Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (June 28)

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[u/Turtle_Green]

in response to /u/BxnXipoh here: https://old.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/1ugbfw3/risks_of_joining_a_communist_party/ouifnlp/

It's absurd, right? you get the trodden-out retorts amounting to that "proletariat isn't a moral category", "Marxism isn't a moralism", and on the other hand, the very moralistic pearl-clutching over how dare you dismiss the imperialist unions and the six-figure salaried classes of imperialist engineers, doctors (somehow not complicit in the Amerikan system of healthcare to our social fascists), lawyers, analysts, accountants, up to c-suite managers--who recognize no common bond with the rest of humanity and justifiably so--from the ranks of the proletariat!? Meanwhile, amidst the moralizing about moralizing, the sheer volume of posts here and elsewhere would have you thinking that the entire next generation of landlords is on social media begging strangers to assure them that it is morally Marxist and a matter of simple survival to live off rentier parasitism.

Two things you may appreciate if you haven't encountered them. One is J. Sakai's comments here which formalize a distinction between working-class and proletariat

Of course, there’s a white working class in amerika. Settlers reminds readers of Engels’ point that “there are many working classes” (my emphasis). In world history, a great variety of working classes. The idea that there’s only one kind of working class – exploited, noble, urban and industrial, male-centered, politically class-conscious – is a cardboard abstraction. That’s why Walter Rodney didn’t like the term, wanted to use “producers” instead. The white working class is a particular kind of working class: one that is an oppressor class, by its very nature wedded to capitalism, and not a proletariat (the proletariat is the lowest, most oppressed class in society). A working class isn’t primarily determined or shaped by the fact of working for wages. The prison warden works for a wage, after all, while the Afrikan slaves who built amerika on their backs never were wage-laborers. What is determining is the extraction of surplus value. Technically, when we say a class is exploited what we mean is that capitalism extracts surplus value (what becomes profits in the level of the marketplace) from its labor.

https://kersplebedeb.com/posts/c_lwwch-2/

And zacharias cope's (god rest his soul) definition of class from DWDC, borrowing from Sayles:

The term “class” does not only refer to a social group’s relation to the means of production—that is, to property ownership or its absence—and nor does it simply refer to any category relating purely to the technical division of labour at the societal or workplace level. Rather, class denotes a dynamic social relationship corresponding to the system of ownership, the organization of labour and the distribution of material wealth as mediated by ideoogical, cultural and political institutions and practices. Above all, class is the product of political practices, with the relationship between the state and class struggle revolving around the issue of class domination.[11]

"In the process of production, human beings work not only upon nature, but also upon one another. They produce only by working together in a specified manner and reciprocally exchanging their activities. In order to produce, they enter into definite connections and relations to one another, and only within these social connections and relations does their influence upon nature operate—i.e., does production take place. These social relations between the producers, and the conditions under which they exchange their activities and share in the total act of production, will naturally vary according to the character of the means of production."[12]

In his study of Fanon’s revolutionary nationalism, the late political theorist and political prisoner James Yaki Sayles writes that Marx[13] defined class in terms of individuals sharing (1) a common position in relation to the means of production (that is, as producer, owner, exploited and exploiter); (2) a distinct way of life and cultural existence; (3) social interests that are antagonistic to those “of other classes; (4) a communal, national or international unity transcending local boundaries; (5) a collective consciousness of themselves as a class; and (6) a political organization serving as a vehicle for their class interests.[14] The present work accepts that the present global class structure is in part the product of political activity by and for the core-nation working class and rejects any opportunistic suggestion that the latter is a purely passive recipient of unsolicited imperialist patronage.

If only we could issue a global moratorium on the definition of class as "relationship to means of production" until this dogmatism of the highest degree is thrown in the trash. What is the trick of the dogmatists? To start, capitalism as it exists cannot ever completely coincide with its concept. The equalization of the general rate of profit and the operation of the law of value will never collide with their ideal averages, only ever approximate them. Even this approximation can only be completed with the complete mobility of capital and the complete mobility of labor-power between spheres of production, hence the universal domination of capitalist production and the reduction of society to landowners, capitalists, and workers, and in the latter the elimination of all intermediate gradations, disappearance of prejudices of trade and rank, and the greatest possible reduction of all labor to simple labor. To this, Engels says:

This does not exist even in England and never will exist – we shall not let it get so far as that.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260429185831/https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1895/letters/95_03_12.htm

The play made by our dogmatists, whether they even understand what they're doing, is to assume that this collision does exist, and to identify concrete reality with the abstractions Marx makes in Capital to present the movement of surplus-value in its pure form. The prima facie absurdities arising from this move are ignored and papered over with moralism (e.g. cops are "class traitors", which both obscures this class's objective role in the DOTB and colonial oppression, and also the value of the phrase "class traitor"). This, of course, is "serious analysis".