Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 18:13:35 +0100
From: hariette-AT-easynet.co.uk (hariette spierings)
Subject: Re: MIM Repost: Two workers, different property


>At 8:09 PM 7/25/96, Maoist Internationalist Movement wrote:
>
>>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.
>
>Collateral for what? Loans? Then the investment has to yield a higher rate
>of return than that on a home equity line of credit. Such opportunities
>rarely abound for an ordinary Joe or Jane (or Jose or Jana). The best you
>can say about workers who own their own abodes is that they don't have to
>pay rent or mortgage, and don't have to worry about eviction or
>repossession. Your fantasy that this makes them into petty capitalists is
>pure nonsense.
>
>Since you claim to be Marxists - you do claim to be Marxists, right? - you
>should be aware that class is defined in relation to ownership of the means
>of production. A house may be considered a means of reproduction of the
>working clas, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how an owner-occupied
>house produces surplus value.
>
>>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.
>
>Please explain the mechanism behind this assertion, which appears quite
>demented on the surface.
>
>>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.
>
>The attribution of the ownership of pension funds to workers is a staple of
>bourgeois propaganda, but I'm surprised to see the hyperrevolutionaries at
>MIM making the same assertion. I think of them more as a form of secondary
>exploitation, with "portfolio managers" running the pools of workers'
>capital along orthodox financial guidelines, and voting the shares in
>rentier, rather than worker, interest. From the workers' point of view,
>pension funds are merely a form of deferred wages, under the control of
>financiers during the workers' working lives. Increasingly, with the shift
>away from defined benefit and to 401(k) and defined contribution plans, the
>workers are bearing more of the market risk. Management fees, however, will
>continue through bear markets and bull.
>
>Doug
>


In this, Doug's view is certainly on the side of Marxism, and Maoism IS
ORTHODOX Marxism, hence my absolute disagreement with MIM "economics", and
of course, politics too.  Is in that sense that I have always streessed that
MIM's Maoism is totally unrelated to that of the PCP.  

Adolfo



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