Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 22:23:40 +0100
From: m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se (Hugh Rodwell)
Subject: Re: the state redux & socialism


Adam writes:

>A capitalist state, liberal democratic or not, defends the right of the
>capitalist to make profits by taking away our right to strike, by busing
>in scabs etc etc.

Well, actually the profits are made in the normal course of everyday
wage-slavery. The better the bourgeois-democratic charade functions, with
its collective bargaining, token strikes etc (in a word its
bourgeois-democratic economism), the safer the profits and the more secure
the system. The attempt to remove such bourgeois-democratic rights (the
equality of labour to negotiate an employment contract as it thinks fit by
way of an organization of its choice) is a clear symptom of the decaying
political legitimacy of bourgeois rule and its inability to cope with its
crisis by the "normal" means of peaceful exploitation.

What Adam emphasizes is the last resort (or next-to-last resort) function
of the executive arm of the state -- putting a stop to unrest that has
broken out.

The dream of the bourgeoisie is to prevent unrest from arising and to have
a workforce that not only keeps within the bounds of capitalist
exploitation -- extraction of surplus value -- but does it willingly and as
far as possible exploits itself.

As we've seen in earlier discussions, exploitation of foreign workers both
materially and morally (via racism etc) can provide a surplus which
capitalists use to head off some of the pressure of their domestic
workforce. But even in the best of times for the imperialists, the state
has still been violently active in crushing opposition to the capitalist
system and the regime currently in charge -- the foreign bloodiness of the
Korean war was accompanied by McCarthyism, the Vietnam war was accompanied
by the killings at Kent State and mass repression of people protesting
against the war.

I reacted to Adam's statement because it narrowed down the repressive role
of the state in two ways. First it half-implied that profits wouldn't be
made if we were allowed to strike, and this is wrong, and second, it played
down the scale of the social repression continuously deployed by the state
to prevent and discourage the emergence of anti-capitalist alternatives.

I don't think this is nitpicking.

Cheers,

Hugh




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