From: Maoist Internationalist Movement <mim3-AT-blythe.org>
Subject: MIM Repost: Two workers, different property
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 1996 20:09:59 -0400 (EDT)



>From owner-marxism  Fri Sep 15 21:41:45 1995
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 1995 17:41:45 -0400 (EDT)
From: Maoist Internationalist Movement <mim3-AT-nyxfer.blythe.org>
Subject: Re: MIM



On Wed, 13 Sep 1995, jones/bhandari wrote:

> From Pat for MIM:
> 
> >Last I checked, the difference in average home equity of white
> >and Black people exceeded $44,000. Those figures are published
> >in the Statistical Abstract of the United States. Home equity
> >is another word for property--a kind of property that still
> >identifies Euro-Amerikans as settlers. Home ownership remains
> >a key avenue of parasitism that Blacks have yet to catch up in.
> 
> 1. Yes, but what percentage of the peckerwoods, honkies and settlers
> actually own homes?  

MIM replies:

		1980	1990
White		67.8%	68.2%
Black		44.4%	43.4%
Native		53.4%	53.8%
Asian		52.5%	52.2%
Hispanic	43.4%	42.4%
Other		36.9%	36.1%

Table No. 1216, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1994

The figures are the percentage of households in which the household
occupies a unit that the household owns. It doesn't mean everyone
is done paying off the mortgage, just at least on the way.

Even if two workers have the same job, and own a house,
if one is no where on the mortgage yet, and the other has
$100,000 in equity, there is a big difference.

The second worker can expect dividends or interest from investments
using the equity as collateral. That is of importance to class.
> 
> 2. why even keep the statistics in terms of race in the first place?  why
> not determine home ownership in terms of some other criterion, e.g.,
> college education, income, job category? We might surely find that lack of
> home ownership is correlated with low educational levels, low income and
> oppressive work conditions.  

MIM replies: There is more difference between Blacks and Euro-Amerikans
than say  Euro-descended Canadians and English. We all want to read about 
the conditions of the English, Canadian, German etc. working classes 
individually don't we?

 > 
> Are you saying that 'race' explains why people don't own homes? Indeed

MIM replies: Actually we think national oppression is more important than
racism and much national oppression gets mistaken for
racism.

Whatever causes the difference, there is a lower percentage of 
labor aristocracy in the internal colonies. The percentage is even lower
in the Third World.

> 3. Moreover, where is the argument that any worker who does own a home, no
> matter its value and no matter her perhaps declining capacity to maintain
> the mortgage payments, cannot be revolutionary? I may well be predisposed
> to accept this argument if made, but I note its absence in the post. 

MIM replies: We have already pointed out that settlers--workers with
real estate, especially that recently seized--are more reactionary.

No class argument ever applies to every individual in the way
you suggest. That's why
enlightened labor aristocracy and petty-bourgeoisie individuals work
with MIM and Engels was a son of a capitalist and Mao was a peasant.
For many this justifies an idealist abandonment of class analysis.

> 
> 4. Also:  your use of the Census shows a very anti-Marxian understanding of
> class.  Class for Marx is determined by the relation to the means of
> production.  Income differences are possible among those in the same

MIM replies: Did we mention income differences? However, such
differences are relevant when they are large enough to distinguish
exploited from non-exploited workers.

Opportunists have defined proletariat as anyone who draws a salary.
However Lee Iacocca drew a salary, at first it was $1 and then
more. If your salary is large enough to allow you to buy the means of 
production and live off their return, you are bourgeois.
 
Anyway, home equity is property, not income. It is one of the 
easiest means by which settlers tap into social capital and the
appropriation of Third World labor.

> objective position vis-a-vis the capitalist class.  This same objective
> powerlessness among seemingly differentiated workers is what cyclical
> crises tend to bring out for the vast majority of workers--especially now,
> as Mattick predicted, Keynesian management is coming to its limits.  But it
> does not seem that a great crisis will drum dialectics into the head of
> MIM.  MIM indeed poses a danger to the development of a class conscious
> movement against American capitalism, for which ill-defined nationalist
> movements among minorities will be no substitute. Anti-racism,as well as

MIM replies: The Black Panthers, Young Lords, organized First Nations etc.
were not ill-defined just because they excluded whites.
Huey Newton said his goals were multinational communism in 
the Maoist stage of his party before it was smashed.
He only didn't want to get too far ahead of the masses by
including whites in the party. And he NEVER  opposed organizational
alliances with whites out of absolute principle and in fact had several.


> feminism, remain central to the development of a class-conscious movement. 
>    
>   
> 5. what are the trends for home ownership in this country? Are young adults
> as a whole all moving into homes, the equity of which will have to serve as
> a compensation for a social security system heading towards collapse? 

MIM replies: Yes this is the talk now. You can't take a house with you
when you die, so it's not a front-burner concern while some are starving.
If you look into this more closely, you will further prove our point,
because worker pension-funds own substantial assets in 
imperialist countries.

Pat for MIM





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>From owner-marxism  Sat Sep 16 16:50:04 1995
Date: Sat, 16 Sep 1995 12:50:04 -0400 (EDT)
From: Maoist Internationalist Movement <mim3-AT-nyxfer.blythe.org>
Subject: Re: homeownership



On Sat, 16 Sep 1995, Doug Henwood wrote:
> 
> MIM seems to be taking a lot of ideology at face value - i.e., the
> embourgeoising nature of homeownership. It what Marxian sense is a "home" a
> capital asset? It throws off no income, and may not even appreciate
> significantly in value. What homeowner could liquidate his or her asset and
> turn it into a real capital asset, one that generates some M'? People
> either live in their owned crib, or if they sell it, immediately sink the
> proceeds into another.
> 
> Doug Henwood
> Left Business Observer

MIM replies: Thank you Doug. This post shows how struggle leads to
advance, because I forgot to raise what you did so crisply.
I left out appreciation/speculation. Have you noticed what has
happened in California? Ordinary people who bought houses in 
California a generation ago, many are now millionaires or well
on their way. When you think about how much income $150,000 in 
assets generates, you can see the potential.

Now just because a capitalist sells an investment and
immediately proceeds to sink the money into another investment
doesn't mean there was no M', does it Doug? It would be
vulgar Marxism to say there is only M' when the capitalist
diverts some of the M' to other forms consumption.

The same goes for homeowners. Ordinary Californians can now
sell their homes and choose to live elsewhere and take in
a huge M'-M gain. Only by defining it as necessary for
Californians to live in their luxury estates does it become
possible to avoid that, which is why MIM focusses in 
on what is truly necessary to reproduce the white worker?

How many Guatemalan workers or peasants can just sit in their
houses and walk away with a $100,000 or $500,000 gain?
People from California and other places with real estate
speculation, like the coasts of Florida, know what I am talking
about from experience. I challenge Doug to back up what
he is saying with numbers. Show us that the average settler
gains nothing from real estate speculation.

Pat for MIM



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>From owner-marxism  Mon Sep 18 06:44:47 1995
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 1995 02:44:47 -0400 (EDT)
From: Maoist Internationalist Movement <mim3-AT-nyxfer.blythe.org>
Subject: Re: homeownership and Black Panthers



On Sun, 17 Sep 1995, jones/bhandari wrote:
> 
> MIM is aiding in the development of race consciousness, as is the US Census
> Bureau, by repeating statistics kept in race.  And what are the
> implications of race consciousness in terms of the goal of classless
> society? (MIM may way want to check out Yehudi Webster's Racialization in
> America. St Martin's Press, 1992).  

MIM replies: As Mao said, the nationalism of the oppressed nations
is applied internationalism. Internationalism cannot now mean that
all peoples give up their national interests equally, anymore than
socialism can mean all peoples give up their property equally.

> 
> You never answered my question of what you have found salient about the
> relationship between 'race' (anyways, what is the objective criterion to
> determine one's membership in a 'race') and homeownership? Why not between
> income and homeownership? Income can obviously be determined objectively.
> Can 'race'?   

MIM replies: This thread has gone far afield. If you trace it back,
you will see that we responded to the false and dangerous notion that
just because people from two nations share the same job they are from
the same class. (In actuality, the notion that whites and oppressed
nationalities are in the same job is a myth to begin with.) We 
pointed to differences in expectations for
property ownership, upward mobility and children's upward mobility.
Others ask us about the secondary aspects of the relations of production
like income, and surely that difference also exists. At the same time,
we noted that our critics usually don't mind talking about separate
Canadian, English and what they call "U.S." working classes, when
in fact the differences amongst those classes is smaller than those
between Black and white, Latino and white, First Nation and white
and Asian-descended and white working classes. The proportion of 
unproductive laborers is a key difference amongst working classes
internationally. Our critics are trying to obscure this in 
deference to borders the imperialists created.

In the 1960s, the Black proletariat acted as a class for itself,
with Black Panther leadership. The same cannot be said of white workers,
who could not stomach a conflict with the state, because of their
overall interests as a labor aristocracy. That quote from E.P. Thompson
is perfectly relevant here. The "it" in question is the industrial
workforce where people from all nations are supposedly all the same,
when in fact, different nations' workers show different levels of 
consciousness and carry different historical burdens, and when in 
fact, the proportion of the workers' peers in unproductive labor
differs radically from nation to nation.

Some will read that Thompson quote as a justification for saying
everyone is a worker no matter how reactionary and can
be talked into socialism or that
everyone is proletarian no matter actual material differences. Others 
will see
it as justifying existential doubt in an idealist way. We are happy
to point to production relations too though and believe the Thompson
quote applies as much or more against our opponents as it does against
us. The relationship that must be grasped is the alliance between the
labor aristocracy and imperialism as against the exploited and super-
exploited. Such thinking requires going beyond official government
borders.
> 
> 
> MIM deduces the existence of the labor aristocracy from the following:  
> 
> > The fact that more than half the white work force can
> >sit around in office work, shuffle paper and work tepidly toward
> >technical and scientific progress is all an indication that they
> >can survive on the necessities of life provided by Third World
> >proletarians repressed by U.S.-backed military regimes.
> 
> As I have already pointed out, MIM's glorification of the labor productive
> of durable-vendible commodities (which shows their use of the Smithean
> criterion of productive labor)is disingenuous.  MIM does not champion
> productive labor, however defined, but the national bourgeoisie, which they
> conflate with workers in the tradition of Friedrich List and....  

MIM replies: Only for those who cannot follow this, I will say that
the above is a polemic but not a literal truth. Mao was for proletarian
leadership of the peasantry and for that alliance's corralling of the
wannabe sector of the national bourgeoisie that felt cut out of the
action by imperialism. That sector of the national bourgeoisie which
in fact benefitted from its alliance with imperialism, usually through
its role as puppet in the state, Mao called "comprador" enemy.

Our critic here needs to be asked a common question: "We know what
you are against. What are you FOR?" Marxism-Leninism in the traditions of
Stalin and Mao has done more to mobilize productive laborers than
any other ideology this century. It is only idealism to say that
it didn't do enough. The point is to show something that worked better
in practice, but that will be impossible for our critic to do.
The only possible recourse is for the idealist enterprise of comparing
Maoist practice with ideals that our critic holds, instead of comparing
two practices.

As for our strategy of allying with a  national bourgeoisie at times,
or our strategy of allying with one faction of imperialists against another
sometimes, our critic opposes us. By 1995 we can say that this is 
a perverse desire to see the proletariat on the losing side of 
strategic battles--all for the benefit of our nihilist-idealist-purist
critics' ideals as stated somewhere in a poetry collection.
> 
> That is, they don't turn away from the US because there is no substantial
> productive labor and then embrace it where they find it. Instead, they bow
> down to 'oppressed' national bourgeoisie (which, as competitive and
> technically backward capitals,  undoubtedly don't get their 'fair' share of
> surplus value, something which seems to have made MIM enough indignant
> enough to accuse me of disregard for the people of the third world).  
> 
> On to their next point (which I do not reproduce), MIM does not understand
> the basic concept of extra surplus value.  Of course innovators gain extra
> surplus value, and it is possible that workers for those innovative
> capitals may gain from it, though--as the conditions of production are
> continually revolutionized--most of that surplus value will have to be
> accumulated if the capital is to prolong its life.  But the redistribution

MIM replies: There is a lot of surplus-value to be realized that
the capitalist risks losing when superexploiting labor. There is 
plenty of space for our white-collar workers in that stage of 
economic life alone. The ramifications of borders, militaries
and unfree wage-labor must be accounted for and not assumed away
in a fairy-tale of Third World workers gaining the price of their
reproduction, as if it were the same as the reproduction of 
parasites in the imperialist countries.

> of value which makes possible the gain of extra surplus value for the
> innovator works on both a national and international level. So there is no
> reason to suppose that value is only redistributed on an an international
> scale.   

MIM replies: Like your remarks about the Black Panthers, what is
missing from your discussion of home ownership and discrimination and
now what is missing in the above--we see crypto-chauvinism. Why don't
you just spell out what you are saying about Blacks and upward
mobility, their children's future, homeownership and why Sri Lankan
wages have been recorded at 4% of U.S. wages in the industrial sector.

And for any Peruvian, Filipino, Kampuchean, ex-Black Panther
or white youth reading
this, I hope you can see that the problem of the imperialist country 
"left" is all partially related to this one question. It's no mistake
all the hostility toward Third World revolution coinciding with 
the abandonment of the early COMINTERN's definition of productive labor.

> > This is more idealism. First they blame
> >the Black Panther Party's relative lack of support from white workers
> >as the Black Panther's fault instead of the labor aristocracy's fault.
> >Notice which of us has a materialist theory that explains that fact.
> 
> MIM, I did not blame the BPP for anything (at least not in my posts, though
> to forgo a critical examination of it is ridiculous).  I only noted that
> mass-based class action is necessary if a lot people are not to going to
> end up dead.  You don't think this is possible becauseo somethng which you
> call the political economy of the white working class, unable to see its
> relationship to Keynesian debt-financing and its limits in real life, as
> now manifest.  
>  
> 
> Rakesh Bhandari 

MIM replies: We said nothing about imperialism's being able
to maintain this forever. We do not think revolution is tomorrow in the
imperialist countries and we are trying to wean people away from
the 1929 political economy of that position. To take advantage
of the next upsurge and crisis, we need to know who to mobilize and
whose demands will dialectically paralyze us or turn against us. Did 
someone say unintended consequences?

We see that Jerry and some others are questioning if the
proletariat should still be defined as "nothing to lose but its chains."
That's fine. We are sticking to our tradition, because food, shelter,
clothing and political repression and war connected to those
haven't been taken care of yet. We wish others well and hope they
do discover something new, though we doubt it given the 
decadence of imperialism. 

Others opposing our "orthodoxy" should cease trying to smuggle
unproductive labor into the proletariat and openly take up
the post-modernist project. Catharine MacKinnon is someone we
find quite useful. She's "post-Marxist." We don't get terribly
angry with people who don't claim our tradition. We only get
upset with those confusing things when they claim Lenin, Stalin or
Mao. On a list like this one, the chances are higher than elsewhere
of someone's laying a confused claim to Lenin,
thus our concern.

Pat for MIM


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