From jdav@noc.orgSun Jan 14 17:33:55 1996 Date: Sat, 22 Apr 95 00:40 GMT From: Jim Davis To: pt.dist@noc.org Subject: Rally, Comrades (April 95) Electronic Edition [This publication is being sent to you as a subscriber to the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE (Online Edition). The intent of RALLY is to assess the current political and economic conditions, and map out the tasks of revolutionaries at this stage of the struggle. It is published approximately every two months.] ****************************************************************** ****************************************************************** ##### #### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ##### ###### ## ## #### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #### #### ## ## # |||| |||| || || ||||| |||| ||||| |||||| |||| ## || || || || ||| ||| || || || || || || || || | ## || || || || | || ||||| |||||| || || ||||| || ## || || || || || || || || || || || || || | || |||| |||| || || || || || || ||||| |||||| |||| ## ****************************************************************** April, 1995 Electronic Edition Vol. 14, No. 2 ------------------------------------------------------------------ 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 ****************************************************************** ****************************************************************** 1. THE WAR ON THE POOR IS A WAR ON AMERICA ****************************************************************** >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. ****************************************************************** 2. THE REVOLUTIONARY'S TASK: UNDERSTAND TODAY, VISUALIZE TOMORROW ****************************************************************** [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. ****************************************************************** 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. +----------------------------------------------------------------+ 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. +----------------------------------------------------------------+ ******************************************************************