Date: Sat, 14 Sep 1996 13:18:54 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: the state (fwd)




---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 1996 21:42:59 +0000
From: neil chertcoff <nchertco-AT-lausd.k12.ca.us>
To: marxism2 <marxism2-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu>
Cc: marxism-list <marxism-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu>
Subject: the state

dear friends, 

I think Justin S's arguments for the eternal political state are much hung up 
in the current state of the general consciousness of the 'middle class'
and hence cannot see any real dialectic at work, the social rebellion 
simmering underneath, and future rises of social class combat with NEw 
organizations that can pave the way for revolutionary transition , 
overthrowing the bourgeois production relations , paving the way for a worker
controlled society, with socialized instruments of wealth production with 
production for use, not sale and profit.

Yes, it will take a transition period to go over to full communism. In this
 transition, we will get rid of waged labor, eventually all money, commodity 
exchange and production and most all other forms of exploitation of person by 
person.

As there will no longer be the MATERIAL BASIS for exploitation, we can also 
more easily combat and eradicate the other horrific diseases of modern class 
society , racism, sexism, ecocide, elitism, thuggism, etc, in the transition.

The real key is the REVOLUTIONARY INSTITUTIONAL POWER of massive workers 
councils and the social mass assemblies thet Justin S. completely 
underestimates! This will mean real inexpensive government and then
finally only societal  administration of and by the useful producers , not 
this political government controlled by capitalist parasites (a la Democrats 
and Republicans!) with workers in massed councils will, from the bottom up 
and with all deputies subject to instant recall, debate, discuss, account 
for, delegate production  responsibility and vote in the social planning and 
goals from the bottom up.

There will be no more of Justin S. like political boundries, but only mainly 
industrial ones with local industry councils,  connected to regional and 
natinal ones , eventually to internationalist councilist  ones with NO 
borders , there will be en-masse industrial representation , dicussions, 
accounting for materials and plant technology --no law of value operates,
humanity lays down the plans for humanities sake.

The communist planning will not be Justin's human nature bureaucrat worship 
Nightmare on Elm Street. There will also be regular community assemblies 
having direct ties to the councils so they can deal seriously with remaining 
 tertiary social problems.

The revolutionary institutions with the instant recall and mass free media 
discussion (thats real peoples open court mass debates and not Dan Rather,
Peter Jennings, and Cokie Robert's bullshit!) will go quite far to insure 
that no new parasitic ruling clique will take power and abuse power setting 
up state capitalism as happened in the USSR, etc.and then lord it over the 
working people.

No Justin, we don't have all the answers , no should we, or could we, and so 
even the wise Marx and Engels in their earlier epoch intentionally only 
sketched skeletal plans of what a communist society would look like and 
function. Edward Bellamy of "Looking Backwards" and later other groups a la 
Technocracy provided a more complete design of what a classless and stateless 
society might look like.

But in this epoch, this noble goal, if connected by practice to the real life 
and death struggles of oppressed and exploited humanity against the 
exploiters and their State Bureacracy, with NEW groups and movements from 
below, the programmatic goals of workers communism become actuated powerful 
forms of theory, ideology, and mass information that grip the masses in 
motion providing the pivot to a new world of communist freedom and the end of 
the world of parasites scheming and lying in sham bourgeois democracy , the 
trash of hacks like Frances Fukuyama, Lester Thurow, Paul Ehrlich, and Robert 
Reich, etc.

Ordinary people become the greats  and change themselves as their 
own organized actions change history and society in the red heat of class 
and social combat.

Justin S's wooden static, and eternal "human nature" conceptions are burst 
asunder, the actuated movements of wage slaves can possibly grab the high 
ground in the next waves of mass struggles against capital , its 
impoverishment amidst plenty, and its nationalist and imperialist 
bloodletting.

NC




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