Date: Mon, 19 Dec 94 21:02 CST
Subject: Rally Comrades 12/94 (E-Edition)
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December, 1994 Electronic Edition Vol. 13, No. 7
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INDEX TO Volume 13, Number 7
1. THE HIGH TECH REVOLUTION: WHO WILL REAP THE BENEFITS?
2. REVOLUTIONARY PRESS MUST GO ON THE OFFENSIVE
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1. THE HIGH TECH REVOLUTION: WHO WILL REAP THE BENEFITS?
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By the High Tech Committee of the National Organizing Committee
The ability to design, produce and move goods is undergoing
radical change.
Computers and robotics, once limited to calculation and
communications, are now displacing human labor in all sectors of
production.
Ford Motor Co. recently opened a new transmission factory near
Detroit, employing 200 people; 10 years ago, it would have
employed 4,000.
In the Netherlands, automated machinery unloads cargo ships
without any human labor. In Kalamazoo, Michigan, one plant using
genetically engineered bacteria produces enough insulin for the
entire United States; it replaces dozens of slaughterhouses where
workers once isolated insulin from steer and pig organs. Around
the world, workers are being evicted from factories and docks and
farms. The next stop: the homeless shelter, prison, or the global
trek in search of work.
The technological revolution is the driving force in this terminal
stage of capitalism, yet it holds the promise of a leap in the
standard of living for all. We need to understand both: its role
in an economy organized around private gain and its potential role
in an economy organized around meeting social needs.
Last January, scholars, labor leaders, community leaders and
leaders of the unemployed gathered for a conference at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Technology and
Employment Conference grew out of the contradiction of joblessness
growing among workers in the "booming" high-technology sector.
The presence of people directly hurt by the economic upheaval was
critical in exposing the bankrupt ideas of the corporate policy
gurus.
The electronic revolution developed in the 1930s from the
intersection of the communications industry and the effort to
develop fast calculators for business. During World War II and the
Cold War, huge investments in military electronics gave birth to
the modern computer hardware industry.
In the 1960s, the power of computers began to be applied directly
to production processes. Now the most sophisticated computation,
automation and robotics technology is used to produce such mundane
items as pencils, razors and juice boxes. Electronics has also
made possible such new technologies as bio-engineering, digital
telecommunications, and "smart" materials.
As a result, high technology itself is now a key sector of the
economy. More U.S. workers are employed in electronics than in
automobile production. Much of the employment growth in
electronics and related industries over the past three decades
came at the expense of traditional industries as companies
replaced workers with electronics-based machinery.
Will the expansion of high-tech industries create new jobs to
replace those lost in core manufacturing? It hasn't so far. Even
including the electronics and computer industries, manufacturing
employment fell by 859,000 jobs between 1980 and 1989. Despite the
growth in computer and data processing services, only about half
the manufacturing jobs lost were replaced by high-tech jobs. And
no one should get their hopes up. The MIT conference made clear
that the electronics industry itself is subject to the same forces
affecting other industries -- cuts in labor costs through "smarter
technology" and the replacement of computer workers with
computers.
Amid exponential growth in computer and electronic technologies,
almost every major high-tech employer -- IBM, Digital Equipment,
Kodak, NYNEX, Xerox, to name a few -- has cut thousands of
employees. According to the American Electronics Association,
"Domestic employment in the U.S. electronics industry fell for the
fourth consecutive year in 1992. ... Since August 1989, our
industry has lost 309,000 jobs."
In the 1960s, production of transistors was a tedious process
involving the manual soldering of thousands of connections. In a
modern silicon chip, a million devices are squeezed onto a surface
smaller than a fingernail -- using fully automated production
processes.
As the head of Radius, a manufacturer of computer equipment, told
the San Francisco Examiner, "We turn out [custom computer chips]
with four engineers and a giant computer. That used to get done
with 100 engineers. That's 96 engineers you don't need anymore."
In one workshop at the MIT conference, a representative from the
Communications Workers of America analyzed the impact of
telecommunications changes on that industry's workers. Internal
documents reveal that the phone companies' long-term strategy has
been "end-to-end automation": From the time an order is placed
until it is in place, the phone company need take no human action.
"This is not just mechanizing; it's total job elimination."
As Noam Chomsky told conference attendees, "The capitalist
oligarchy operates completely outside any democratic structures,
and their plans don't include the rest of us."
President Clinton claims the unemployed need new skills. But even
the most skilled are losing their jobs. According to the Institute
of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, unemployment among
electronic engineers is the highest in over 25 years, and some
200,000 engineers dropped from U.S. employment rolls between 1991
and 1993. Even college-educated youths find their opportunities
shrinking; Labor Secretary Robert Reich's calls for "retraining"
are revealed as empty rhetoric.
With robots replacing workers, the corporate class no longer needs
an educated work force. Thus it is methodically pushing to
disinvest in public education. Hardest hit are African Americans
and Latinos, who have been systematically excluded from education
and from skilled jobs in the past. Youth also are hard hit, with
50 percent unemployment in many areas of the country. For a vast
section of America's youth, the capitalist system offers no
future.
Former IBM and Digital Equipment engineers showing up at the
unemployment office are finding the social safety net of 20 years
ago being yanked away. Commodity production without human labor is
leading to the emergence of a new class of people. Since the
capitalists do not need this new class for production, they are
unwilling to pay taxes needed to support them -- hence the cuts in
education and in welfare programs like General Assistance, Aid to
Families with Dependent Children and Supplemental Security Income.
The connection between technological change and welfare cuts is
clearest in Michigan. As General Baker told the MIT conference,
General Assistance was begun in Michigan in 1937 to provide income
to autoworkers while factories were closed for model changeovers.
In 1940, it took six months to implement a model changeover;
today, as the 1995 cars come down the line, the 1996 cars are
right behind them. Michigan ended General Assistance in 1991.
As welfare programs are eliminated, the government rapidly builds
prisons and police networks to deal with the growing survival
movement.
The Industrial Revolution harnessed steam power to human muscles,
vastly increasing productive power. The Electronic Revolution
transforms the accumulated intelligence and knowledge of workers
into mechanical form. Though this displaces workers under the
current economic system, it also offers the potential for
liberation from need.
The productive forces now exist to provide food, shelter,
transportation, computers, health care, education and recreation
for everyone. This is no longer a utopian statement. In 1940, 50
percent of the work force was involved in direct manufacture to
produce the goods then available. Today, 22 percent of the work
force produces many more goods. Hundreds of years ago, almost
everyone had to participate in agriculture in order to eat. Now
three percent of the population grows enough food for everyone
else. The same transformation is taking place in all areas of
production.
The new information networks have the potential to make the sum of
human knowledge accessible to everyone. But as the corporate
giants move to control the new technology, they increasingly limit
access to the shrinking number of consumers who can pay for it.
Private, capitalist appropriation of technology in order to amass
profit stands in stark contradiction to the potential benefits.
Thus, the impoverishment of increasing numbers of people is due
not to material shortages, but to the political and economic
system: private ownership of socially produced wealth.
Productivity increases make it possible to raise people's standard
of living, whether they are employed or not. But realizing this
potential of the high-tech revolution requires the distribution of
the fruits of production according to need, not profit.
Such a transformation in society does not happen automatically.
History is made by people, based on how they comprehend the
changes going on around them. Politics is the battle of ideas.
Those of us engaged in analysis and education need to speak out
clearly. We need to explain why capitalism is an obsolete form of
social organization in the age of the Electronic Revolution.
Though much less human labor will be required to produce goods,
the vital work of society remains: raising children and providing
education, transportation, communications, health care, culture,
recreation and environmental protection to all. This liberating
work must be described in detail, providing a concrete vision of a
better life. We must work with groups already fighting for their
survival around homelessness, welfare rights, substance abuse,
education and jobs. We must join together to formulate proposals
and programs. In the process, tens of millions of people will
realize that their needs can never be met under the existing
economic system.
Conferences, forums, articles and similar efforts are critical in
spreading the word and investigating how technological upheavals
affect different parts of the country and sectors of the economy.
On March 3-4, 1995, a second Technology and Employment Conference
will be held in Chicago, the industrial heartland of the United
States. This will be an opportunity for concerned individuals and
organizations to come together, to share their knowledge and to
respond to the profound changes happening in the economy.
[For more information, join the High Tech Committee. Write to the
National Organizing Committee, P.O. Box 477113, Chicago, IL 60647,
or e-mail jdav@igc.apc.org.]
[The reports of the Technology and Employment Conference are
available from the Technology and Culture Seminar, MIT, 77
Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139.]
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2. REVOLUTIONARY PRESS MUST GO ON THE OFFENSIVE
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[Editor's note: The following speech was given by Nelson Peery at
the NOC Conference entitled "From the Defensive to the Offensive
with Our Press" held in Chicago, August 27-28.]
Comrades, we have gathered here to assess our agitation and
propaganda work in what is, I believe, the most important period
in the history of humanity. We are at the brink of an era that
will put an end to all human ignorance, privation and strife.
All previous revolutionary epochs have created a new elite. The
revolution of the new class, the elevation of the new class to the
level of ruling class, will put an end to all classes and all
elites. For the first time in history, the material foundation for
the leap into a whole new world is at hand.
We, the representatives of the future, have stepped forward to win
that new world. It does not matter that we are a small
organization with a small press. We can defeat and will defeat the
owners of the monopoly press. No matter their objective
capabilities, they cannot convince the people that they are well-
off when they are starving. As we learn the skills of taking
strength from the mass movement, I have no doubt that we will win
this war for the hearts and minds of our class.
In order to be an effective revolutionary, one must work with the
particularities of what is happening and not be a revolutionary in
general. Romantic, infantile revolutionaries believe that by
effort alone and under any circumstance, they can achieve a
desired result. We serious revolutionaries proceed from the
understanding that there is an objectivity in the processes going
on in the real world and we can only work with (and within) the
social results of these processes.
Consequently, to be effective, we must first know what the process
is and what the social results of that process are. We do this by
struggling to understand the actual content of our time, our
moment in history. Then we must determine where we are in that
moment. Only then can we become effective propagandists. It is
very important that we understand this concept.
The content of a particular historical period dominates the
political activity of the time and forces that political activity
to conform to its requirements.
For example, the content of the period from 1912 through 1920 was
the completion of the conquest of the economically backward world
by industrial finance capitalism. This fact compelled the various
imperialist powers to turn against each other and continue their
absolutely necessary expansion by inter-imperialist war.
All the politicking in the world could not stop this process.
Inter-imperialist war was inevitable and revolutionaries could
only work with the social results of the imperialists preparing
for and carrying out that war. It was under such circumstances
that the Russian Revolution occurred. That revolution was an
example of developing strategy by examining the content of a
period.
What is the content of our time? We can say with assurance it is
the economic revolution that is taking social production from the
electro-mechanical period into robotics. Why are we so sure? We
are sure because this fact dominates every social and political
motion. But this is only half of the story. The other half is that
we see how capitalist competition is speeding up the use of
electronics with all the social and political consequences. There
is no going back. We know that the most important aspect of
dialectical motion is direction. Size and speed are secondary. The
direction we refer to is that the economic revolution is
inevitably causing a corresponding social revolution.
The economic revolution is in the realm of the objective and
constitutes a side of the productive process and history that we
can do nothing about. Our battlefield is the consequences of this
economic revolution, the social revolution. Revolutionaries cannot
start a social revolution, although most of them spend all their
time trying. The social revolution arises as the economic
revolution begins to destroy the old society.
The task of revolutionaries is to educate the masses so they can
win the social revolution. This is the central task of the
revolutionary press.
The bourgeois sociologists, loyal point dogs for the ruling class,
are frantically warning of the accelerated emergence of a so-
called "white underclass." They are pointing out that the white
poor today are in the position of the black poor 20 years ago.
These sociologists are incapable of analysis and cannot understand
that the expansion of robotics necessarily means the expansion of
poverty. They do understand, however, that people act according to
their economic circumstances rather than according to their skin
color. They understand, even if they cannot say it, that the new
economy is creating a new class with no links to, or stake in, the
capitalist system. They also know that only a class outside the
system can overthrow it. They correctly point out that this
country can contain and live with massive poverty among blacks,
but not among whites.
These learned asses can't grasp the fact that the black worker is
part of the working class Ð generally a worker in the most
vulnerable part, the unskilled and semiskilled section that was
hit first and hardest by the introduction of robotics. What
happened to the most unstable sector of the class where the black
worker was concentrated is moving outward.
These charlatans have good reason to fear. Take away a person's
livelihood and you have taken away the means of controlling him.
The ruling class must increase the use of robotics even at the
risk of increasing the growth of the new class and strengthening
the roots of revolution. This is the real reason for the upsurge
of prison-building. This is the real reason for the upsurge of
fascist laws and ideology on the part of the government. They,
like us, can only treat the results of the economic revolution.
They cannot touch the causes.
In this context, what is the situation? Where are we in the
process? The poor, the new class that has been created by
robotics, is beginning to stir. They are beginning to lose
confidence that somehow the government is going to take care of
them. More than that, they are losing confidence in the
government's ability to govern fairly.
Recent polls show that only about 23 percent of the people have
confidence in the government, big business, the labor unions or
any of the other institutions of capitalism that control them.
That's the good part. The other part is that about 65% of them
would not vote for the Bill of Rights if it were a piece of
legislation. What do we deduce from this? These statistics tell us
that in the objective sense, the people are moving away from the
capitalist institutions but, on the subjective level, they are
being captured by fascist propaganda.
These statistics point out the task of the revolutionary press. No
matter what else happens, if we don't change the minds of the
people, if we don't make them understand who and what they are, we
cannot win the fight. We will win this fight because the enemy is
telling lies and we are telling the truth.
The fascist danger is real. Confused, the people are prepared to
surrender their rights to a man on horseback if he will solve
their problems. The emergence of a Ross Perot was frightening.
Fortunately, he was such an inept, dull, confused and confusing
person that he lost his following. The people are at the point
where they are open to new ideas. Revolutionaries are the carriers
and teachers of new ideas. This is the central task of the
revolutionary press.
As dialecticians, we know the revolutionary process of building a
new society begins with destruction of the old. Destruction is an
integral part of construction. We are not content to lament and
weep about the resulting human misery and put Band-Aids on it as
the middle-class liberals do. We know this is the only time when
we can change the minds of the people about capitalism. The period
of social destruction is the time for the introduction of new
ideas. It is the time for the development of new organizational
forms. We must make this first phase of the social revolution a
school to teach the people and a forge to harden them for the task
that lies ahead. That task is winning the social revolution and
directing the reconstruction of society in our own interests. It
is the time for revolutionaries to carry out their tasks as
agitators and propagandists.
At what stage is the revolution? It has, essentially, entered the
stage of fighting for isolated demands. The struggle for the
essentials of life is being carried on in every city in this
country. This is the first, scattered spontaneous stage of the
revolution.
The stages of revolution are essentially the same everywhere.
Therefore, we can learn from the revolutionary processes that have
gone on before. We can learn very much from the freedom movement
of the African American people. From the Civil War onward, they
fought very hard and long against legal segregation and
discrimination. This oppression sprang from and was a part of the
sharecropping system. So long as the African Americans were part
of this system, they could not effectively fight against it. The
first stage of liberation was their liberation from sharecropping
Ð being thrown out of the system. This came about with the
mechanization of Southern agriculture. They were literally driven
off the plantations and onto the dirt roads. Sound familiar? Apart
from their misery, they were, for the first time, free to fight
the social oppression. Stage by stage, that struggle unfolded. As
a result of the Montgomery boycott, the fight erupted across the
country.
The fight was scattered, with limited goals such as the right to
eat at a lunch counter, or the right to live where one pleases, or
the right to a job. Little by little, the fight coalesced from
scattered, specific fighting for limited goals into a general
fight for an abstraction that took in, yet superseded, the sum
total of all the scattered, specific fights.
You may recall the great documentary, "Eyes on the Prize." A
portion of it dealt with the turning point of the struggle in
Birmingham, Alabama. The courts had ruled against allowing the
African Americans to march in a demonstration. The leadership of
the movement made the decision to march anyway. Each day, a new
group marched and was arrested. Finally, there were no more adults
left to march. The leadership decided to turn to the children.
These youngsters faced the fire hoses and dogs and clubs of the
cops until they reached the center of the city. They were stopped
by a line of riot police. The television camera turned to a little
girl, about nine years old. Perhaps realizing that he was on
camera, the cop stood in front of the little girl. He held his
club behind his back and bending toward her, asked: "Just what do
you want, little girl?" She looked up at him and answered,
"Freedom!"
The movement had been transformed from fighting for the right to
this or that demand to the abstraction Ð Freedom. The Freedom
movement Ð more than the sum total of all the struggles Ð rolled
on, inspiring and involving millions of people of all races and
creeds.
What can we learn from this? First of all, we learn that simply
fighting in the scattered struggles cannot win. We must build a
movement. That means imbuing the masses with a vision, a concept
abstracted from the concrete struggles, embodying these struggles,
but going beyond them. Secondly, the masses can only be mobilized
by abstractions. This is the role of the propagandist, the role of
the revolutionary press.
The theme of this important meeting is "From the defensive to the
offensive with our press." This is a very important and timely
concept. I think, however, that we should examine these terms. We
cannot embrace the defensive or offensive because we want to. It
has to be for real and objective reasons. An army doesn't simply
decide to take the offensive or defensive. Strategy must
correspond to the objective conditions, to the alignment and
relationship of forces. History is littered with defeated armies
who defied this law.
Now, why can and must the press go on the offensive? Because world
imperialism has shifted from the offensive to the defensive.
Imperialism can maintain the strategic offensive only so long as
the masses of the imperialist world support it politically. It has
to buy that political support with outright bribery. The
introduction of robotics has caused such widespread unemployment
and is creating such a massive new class that imperialism has lost
its base. More than that, the capitalists are attacking their
indispensable political foundations by slashing social services
and criminalizing the new poor. They have to go on the strategic
defensive and are doing so.
On the other hand, robotics is creating a new class that is
objectively revolutionary. They do not know it. For the first
time, there is the possibility of building a communist press and a
communist organization on an actual communist movement. This is
the key to revolution. We do not have options. We absolutely must
go on the offensive, change revolutionary potential to actuality
or fall victim to fascism.
What is the offensive? The offensive means to stop simply
defending the victims of the system and go after the system and
the capitalist criminals. Information is our ammunition. We must
have more information on what is happening and who is responsible.
Our cadre know or can find out what is going on in their areas.
Each and every comrade must become a writer for and distributor of
the press. These are the essentials of the offensive. Our first
goal is to imbue the new class with a hatred of the enemy. The
objective conditions allow and compel us to do this.
Comrades, the period of the offensive demands its own psychology.
This is known as the offensive spirit. Let's use the press to
further enthuse the cadre and our class. Let's lay aside the petty
bickering and the hesitations about taking the paper deep into our
class. Let's get the taste of blood in our mouths and go after
these dogs. Historically, they are on the ropes. Let's get out
there and finish them off!
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RALLY, COMRADES! (Electronic Edition) is the electronic version of
RALLY, COMRADES!, a newspaper published by the Political Committee
of the National Organizing Committee. The name of the paper is
taken from the original chorus of the poem and song, _The
International_, the rallying cry of the international proletariat:
Rally, Comrades
'Tis the last fight we face
The international
Shall be the human race.
Please address all correspondence to: RALLY, COMRADES!, P.O. Box
477113, Chicago, IL 60647, or e-mail jdav@igc.org. (c) 1994 by the
National Organizing Committee.
Hard copy subscriptions are available for $15/year, and donations
are important. We encourage reproduction and use of all articles.
Please credit RALLY COMRADES.
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The mission of RALLY, COMRADES! is to orient, educate and raise
the consciousness of those who are fighting the growing repression
and poverty in our country. We have entered an age where
electronics is replacing human labor and a growing mass of people
is becoming permanently unemployed. No longer requiring our labor,
those who run this country have launched a massive assault on our
living standards and our legal and human rights.
The people are fighting back, but their struggle is scattered and
unfocused. The crying need of the moment is to unite the leaders
of the scattered struggles around a common understanding and a
common strategy. The leaders need a source of information on the
political situation and the tasks of the revolutionaries. We
dedicate the pages of RALLY COMRADES! to this end.
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