of Chrysler. That must have been "a victory for our enemy" huh syndicalist poseur Proyect?
When the workers own the airlines, car rental corporations and grocery chains and they pay themselves less, are they their own enemies? Stupid. Anti-Marxist. What matters is who is in control of the economy and can appropriate other people's labor.
When you get paid with the appropriated labor of others your class demands are bourgeois, maybe only petty-bourgeois, but bourgeois nonetheless. Proyect speaks for a class of people who oppose internationalism and revolution in deed, because they support the reformist economic interests of the petty- bourgeoisie. They accomplish this partly by allying with the imperialists against the Maoists like MIM, but principally by attacking the revolutionary struggle in the Third World.
So no, Marxism is not equivalent to saying lower wages is a victory for our enemy. Marx did not need to talk about surplus-value and classes just to say that. Proyect does have to dodge adding up the surplus- value like Marx did and Lenin did.
********************* Marx and Engels said to Proyect and his hangers-on long ago:
It is an unavoidable phenomenon, well established in the course of development, that people from the ruling class also join the proletariat and supply it with educated elements. This we have already clearly stated in the Manifesto. Here, however, two remarks are to be made:
First, such people, in order to be useful to the proletarian movement, must bring with them really educated elements. This, however, is not the case with the great majority of German bourgeois converts. . . .They are completely deficient in real, factual, or theoretical material. Instead, there are efforts to bring superficial socialist ideas into harmony with the various theoretical viewpoints which the gentlemen from the universities, or from wherever, bring with them, and among whom one is more confused than the other, thanks to the process of decomposition in which German philosophy finds itself today. Instead of first studying the new science [scientific socialism] thoroughly, everyone relies rather on the viewpoint he brought with him, makes a short cut toward it with his own private science, and immediately steps forth with pretensions of wanting to teach it. Hence, there are among those gentlemen as many viewpoints as there are heads; instead of clarifying anything, they only produce arrant confusion -- fortunately, almost always only among themselves. Such educated elements, whose guiding principle is to teach what they have not learned, the party can well dispense with.
Second, when such people from other classes join the proletarian movement, the first demand upon them must be that they do not bring with them any remnants of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc., prejudices, but that they irreversibly assimilate the proletarian viewpoint. But those gentlemen, as has been shown, adhere overwhelmingly to petty-bourgeois conceptions. In so petty-bourgeois a country as Germany, such conceptions certainly have their justification, but only outside the Social-Democratic Labor party. If the gentlemen want to build a social-democratic petty-bourgeois party, they have a full right to do so; one could then negotiate with them, conclude agreements, etc., according to circumstances. But in a labor party, they are a falsifying element. If there are grounds which necessitates tolerating them, it is a duty only to tolerate them, to allow them no influence in party leadership, and to keep in mind that a break with them is only a matter of time.
"STRATEGY AND TACTICS OF THE CLASS STRUGGLE" by KARL MARX and FREDERICK ENGELS September 17-18 1879
A Private Circulation Letter from Marx and Engels (First drafted by Engels) to Germany's Social-Democratic leadership