Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1998 07:20:02 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: AUT: re: grundrisse etc discussion


Forest wrote:

> I shall respond at greater length to Gerald Levy's post in the near
> future, as it reflects a mixture of prejudice/ignorance which I suspect is
> rather common among "Marxists."

The above reflects a mixture of assertion and bad faith which I suspect is
rather common for "Marxist" discourse. If you have an argument (rather
than a set of assertions in poetic form), please make it.
 
>  For now, briefly: with respect to the
> question of whether slaves thought of themselves as proletarians, do all,
> or even most, proletarians think of themselves as such today?  Does one
> have to think oneself proletarian in order to struggle in proletarian
> ways, ie in ways that threaten to overturn the rule of capital?

These are good questions and they tell you why it is both slippery and
dangerous to define "proletariat" only in terms of proletarian
subjectivity.

As for the linguistic origin of the term "proletariat", it is irrelevant.
There are indeed many terms (in all languages) whose meaning have changed
radically over time (perhaps a subject for a future discussion at some
point).

>  As for tavern owners, do you think that seventeenth-century tavern owners
> resemble theircontemporary counterparts?  Perhaps there are still tavern owners who
> provide spaces for proletarians to meet, conspire, unload stolen goods,
> hide out from the authorities, and so on, but I'm not aware of any.

To have sympathies for (in this case, one segment of) the proletariat,
does not define one as being proletarian. 

> Though they made profits from their businesses, so did the proles selling
> stolen goods, which didn't make them non-proles, did it?

Selling stolen goods on the "black market" is not the primary way in which
proletarians earn a living. To the extent that they engaged in this
activity, they were supplementing their income with a "second job".  In
performing their "second job" their interests were the same as the tavern
owner. 

Jerry



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