From: "Nate Holdren" <nateholdren-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Perplexing Ilan
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 10:07:21 -0500


Carrol-
Thanks for the marx quote, I appreciate it. Maybe  "blatant silliness" is a 
little harsh. How about "untenable idea" or even "confusion"?
The point made below was actually pretty close to the point I was trying to 
get across in responding to Ilan.
That said, though, I think it's fairly obvious that some struggles by 
working class people to secure themselves a better life right now do in fact 
set the revolution further back, that is, struggles in which one section of 
the working class tries to enhance its own position at the expense of other 
sections (like anti-immigrant sentiments or like workers who support racist 
policies and practices which among other things serve to inflate their own 
wages).
I don't think this is a particularly controversial point, that some things 
that some working class people fight for may actually be 
counter-revolutionary. This is the point I take Ilan to have been making. I 
suspect though that I think counter-revolutionary struggles are more rare 
than Ilan does.
cheers
Nate

>From: Carrol Cox <cbcox-AT-ilstu.edu>
>Reply-To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: Re: AUT: Perplexing Ilan
>Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2002 21:17:14 -0600
>
>
>
>Nate Holdren wrote:
> >
> > Hi Ilan,
> > I agree with your comment below that "Achievements of struggles at the
> > present are worth the efforts ONLY if they do not contradict the long 
>term
> > struggle for the libertarian communist revolution."
>
>Marx crushed this sort of blatant nonsense in June of 1865. He was
>arguing against an earlier expression of the childishness of setting
>struggles for a better life now against the aims of revolution:
>
>*********
>  If the proportion of these two elements of capital was originally one
>to one, it will, in the progress of industry, become five to one, and so
>forth. If of a total capital of 600, 300 is laid out in instruments, raw
>materials, and so forth, and 300 in wages, the total capital wants only
>to be doubled to create a demand for 600 working men instead of for 300.
>But if of a capital of 600, 500 is laid out in machinery, materials, and
>so forth and 100 only in wages, the same capital must increase from 600
>to 3,600 in order to create a demand for 600 workmen instead of 300. In
>the progress of industry the demand for labour keeps, therefore, no pace
>with the accumulation of capital. It will still increase, but increase
>in a constantly diminishing ratio as compared with the increase of
>capital.
>
>  These few hints will suffice to show that the very development of
>modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favour of the
>capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the general
>tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the
>average standard of wages, or to push the value of labour more or less
>to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of things in this system,
>is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance
>against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at
>making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary
>improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of
>broken wretches past salvation. I think I have shown that their
>struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the
>whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising
>wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour, and
>that the necessity of debating their price with the capitalist is
>inherent to their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities.
>By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they
>would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger
>movement.
>
>  At the same time, and quite apart form the general servitude involved
>in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to
>themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought
>not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the
>causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement,
>but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not
>curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed
>in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the
>never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They
>ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them,
>the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and
>the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society.
>Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's
>work!" they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary
>watchword, "Abolition of the wages system!"****
>
>Speech by Marx to the First International Working Men's Association,
>June 1865
>
>                                       Value, Price and Profit
>
>Written: between end of May and June 27, 1865;
>First published: 1898;
>Edited: by Eleanor Marx Aveling;
>
>(Also often published under the title, Wages, Price and Profit. The
>quotation is from the final chapter.)
>
>
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