PT Proles

There’s been a lot of talk about demands of the Occupy Everything movement.

“What do they want?”

Are there demands to be made? If there are demands, who “listens” to them?

Are there no demands because that makes us stronger? Stronger for what? Are there no demands because we don’t want anything? Or are we offended at needing a “listener”? Or is it that a demand for anything less than everything is a waste of time and energy?

Here are some facts:

• A demonstration like this gives us an opportunity to meet one another and spread ideas.
• The Occupy Everything movement can easily end up a Democratic Party pressure group like MoveOn.
• The Occupy LA committee is committed to working with the LAPD and the Democratic Party, to the point of harassing and threatening immigrant food vendors, because they might “threaten” the committee’s food inspections.

Regardless of the committee’s orientation, we have choices to make.

Let’s say we all agree on a set of demands: free healthcare nationwide, free higher education, and a living wage. These seem outrageous in the context of American politics, but they are practically possible. They don’t violate any law of physics or chemistry.

How would we implement them? How would we ensure these goals were accomplished, materially, in real life? Next year, for instance?

Assuming we want a law, the most modest of the goals, single-payer healthcare, would entail an all-out years long battle with Democratic and Republican politicians, lawyers, lobbyists, the president, 50 state governments, the Supreme Court, global insurance and pharmaceutical companies, hospital conglomerates, the FBI, and probably private security forces.

It’s impossible.

Thinking about the practical implications of trying to budge this awful monstrosity that we live in, in terms of its own methods, should reveal to any reasonable person that at this point in time, any demand is a demand for everything.

This is not 1929 America, with industrial resources, an expanding global economy, healthy, fresh, debt-free workers straight off the boats, farms and plantations.

This is 2011 America, in a shrinking, highly competitive world economy staggering under the weight of 40 years of (mostly US-originated) debt. The typical large corporation today is a fairy-tale air castle of fictitious capital–claims on someone else’s future income–and its directors scramble frantically, as they must, to eke out a margin of profit by any means necessary, as they must. Whether that’s making trains, planes and automobiles, or the division of continents for resource extraction, or going to war over the division, or busting unions, or using the atmosphere as a toxic-waste dump, or shooting demonstrators, or supporting dictators, or flying drones into family homes, or blowing a bubble in real estate, thereby reaching deeper and further into the pockets of the working class than ever before… that’s what capitalist firms and the states they command must do to maintain the value of their stocks and bonds. They have to pay those dividends somehow. They have to make sure their bonds really do pay 103 percent.

This is worldwide. It’s no different in China, Germany, India or Russia, and we all know that the big corporations operate everywhere.

So if we want single-payer healthcare we have to interrupt the capital flows of several globe-spanning corporations and overwhelm the resources of several large states. For laughs, imagine the United States enlisting China to sue the United States, on behalf of, say Kaiser-Permanente, or some other healthcare conglomerate, in the WTO.

Only the working class, conscious of itself as a class separate from the state and “the people” can do this. “Work” makes this thing go. And only workers can stop it and bend it to their will.

In this situation, talk about a “disappearing middle class” is an obfuscation. If you depend on a wage you’re a worker. Even if you have a mortgage, two cars, two kids, and a white picket fence.

Which means that the only hope for the Occupy Everything Movement is to identify ourselves as and reach out to other workers as workers. Even those without jobs. The unions are wrapped up in the Democratic Party, just like the Occupy LA committee. So we don’t need to reach out to the unions per se. But we need to reach out to the workers in them.

The largest working-class demonstration in US history since the 1930s was the 2006 May Day quasi-general strike of the Latino workers in this city and many others across the country. We need to make contact with these workers and others, as workers, if we expect anything to come out of Occupy Everything.

Till then, the question of demands is as abstract and utopian as voting.

So, we finished discussion of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts this past Sunday, and now

we’re moving on to our next text: Capital, volume 1.

We thought it was a good idea to explore the philosophical foundations of Marx’s later works before delving into Capital, and it just so happens that one of the proles started a Capital discussion group a couple of months ago. So we’re all folding in now, and we’re also moving to a weekly schedule.

For this week’s reading, we’re discussing chapters 10 and 11.

See you Sunday, April 17! Bring a friend. And some cake. Or pie. Or hamburgers. Or tamales.

Amid the chilly October weather, comrades gathered atop the informally christened Red (and Black) Hill at Barnsdall Art Park to discuss Wages of Labor, the first section of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In this first section, Marx lays bare the exploitation at the root of the capitalist system. Capitalism at its foundation is unhappiness and the capitalist class must avoid worker organization at all costs.  The discussion between the attendants was varied, with divergent tendencies coming apparent as the topics went their course.

Austerity and the public sector

The verdict is in: the cuts are coming. Of course, this is not too much of a surprise for anyone who has kept themselves abreast of the steady drumbeat emanating from the obfuscationist bourgeois press. The drumbeat of austerity tells us that we need to batten the hatches, make sacrifices, and persevere in the tough times that are unavoidable. Only through our collective effort, the frantic bourgeoisie counsel us, can we pull ourselves out of this quagmire. This seductive rhetoric conceals the true root of the crisis: capitalism and its defenders. With each austerity edict, the genuflected cronies of the ruling class, the unions and their leftist allies, echo their masters’ declarations. The ruling class and its allies will use any measure deception and deflection to hide its role in the crisis and bring the working class back into the cross hairs.

A recent, and especially disgusting, illumination of their depravity is expressed in the twisting of the Bell scandal to further bludgeon the working class into submission. The Bell scandal, itself caused by flagrant ruling class chauvinism, has become the watchword for the cuts facing public sector workers today. The effects of the scandal are carefully deflected away from its true perpetrators and towards the proletariat. The bourgeoisie know no morality, as they expose public sector workers to attack under the pretense of “transparency.” In few places is this more stunningly expressed as in the recent round of cuts facing Los Angeles city workers.

In response to the Bell scandal, LA City Controller Wendy Greuel posted the salaries of LA city employees. The vicious nature of the cuts expose themselves, as Greuel speaks the venom of austerity’s justification: “This is an important step to provide greater transparency and openness in how taxpayer dollars are spent.”  Knowing full well the perception that city employees traditionally earn more than their private sector equivalents, it’s no wonder the city jumped on the opportunity to further justify cuts which it has been pursuing for months.  Neighboring cities have also followed suit.

The race to the bottom has begun!

In the face of the onslaught, what is a proletarian to do?

After a lengthy discussion the depth of capitalist crisis, of which austerity becomes a stunning necessity whatever faction of the ruling class has power, a comrade at the meeting asked the age old question What is to be done? With the depth and extraordinary character of the crisis staring down the working class at every avenue—threatening our very livelihoods with the frightening clamor of economic destitution—how does one resist in the face of such a beast? The discussion turned towards the role of lifestyle in resisting capitalism. Is a radical lifestyle necessarily part of resisting the domination of capitalism? Here, the discussion was split between two broadly delineated camps.

On one side, the viewpoint was that there is no free time, as it were, within capitalism. Everything is necessarily framed within the confines of Marx’s concept of socially necessary labor time, or, the time needed for workers to recuperate their labor power after a day at work. The creative power harvested by capitalists, through the extraction of surplus value, is not inexhaustible. The workers must be given a certain timeframe to recover from their toils. Free time fulfills this function and it stems from this that the entire existence of the proletariat is necessarily either subservience to capitalism or a resistance to it.  Capitalism cannot be ignored.

The other side held a dissenting view; that what one does in their free time is not necessarily defined by where they work or what their bosses want. In this time, away from the rigmarole of wage slavery, one is able to oppose their economic condition by engaging in activities which foster a sense of self-sufficiency; such as home grown food and other DIY projects.  Does not an independent, determined drive towards self-sufficiency lay the seeds of capitalism’s demise?

These disagreements were not completely reconciled, but the comradely discussion that ensued provided a clarification of where agreements were to be found: whatever the role of lifestyle in resisting capitalism, there is the risk that these lifestyle options, while engaging the creative powers drained out of us by capitalism, could serve a cathartic function. If one has their gardening collective, in which they manage to reclaim a smidgen of their humanity wrested away by brutal economic exploitation, the risk of not seeing the need, or urgency, of furthering the communist project–the connections of local struggles one may be engaged in with the global resistance to capitalism–becomes a very real danger.

Comrade Loren Goldner has just released a video of a talk he gave in Oakland. It’s pretty good stuff. PT Proles saw the LA edition firsthand, and it was what inspired us to finally get something together!

Loren Goldner, Oakland, September 2010, on the current crisis, phases of capital accumulation, and working class struggles.

Not that we believe in such a thing. We are going to read the introduction and first chapter of Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and then we are going to talk about it–at Barnsdall Park, Sunday, October 24, 2010, from 2–4 pm.

“Wages are determined through the antagonistic struggle between capitalist and worker. Victory goes necessarily to the capitalist. The capitalist can live longer without the worker than can the worker without the capitalist. Combination among the capitalists is customary and effective; workers’ combination is prohibited and painful in its consequences for them.”

So begins the first chapter of Marx’s Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts… These words resonate particularly well today, as the increasing decay of the capitalist system becomes manifest through ever exploding unemployment, rampant wars and a complete loss of economic security. The working class, now more than ever, must organize for its interests.

Join comrades at Barnsdall Park on the 24th to discuss the preface and the first chapter of these manuscripts. The selection of Barnsdall Park is not only for the beauty of the location, but also because the park serves to be the latest victim of capitalist exploitation as it is threatened with privatization.

The manuscript is here.

Related articles

• MOCA interested in taking over city’s L.A. Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park (latimesblogs.latimes.com)