Date: Sat, 22 Apr 95 00:40 GMT
Subject: Rally, Comrades (April 95) Electronic Edition
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April, 1995 Electronic Edition Vol. 14, No. 2
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INDEX TO Volume 14, Number 2
1. THE WAR ON THE POOR IS A WAR ON AMERICA
2. THE REVOLUTIONARY'S TASK: UNDERSTAND TODAY, VISUALIZE TOMORROW
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1. THE WAR ON THE POOR IS A WAR ON AMERICA
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>From the Editorial Board
Not a day goes by without outrageous attacks on the poor. Almost
every major politician, Democrat and Republican, is calling for
cuts in all kinds of public aid programs -- federal, state or city
-- that serve the poor, the elderly, women and children and the
disabled. It's important to see two things about this: first,
these attacks don't just stem from the personal views of this or
that politician; and second, these attacks are not simply an
assault on the poor -- they are an attack on the majority of
Americans.
Today's welfare state had its origins in the Great Depression and
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. It was consolidated
during the rise of the Cold War and the tremendous expansion of
capitalism that marked the years after World War II. In part, the
welfare state represented a reform of the capitalist system. It
was designed to temporarily support workers during periods of
unemployment. Politically, it guaranteed the broad support of the
American people for the foreign policies of the Cold War. It was
these policies which allowed the profits from across the globe to
flow into the United States.
During the years after World War II, most workers who became
unemployed during the periodic recessions that characterize
capitalism were only temporarily jobless; these people would
eventually be called back to work. The capitalists needed the
welfare state to support the workers while they were unemployed.
In the postwar years, the capitalists had the profits to
essentially buy the allegiance of the American people with a
welfare state. The welfare system had the added benefit of being a
massive subsidy to business, since business -- landlords, food
sellers, etc. -- ultimately ends up with the money. This period of
big, industrial businesses had its reflection in big government.
Today, computers and robots are steadily replacing labor in the
workplace and businesses are "downsizing." The capitalists no
longer need a big government or a welfare state. We are thus
witnessing the reversal of the New Deal and everything it stood
for.
In his book _The End of Work_, Jeremy Rifkin illustrates how the
application of electronic technology to production is permanently
eliminating jobs. In the auto industry, for example, General
Motors has cut 250,000 jobs since 1978, and plans to eliminate as
many as 90,000 more -- one-third of its work force -- by the late
1990s. And auto manufacturing and related enterprises generate one
of every 12 manufacturing jobs in the United States. The steel
industry is another example, Rifkin notes. In 1980, U.S. Steel
employed 120,000 workers; by 1990, the company produced roughly
the same amount of steel using only 20,000 workers.
Applying electronics to production means the capitalists have
almost no need for unskilled labor, and even skilled workers have
trouble finding jobs. And the capitalists will not pay to support
labor they don't need. Thus, from the ruling class' view, the
welfare state and the bureaucracy that went with it are no longer
necessary. In an era of "lean production," the capitalists are
moving to create a leaner, meaner government.
While the cuts in welfare won't necessarily save that much --
AFDC, for example, is only about 1 percent of the federal budget
-- these cuts do lay the political basis for cutting other areas,
such as Medicare and Social Security. The attack on the poor also
creates a horrible, punitive "blame the victims" political climate
which goes hand in hand with the drive to create a police state.
Many of those who today are supporting "reducing big government"
and "getting tough on crime" will later find themselves unemployed
with no safety net and at the mercy of the police state they
allowed to come into existence.
In this vein, it is significant that the push to cut welfare (and
government generally) is draped in rhetoric about "States'
rights," and "returning power to the local level." The history of
this country, especially in the South, shows that "States' rights"
was used to mask a reign of terror against the poor and those who
fought for their rights. "States' rights" has never meant more
democracy; it is a matter of unleashing the right wing to
accomplish the goals of the central government. We are seeing this
pattern repeated today, and this time the target of the terror is
all those who will become permanently unemployed or marginally
employed as a result of the Electronic Revolution. Ultimately,
this will be the vast majority of Americans.
Another ominous aspect of the welfare cutbacks is the elimination
of the concept of "entitlement." That food stamps, for example,
are an "entitlement" program means that, legally at least, anyone
who qualifies for the program is entitled to receive the benefits.
The various proposals to eliminate the entitlement status of
social welfare programs and convert them to block grants to the
states amounts to eliminating the legal right to survive.
The attack on the poorest of the poor is simply the spearhead of
an attack on the overwhelming majority of the people. It is a
wedge that divides us, and a tool for fostering mass acceptance of
a certain philosophy -- a view that we are not responsible for one
another, that neither society nor government has any obligation to
the individual, and that the "free market" will solve all our
problems if we just let it.
We should not be so foolish as to put our hope in making appeals
to the capitalists to treat us fairly. Their economic and
political interests compel them to replace workers with machinery,
cut welfare and build a police state.
The advent of electronics means that society must be reorganized;
the only question is, who will benefit from the reorganization?
The capitalists' solution means rising poverty, hunger and
homelessness and an electronic fascism to control the masses of
Americans. The alternative is for the vast majority of the people
to take control of the means to produce everything we need, end
poverty and create the conditions for the true dawn of human
civilization.
The American people must be won to an understanding of who the
real enemy is, and to a vision of the bright future we can have if
we unite and organize to liberate ourselves. We commit the pages
of Rally, Comrades! to this effort.
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2. THE REVOLUTIONARY'S TASK: UNDERSTAND TODAY, VISUALIZE TOMORROW
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[Editor's note: The following is an excerpted version of remarks
made by Nelson Peery, a member of the Political Committee of the
National Organizing Committee, to the Midwest Conference on
Technology, Employment and Community held in Chicago March 2-4.]
Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to this
conference on high technology and society. This is no small
accomplishment for a person who, in his youth, had worked with a
plow and a horse.
Perhaps only a person who has done such work has seen enough
changes in the economy and consequently in society to visualize
what the current on-going historic changes in the economy mean for
our social future.
I would like to skip a description of the millions of homeless,
the tens of millions of jobless, the acres of burned-out
neighborhoods, the slaughter of our youth, the "in your face"
looting of the public treasury, the decline of education and the
threatening complete elimination of social services. The important
thing is to understand why this is happening and what the
political results are bound to be.
When and why did government grow big with the alphabet programs
and when and why did it suddenly need to shed itself of these
programs?
The major task of government is to create the structural programs
and policies that allow the economy to function. For example, when
the government was the instrument of the farmers, that government
did the things necessary to protect and expand the farm. The
Indians were cleared from the fertile lands, slavery was protected
and extended, shipping lanes for export were cleared and frontiers
expanded. As the farm gave way to industry, the government
transformed itself into a committee to take care of the new needs
of industry.
At that point, government began to grow. Industry needed literate
workers, so the school system expanded under a Secretary of
Education. The army needed healthy young men to fight the wars
brought on by industrial expansion, so a school lunch program was
started. As industry got big, a Department of Housing and Urban
Development provided order to the chaotic, burgeoning cities it
created. In other words, government became big government in order
to serve the needs of industry as it became big industry. The
workers were kept relatively healthy and the unemployed were
warehoused in such a manner as to keep them available for work
with every industrial expansion.
Now the rub. New means of production changed the game. Not only
were expanding sections of the working class superfluous to
production, but the new mode of high-tech production no longer
needed a reserve army of the unemployed. Nor did it need healthy
young men for infantry war. As industry gave way to the new
electronic means of production, it downsized. The government
necessarily had to follow suit.
As the application of these new scientific marvels to the
workplace expanded, a new economic category, the structurally
unemployed, was created. Some 150 years ago, Marx and Engels
coined the term "the reserve army of the unemployed." This was the
industrial reserve to be thrown into the battle for production as
the need arose. The structurally unemployed was something
different. They were a new, growing, permanently unemployed sector
created by the new, emerging economic structure.
Naturally, robotics entered industry at the lowest and simplest
level. Its first victims were the unskilled and semi-skilled
workers. For historic as well as racist reasons, the black workers
were concentrated there. The widespread liquidation of the blacks
in the industrial work force was looked upon as another brutal act
of American racism. The blacks could not see the effect of
robotics on the white unskilled and semi-skilled workers who were
scattered throughout the general white population, especially in
the suburbs. The African Americans were concentrated in a
relatively small urban area, and the percentage of black laborers
to the African American population was higher than white laborers
to the white population.
The consequent creation of the ghetto -- the black, permanently
destitute, rotting inner core of the formerly central, working-
class area of the city -- was also accepted as simply the result
of racist economic policies of capitalist industry. The
economists, their inquiry tainted with racist ideology and unable
to understand the difference between the reserve army of the
unemployed created by industrial capitalism and the structural,
permanent joblessness created by robotics, came up with the term
"underclass."
Those who coined the term "underclass" perhaps thought this was a
group unable to keep up, and that, once falling behind and
supported by welfare, consciously accepted an existence outside
the capitalist relations of worker and employer. Perhaps they saw
them as something not quite the same as, but akin to, the
lumpenproletariat of the beginnings of industrial capitalism.
Racism allowed for this term to be quickly and widely accepted.
>From the battlements provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
from the oak-paneled sanctuaries of the universities, it must have
seemed that a sub-class of blacks, reliant on welfare, had lost
the work ethic. Worse, they were creating a sub-culture of
immorality and criminality in the midst of a great expansion of
wealth and productivity.
A more concrete look will show several things. First, that the new
productive equipment was polarizing wealth and poverty as never
before. Absolute wealth in the form of 145 billionaires and
absolute poverty in the form of some eight million homeless are
new to our country. The second polarization was the increase in
production accompanied by an increase in unemployment and
joblessness.
Most important, a concrete look would show that the so-called
underclass is, in fact, a new class. History shows us that each
qualitatively new means of production creates a new class.
Previously, each new class had been the owners or operators of the
new equipment. Today's new class, created by robotics, is not
simply driven out of industry, it is driven out of bourgeois
society. There is a historical parallel.
The Roman proletariat, once a working class, was driven from the
workplace by the introduction of slavery. They ended up absolutely
destitute and outside society. They were fed by the state and in
exchange produced babies who would grow up to be soldiers. The
proletariat did not work and could not work because they could not
compete with the labor of slaves. The comparison is clear. We are
witnessing the creation of a real, if modern, proletariat.
Further, and perhaps most importantly, it should be noted that in
history, no system has ever been overthrown by an internal class.
The feudal system was overthrown by the classes outside the
system, not by the serfs. The concept of class struggle has been
convoluted to express the struggle for reform, which is the only
possible social struggle between two classes internal to a
society. Class struggle begins when qualitatively new means of
production bring about an economic revolution and the economic
revolution forces a social revolution. The struggle of the old,
reactionary classes inside society against the new class outside
the society over who is going to create a new social order is the
class struggle.
The social system is under attack as the electronic revolution
destroys its economic underpinning. This underpinning is value
created by the expenditure of human labor. In proportion to the
use of robotics, the new system becomes more productive and less
able to distribute that production. The modern proletariat has no
choice but to join with the robot in the final assault against the
existing social and economic order.
We are not facing a recurrence of the Egyptian or ancient Chinese
collapse of civilization. On the contrary, we stand at the end of
pre-history. Wageless production cannot be distributed with money.
The contradiction between the modes of production and exchange has
reached its limits. Production without wages inevitably results in
distribution without money. This objective economic demand will
sweep aside any subjective or political system that cannot conform
to it. Communism moves from the subjective arena of the political
and ideological into the realm of the objective and economic.
Since there are no concrete economic connections between today and
tomorrow, consciousness plays the decisive role in this
revolution. We must consciously fight for the future. Blind rage
against the ongoing destruction of life will not bring change.
This future will not evolve automatically as did the rosy dawn of
capitalism.
How will the movement acquire this decisive consciousness? As with
all changes of quality, it must be introduced from the outside. An
organization must be built for the specific purpose of bringing
this consciousness to the new class, and not only the new class.
Since we are entering a social revolution, this message must be
taken to all of society. Filling our future with a content made
possible by the marvelous new means of production depends entirely
upon the leadership of an organization of visionaries capable of
arousing and enthusing the masses.
Philosophers in ancient Greece declared that their slave system
was necessary in order to allow another class of people leisure
time to create the culture and education necessary to uplift the
free population. Economic and social contradictions within their
system of human slavery brought it to an end. Today, in the robot,
we have an efficient and willing producer capable of freeing up
the totality of humanity so they may fully commit themselves to
the age-old struggle for a cultured, orderly and peaceful life.
Does it take much genius to see that the social and moral ills of
our time are the result of controlled scarcity? Does it take
genius to understand that the new, terrible social ills are the
result of -- and not the cause of -- the destruction of a society?
Does it take genius to understand that abundance, which today is
the cause of starvation and misery, will be the foundation for
tomorrow's leap into a new and orderly world? Does it take genius
to see that privilege and all its hateful ideologies can only be
overcome and will be overcome by unfettered abundance?
Visionaries, unlike dreamers, proceed from the real world. Any
person who has been forced onto the streets by the private use of
robotics cannot help but visualize the possible world wherein
robotics are used for the benefit of society rather than by
individuals whose only interest is profit.
Yesteryear's dreamers were the destitute, the exploited, the
downtrodden. The visionaries were the owners of the new mechanical
means of production. Today, that world stands on its feet. The
visionaries are those who have been driven from the factory and
from society by those who own the more efficient electronic means
of production. They visualize their social liberation, the happy,
prosperous future possible if only they could collectively own and
direct the instruments that are destroying them. The dreamers are
those wallowing in increasingly valueless wealth, still believing
that wageless production can be circulated with money.
Humanity stands at its historic juncture. Can we who understand
today visualize tomorrow with enough clarity to accept the
historic responsibilities of visionaries and revolutionaries? I
think so. Humanity has never failed to make reality from the
possibilities created by each great advance in the means of
production. This time, there is no alternative to stepping across
that nodal line and seizing tomorrow. Thank you.
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ABOUT RALLY, COMRADES! (Electronic Edition)
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 rally@noc.org.
(c) 1995 by the National Organizing Committee. Permission granted
to reproduce, provided this message is included, the article is
not changed, and no further restrictions are placed on its
distribution.
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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