From: "chris wright" <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net>
Subject: Re: AUT: Fwd: It's official: struggle is healthy
Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2003 12:54:55 -0600


Hi Richard,


> >I have always thought it was no
> > accident that the 90 yearl old CP types I knew were active and
> vigorous in
> > ways that no other older folks I knew were.
>
> They were probably the ones who had really found their religion, at a
> time when the captial-C Communist religion actually had some power over
> people.  But even those types are extremely rare.  Most people drop out
> of activism a lot younger than 90...

This is simply mean.  It also happens to include a lot of old activists I
know who were/are 'labor movement' or civil rights movement folks.  They
have a tremendous energy and vitality connected with struggle.  No, getting
tear gassed and such is not healthy, but you guys all have this very Charles
Bronson/Steven Segal idea of being in the struggle.  Sure, that's a part of
it, but the important stuff is really not the violent clashes with cops.
Its the sense of solidarity, community, of creating a different way to live
because you are living it and trying to share it with other people.  Stop
thinking only in terms of class struggle as 'fighting'.  Its a bad and wrong
habit that turns people away.

As for being young, if being a communist doesn't keep you feeling young,
then you're doing something wrong or you have the wrong communism.  For all
the crap I have put up with, including haveing my phone bugged, followed by
goons in black Ford sedans, hassled by reactionaries who want a fist fight,
hit by cops, etc. all of it is minor compared to what I get out of it and it
is certainly no worse than my friends who are not communists have faced,
since most of them have done serious jail time, been stabbed and/or shot,
had serious addictions, get followed by the cops all the time just for
having the wrong skin color, can't walk through a store without being
followed by store security, get pulled over in rich suburbs for driving an
old beater car, etc.  What you're talking about, Richard, is kinda what most
of my friends deal with everyday.  And they could deal with it better, IMO,
if they were in a mass struggle rather than feeling isolated and under siege
with no hope for the future or confidence in anything but themselves and
maybe, maybe, some family and friends.
>
> >But we need to
> > make it plain that it is good for your health because capital is
> unhealthy
> > at every level and that the struggle against capital is a struggle to
> live
> > humanly.
>
> That would be a better point to make...if only that fluffy article had
> made it.

Then we should.  The article can be used, and why not?  Let's use it to make
our own point.

> I think the main problem with the idea of Yuppies getting involved in
> protest en masse to feel better about themselves...is that this
> involvement is probably going to be superficial and short-lived. *Many*
> young people among the more economically privileged get involved in this
> stuff because it feels good for them to rebel at that moment in their
> lives...and then when it gets too heavy for them and/or they simply end
> up following the patterns that a lot of the bourgeois follow as they get
> older (and/or they eventually somehow see their own privilege being
> threatened)...they drop out en masse and we end up studying the history
> of another short-lived youth movement.

The problem with this is assuming that most people period are activists for
the long haul.  That is never, and in this society never will be, the case.
Most people get active for a certain period around concrete struggles and
they often emerge and re-emerge as struggles happen around them.  The
abolition of capital will not, btw, make everyone an 'activist'.  It will
mean that everyone's normal activity will be the activity of self-regulation
and self-creation.  The activist is an aberration, an unfortunate necessity.

And I again disagree that we can assume that 'yuppies' will only get
involved to feel better about themselves.  Some will get involved for other
reasons.  I expect that actual revolution will involve a layer of the
yuppies also choosing a new life because the vacuity and stupidity and
misery of their own is plain enough now.

But will they be the backbone or the core of communists or of the
proletariat?  Nope.  And I never said it either.  But if yuppies start
coming to anti-war protests and getting involved in stuff in their
neighborhoods and suburbs and donating money and resources to anti-war
groups or strike funds, I'm not gonnna piss that they might not hang around
that long.  That is purist foolishness.  And with them like with anyone
else, their seriousness and commitment as an activist is by no means
guaranteed by their social position.

Wow, there is a lot with this I am thinking.  Let's see: Yes, I agree that
workers tend to have nowhere to go relatively speaking, although in the
1950's and 60's that was not so true.  Militant workers often became union
leaders or got bought into management.  Watch the Richard Pryor movie Blue
Collar.  Its good on that and not a few people went that way.  But its often
true, it requires less outside of one's daily life to be a worker communist
and it is easier to be reminded everyday why you are a communist, but even
so, I think this is too crude.

> > The proletariat is not an already existing class, but a class which will
> be formed out of struggle.
>
> I don't want to get into one of those abstract Aut-Op-Sy discussions
> about class composition right now (mainly because it's getting late in
> the day and I have to get back to my seemingly futile efforts to find a
> job)...  But I think privilege and economic and social status, power and
> autonomy *do* have at least something to do with whether people can
> actually be part of the "proletariat" that supposedly will be formed in
> the class struggle.

Too late, you're already there.  I never said that those things don't have
anything to do with who will become a part of the proletariat as a class
for-itself, so to speak.  They have a lot, but they are expressions of being
on one side of the other of the capital-labor relation.  But you can't skip
the move from the capital-labor relation to actual classes.  In the
capital-labor relation labor exists in two forms: as labor for capital and
as labor against capital, simultaneously usually.  When the labor for
capital side is dominant, we are not a class, but generally a series of
interest groups, fractions, hierarchies, etc.  We are workers, but by no
means a class except for capital: we are a class of differantiated labor
power.  But the proletariat will be the totality of people organizing
against capital for its abolition, including as labor for capital, and that
will include people from every level of society.

Which brings us to Harald...
"Just cannot help be satirical here. From the above we can
conclude that capitalism does not exist but through struggle
it can be formed and brought into existence together with
the proletariat, without which capitalism cannot exist.

I think I give up every struggle here and now.
You get my point, Chris?"

I get your point Harald, but you don't obviously get mine.  Sure, we can
talk about workers and if you want to get into the whole sterile debate over
who is and is not a worker again, feel free.  I may not quite have it yet,
but I am damn sure that there is a better way to think about class.  And it
starts with refusing to act as if there was an already-existing working
class which we know in advance and whose parameters are definable.  There
are certainly workers.  And in strikes and struggles against capital in
specific ways, I am all for talking about it being a working class struggle
because the struggle is what makes it working class or not, but the
formation of the workers as a class, as something other than 'for capital',
as variable capital, is another matter.  For all that workers are constantly
in struggle with capital and that is the precondition of accumulation, of
surplus value production itself, it is a long way from resistance to
collective struggle and recomposition as a revolutionary class.  In that
sense, the working class only appears qua class for itself, as a class
subject, in its struggle against capital as a totality.  We cannot take the
existence of the working class as a given.  Otherwise end up with the
nonsense of the working class 'disappearing.'  Or worse, we have this
sometimes active, sometimes inert class which really only needs to be
educated and/or kicked in the ass by the revolutionaries.

The working class has only ever cohered as a class in and through its
struggle against capital and as capital (variable capital.)  This is a long
conversation about class and history, so I'll only say a tiny bit.  Capital
was not formed through a pre-existing working class.  It was formed through
slavery and the creation of a working class.  The relation of predicate and
subject in the historical process is not fixed.  What was a precondition can
become an outcome and vice versa.  That argument is best had over beer and
some historical discussions.  Your supposed caricature of me is more correct
than you understand but you are off a little bit and this leads to your
sarcasm missing its mark.  It should say, "Capital did not exist, but
through struggle to transform the nature of accumulation it began to form
and come into existence through the creation of a proletariat, without which
capital, as the dominant social relation, cannot exist."

Cheers,
Chris

ps 351 days unemployed and counting.  Moving to Baltimore, MD this summer
because it is cheaper for us to buy a house in Baltimore with me unemployed
than to pay rent in a working class neighborhood in Chicago with me
unemployed.  I do (did) computers and now I collect unemployment and play
with my son and write way too much on aut-op-sy, to everyone else's
annoyance.  But while I miss the money, I don't miss the work.




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