Aftersorrowcomesjoy writes:

I am pretty much done with this discussion because instead of telling me anything scientific to prove anything you are telling me about 221,000 people…. if you paid more attention to working out the problem with statistics and less to tiny little examples of how you are supposedly "proving" this or that, you might get somewhere. I am done now so you can reply if you want but i grow tired of this pseudo-debate and i doubt i will be checking back here anytime soon.”

First of all if you want to leave this discussion then that’s your right, but don’t try and claim that no one here has said anything scientific about the question of the existence of a multinational proletariat in the US to justify your withdrawal. You have repeatedly claimed that no one here has been able to put forward any statistics on the question and instead have resorted to anecdotes. I think that these statistics point to the correctness of the RCP’s analysis that there is a multinational proletariat including a lower section of workers, numbering some 30 to 40 million, whose conditions of life and work are those of a downpressed proletariat and that “large sections of the proletariat work in segregated, caste-like conditions. They are slotted into and stuck in low-paying and less desirable occupations and jobs. Owing to the whole history of oppression by the ruling class, in various forms down to today, Black, Latino and other oppressed nationalities and immigrants are disproportionately represented in the lower rungs of the proletariat and suffer high rates of unemployment, including high levels of more long-term unemployment.”

Here’s an excerpt from an earlier post that I wrote:

In 2000 Census out of 193 million white people 7.5 percent or over 14.5 million people live in what the census defines as poverty. 18% of white households that are headed by a woman are below the poverty level. Over 8 million white people live in extreme poverty making only 50% of the poverty level income.

The poverty level income is pretty low -- $17,000 for a family of 4 with two children. This is equivalent to a $8.17 an hour wage for a full time employee working a 40 hour week.)

African Americans and Latinos in the US do have much higher poverty rates than whites – 22.1% for African Americans and 21.2% for Latinos. Out of 35.7 million African Americans, 7.9 million are in poverty and out of 33.7 million Latinos 7.1 million are in poverty.

2. Occupation
For white people 11.6% are in less skilled blue color and service jobs, 16.6% are skilled blue color and supervisors, 10.7% are in clerical or sales occupations, 24.5% are doctors, lawyers, managers or other professionals, 1% are farmers or farm laborers, 2% are unemployed and 33.6% are not in the labor force.

For Black people 23.3 are in less skilled blue color and service jobs, 12.2% are in skilled blue color and supervisors, 14.5% are in clerical or sales occupations, 14.4% are doctors, lawyers, managers or other professionals, .1% are farmers or farm laborers, 4.8% are unemployed and 30.7% are not in the labor force.

For Latinos, 25.6 are in less skilled blue color and service jobs, 15.4% are in skilled blue color and supervisors, 10.4% are in clerical or sales occupations, 11.6% are doctors, lawyers, managers or other professionals, 1.7% are farmers or farm laborers, 4% are unemployed and 31.2% are not in the labor force. (Source: Social Stratification in the United States by Stephen J. Rose)

And here is an excerpt from a post by Dolly Veale where she runs down some of the statistics that are in the DP.

*44.3 million (16.3% of US population) are without health insurance; another 50 million are under insured, the worse performance since records have been kept.

*Child poverty has increased 33% since 1970. In the U.S. today, 1 out of every 5 children are poor – almost 2 out of every 3 poor kids are white, 3 out of every 5 “Latino” kids are poor and nearly half of all Black children are poor (from Children Defense Fund: A Children’s Defense Budget). Suicide rates among the young are 36% higher than 1970 and triple the rate in 1950. Suicide rate between 1984-1996 for those aged 15-19 years old increased 95%.

*The wage increase of 1996 up to $5.15 an hour made up slightly more than half of the ground lost to inflation in the 1980s. Thus the real value of the minimum wage in 1997 was 181% less than in 1979. Full time minimum wage earnings currently equal 84% of the estimated poverty line for a family of three. 71.4% of minimum wage jobs are held by people age 20 and over.

*A survey of 30 US cities found that almost 1 in 5 homeless persons work full time (in one county in the SF metropolitan area, over 50% of people in the homeless shelter work full time). Black people make up 12% of the US population but are almost 50% of the homeless, followed by whites at 32%, Latinos at 12%, Native Americans at 4%, and Asians at 3%. About 40% of the homeless are veterans. The fastest growing segment of homeless are women and their kids—they’re 40% of the total homeless population. 45% of homeless have earned more than a high school diploma.

* 34 million people in the US are regularly hungry or are “food insecure” with 32 million seeking emergency food assistance during the course of a year. In the US 1 out of every 3 people seeking food relief has had to make a choice between buying food and paying rent. The director of a major free food assistance outlet that feeds 300,000 people a day in a major city explained “What we are seeing is more and more what we call the working-hungry—families with children who don’t make enough to eat…” 70% of poor families with children include a person who works, and 2/3 of those who are unemployed are actively looking for work.”

This is Dolly’s conclusion: “The towering wealth of a relatively small section of US society increasing cast a long shadow over a landscape that is filled with uncertainty for broad sections of people whose lives resemble a high wire balancing act without a safety net. For tens of millions on the bottom of this “great society”, life is hell. It’s a picture of a society that is a resounding failure and utter catastrophe, a window into the “way of life” for millions of people EVEN inside the belly of the beast that screams out “The World is Intolerable and Cries out For Justice.”

What conclusion do YOU draw from these statistics?? Eight million white people make 50% of the poverty level income (50% of the poverty level of 17,000 for a family of for is $8,500 / year or $4.08 per hour). Is it your contention that a person trying to raise a family of 4 on $640/month is part of the labor aristocracy?? I have a Native American friend who lives on a reservation in a house that looks that it might fall down in a strong wind and who has to do without water when her well runs dry. But she has a car and a “swamp cooler.” Is she too part of the labor aristocracy?

Second, you have consistently ridiculed the posts that have brought out in detail the actual material conditions that sections of the proletariat in the US face. In my opinion, anyone with a heart in unity with the oppressed has to be moved by these powerful exposures like Dolly’s post on the poultry workers and the coal miners or Rosa’s description of the conditions in the area where she is from. And shouldn’t anyone with a desire for revolution be moved to address these outrages and rally this section of the people to revolution?

Yet your only response has been to coldheartedly write off these posts. What conclusions do YOU draw from the existence of these workers?

Finally, although I’m interested in the answers you have to the questions above I don’t think we’ll really get anywhere around this because I think the real difference is not one of analysis but of method and ideology. I think Areaman in an earlier post identified some of the false methodological assumptions of your arguments, in particular that you seem to define class only in relation to income distribution. While this is important, for a Marxist the key factor to look at in doing a class analysis is position in the relations of production. Areaman wrote:

My point is that this whole argument rests on two false assumptions (not on a material analysis).

a) First false assumption: that you can tell the revolutionary potential of a class or section of a class by merely studying their income and position within the international class structure. In fact, class is defined and established by position in the relations of productions. However revolutionary potential is determined by specific conditions and history. Some predictions can be made, but not based merely on statistics. (see my next post on the contrasting MLM materialist method).

b) Second false assumption: that “benefits” from imperialism are like a “taint” where even a little bit sends you to political hell. Class interests are more complicated than that. That is why Marxists talk about some privileges being “crumbs” from the table – in a scientific sense, that popular phrase means that there are benefits (which come to sections of the masses by virtue of their gender, nationality, skills, etc.) that are very small by comparison to their larger, historic interests.

In short, "data" is inserted into an argument built on bourgeois logic -- where a false verdict arises from false assumptions.

As someone said in an earlier post: a homeless person in the U.S. gets to pick through better garbage than a homeless person in Manila. But does that mean the homeless have a material interest in defending the society that makes them homeless?

You never answered Areaman’s post critiquing your method but instead continued to chant your mantra, including on other message boards, that the debate on this website is devoid of analysis. Given all of this how can you claim that the discussion on this website is a pseudo-debate? You claim that the supporters of the line of the RCP on this site haven’t responded to you but isn’t it you who have failed to respond?

PS -- I note that “Maoist3,” the discussion leader at RAIL/MIM’s discussion group, has recently warned people to stay away from the 2changetheworld website saying that “the "RCP-USA" is trying to bait people for info needed by cops -- namely the racial background of comrades….If people want to go over there, they should do so at their own risk.” The post goes on and on about the RCP’s disdain for statistics etc. but never elaborates on their warning.

However an article in the current issue of MIM notes and another post by Maoist3 makes clear the content of their “warning”: 1) that someone posted on the 2changetheworld site that MIM had no Black members. While I can’t even remember this post and comment I hardly think that it falls into the category of “baiting people for information needed by cops.

2) that the RW identified Carl Dix as Black in his interview with Bob Avakian and that by pointing this out the RW was calling on everyone to identify their race and other features to the government.

IMHO, these “warnings” cannot be taken at face value and the real warning that MIM wants to give is that people should stay away from the 2changetheworld site because their line is being exposed here. Of course they can’t do that openly.

Morpheus

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mim3@mim.org replies for MIM: Considering that the "RCP-USA" censored pro-MIM statements that people attempted to make at the www.2changetheworld.info and considering MIM happily reprints in full all "RCP-USA" idiocy, such as the above, we think the facts prove whose line is being exposed.

Morpheus's second-to-last paragraph is also a pile of shit. The statement in question was NOT an interview in the RW. The statement was right on www.2changetheworld.info. On July 22nd, 2002, in the "Liberating Oppressed Nationalities" section of www.2changetheworld.info Lurigancho said, "as far as I understand it, MIM is white (correct me if I'm wrong." If that is not baiting people to give out their identities, what is?

Then on September 30th, we learned what people at www.2changetheworld.info are doing with people's IP addresses in the "General Discussion Forum," when Bandh said, "MIM is not a party and viewing web info and personal accounts are only based around colleges in Boston and Southern California."

If that is not baiting people for geographic information to disprove that MIM is only based in two cities, then what is baiting? How can "RCP-USA" activity be distinguished from cop activity?

With regard to the "line" on statistics above, it's eclectically collected facts with no bearing on the question at hand. The U$A has 280 million people. To prove that a majority is exploited, you have to be talking about at least 51% or 140 million +. That's leaving aside that the "RCP-USA" refuses to break it down into a discussion of oppressor nation versus oppressed nations.

Instead, "RCP-USA" constantly refers to "for millions of people EVEN inside the belly of the beast" as if they were refuting MIM. MIM has already said it is mobilizing the bottom 20%. In case "RCP-USA" did not notice even 1% of U.$. society is "millions of people EVEN inside the belly of the beast," just to quote one of their moronic statements supposedly against us above. Listening to "RCP-USA" one would never know that 1% of the "U$A" is 2.8 million people. So it's not a question of them speaking for the bottom and MIM not. MIM is speaking about "millions." It's a question that the "RCP-USA" rejects our cardinal question and it cannot come up with any proof about not just millions or tens of millions but a bare minimum of 140 million people. The "RCP-USA" cannot connect what it has to do to disprove MIM's thesis, because it's members are horribly backward and its leaders are not interested in the question of surplus-value. The leaders are consciously taking people down into patches of data for the purpose of "juggling" and "selecting" as Lenin said in his essay "Statistics and Sociology" and many other places as well.

[Postscript: We have repeatedly referred to Lenin and how he tried to defeat individualist Anglo-Saxon ideology opposed to statistics. Not surprisingly in the very document where he said Blacks are a nation within U.$. borders, in his essay with the January 1917 preface called "Statistics and Sociolgy" Lenin had to knock down the chauvinists using patches of data to prove their points: "The most widely used, and most fallacious, method in the realm of social phenomena is to tear out individual minor facts and juggle with examples. Selecting chance examples presents no difficulty at all, but is of no value, or of purely negative value, for in each individual case everything hinges on the historically concrete situation. Facts, if we take them in their entirety, in their interconnection, are not only stubborn things, but undoubtedly proof-bearing things. Minor facts, if taken out of their entirety, out of their interconnection, if they are arbitrarily selected and torn out of context, are merely things for juggling, or even worse."]

You can read all the statistics above in the "RCP-USA" attempt at rebuttal of MIM and not one addresses MIM's cardinal question on the majority of the population. MIM did not say there is no lumpen and MIM did not say there were not scattered people who are homeless or in other difficulties. We said the majority of white people is exploiter and that is our cardinal question. Of course there are much smaller groups of people like the lumpen who have to be detailed too, but our cardinal question surrounds the exploiter enemy within U.$. borders. "RCP-USA" has to sidestep that question, because as it knows, there are NO statistics in their article above or elsewhere on surplus-value transfers from the Third World or even within U.$. borders. The "RCP-USA" is covering up for the middle-classes of the more than 200 million people it seeks to represent at the expense of the international proletariat.

That's for the class structure. Now look at what they are saying about the political activity of the U.$. population: "However revolutionary potential is determined by specific conditions and history. Some predictions can be made, but not based merely on statistics." Listening to the "RCP-USA," one would think that U.$. imperialism was born yesterday, and not something that has been supported in war after war, bombing after bombing, by the 80 or 90% of Amerikkkans for decades.

All this shit about "can't predict" is precisely to whitewash the crimes of the U.$. population against the whole world. Bush did not kill millions in Iraq without 90% backing. There was also the invasion of Panama, the bombing of Libya, the consistent majority support for I$rael--all of this before the support for rounding up thousands without charges after 911. In contrast, Hitler was in power from 1933 to 1945. It was only 12 years, but revolutionaries drew conclusions instead of putting off the question indefinitely into the future. The German communists did not engage in such apologetics and they gave their own fellow Germans the blame for World War II--"co-responsibility." Yet, compared with how long the U.$. rampage has been going on globally, the German Nazi rampage was short. The difference is that the "RCP-USA" is still saying "can't predict," while the German communists approved by Stalin and Mao called a spade a spade. Today, the genuine communist internationalist minority within imperialist country borders does not begrudge the international proletariat anymore than it did in 1945. It is only oppressor nation nationalists who cannot face up to 1945 or its equivalent that is on the historical agenda now.

The German imperialists and population richly deserved to be occupied by the Soviet Red Army, as a matter of justice. As a matter of moving forward, imperialism has created a situation where some nations--the parasites-- do not have revolutionary thrust of their own. It's not a question about some perfect Trotskyist conjuncture of the future requiring fanciful debate and science-fiction simulation. It's a question of how the imperialist population has behaved in the midst of war and pillage, repression and racism, decade after decade. It is no favor to these militarist, environment-destroying parasites to tell them they are ready to build socialism. They are not ready and they are not qualified to do the job. To tell them otherwise is to delay their own self-transformation and make it more painful and more violent. To rely on these parasite nations, to re-label their racism and national chauvinism "socialist construction" would be a crime against the international proletariat. That is the real lesson of "globalization." The beneficiaries of "globalization" are the imperialist country populations and they won't be able to construct socialism without being forcefully re-civilized by the oppressed nations led by the international proletariat. How much force will be required can be influenced by the revolutionary movement within the imperialist countries. The more errors the revolutionary movement makes and the more revisionism it faces, the more severe will the violence end up being to correct imperialism at the source--and no one can guarantee the humyn species will survive at all, thanks to imperialism and its distorting effects on the natural will to live. For genuine proletarian revolutionaries, it's no longer a question of when some miracle conjuncture will happen, but when the world's suffering exploited and oppressed correct imperialism at the source. It's not a question of whether revolutionary violence will come from Amerikkkans for Mao or Mexicans for Mao. It's only a question of when that violence of the international proletariat is going to come, not whether it is going to come. Then it's going to be a question of how bad the violence is going to have to be to get the job done--a future of economic harmony and peace established through the dictatorship of the proletariat.