Date: Sun, 01 Jul 2001 06:55:51 -0700
Subject: Re: AUT: Re: Getting back to Negri and Empire
From: Sharon Vance <canito3-AT-earthlink.net>


Here is something from my journal that I wrote this morning that may be
relevant. It is an excerpt
Ultimately starvation wages are kept in place through violence, coercion and
violations of labor law and basic human rights, and through superpower
interventions. As more and more American workers suffer and less and less
benefit from US Imperialism the justification for this will be harder and
the troops and soldiers necessary to carry it out will be harder to
mobilize. At home in individual work places, labor is already on the
offensive. It is inadequate and cooptated, but labor bosses can not continue
to rally their troops indefinitely only to call them back at the last minute
and present them with sell out contracts. Just two years after UC grad
victories UC grad rank and filers, the latest group to enter the AFL-CIO
'family' en masse, is already shaking things up and calling for direct
democracy within the union. You can not impose a Jimmy Hoffa Jr. on general
practitioners or computer programmers either. This new infusion into the
labor movement will force it to change, perhaps in more 'professional
directions' -- but the very conditions that lead these people to organize in
the first place will not go away. And they will not tolerate sell out
contracts. And who knows, I'm sure some of them will start educating
themselves and will discover some of the different, and more radical and
more philosophical and sophisticated ways of organizing labor. Everyone will
be pushing wages up and the scarcity of workers willing to do the underpaid
dirty work will also force a change in those areas as well.

Northern CA IS seeing such a scarcity right now.

Of course even as wages go up, in the current system they will never keep up
with inflated housing, fuel and health care costs. This is a way to achieve
World Bank austerity without appearing to impose it. But people are catching
on to that too. And Northern CA is beginning to realize that if they don't
start providing affordable housing the whole economy could collapse, or at
the very least there won't be any teachers to work in the public or private
schools. And if the private sector can't find a solution people will begin
demanding that the public sector do so. This is already happening with
health care and energy.

In CA we actually have a situation where public ownership is showing itself
to the entire population of private corporate electricity bill payers to be
the much better option. LA Water and Power is selling power to the State,
which is selling to the private companies. And the corporate media is
bending over backwards to obscure and explain away this fact.

As for health care we were only votes away from getting single payer. And I
think that eventually we will get it, in CA. They already have it in Oregon
and Hawai'i.


We may yet get a real Brazilian austerity program imposed on us, with the
way Bush is spending and cutting federal revenue. But will people be as
silent about the resulting deficits as they were under Reagan? Will the
Democrats be able to ignore it, or only put up token resistance and still
stay in office? Maybe the corporations and WTO are thinking that if they can
impose a Bush Presidency on us they can also impose austerity. I think this
is where they will miscalculate. If that were to happen the militias and
working class right wingers would finally have to wake up and realize their
"Zionist UN Conspiracy" is in fact US corporations and the WTO and World
Bank. When that happens the divisions, at least in the arena of political
economy, between the right and left among the working class will collapse. I
just hope I live to see it and will be in a position to actually help the
process along. 

Sharon

> From: Harald Beyer-Arnesen <haraldba-AT-online.no>
> Reply-To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 14:21:13 +0200
> To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> Subject: AUT: Re: Getting back to Negri and Empire
> 
> What the
> future
> will bring remains to be seen. But this impotence to a large extent  follows
> from the opposition to the present conditions not being posed in class
> terms,  and linked to this, the almost exclusive focus on large
> corporations,
> and something as irrelevant as blocking this or that summit, and at last,
> the continued influence of leninism through a rejection of constructive
> organising and (collective) educational  efforts on a class basis.



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