Wobbly times number 188

An Introduction to Bataille's ACCURSED SHARE
                     with a side trip to Debord's "Society of the Spectacle" 

Wobbly times number 185

Workers produce the wealth of nations for wages.

The upper 10% own 80% of the wealth workers
produce.  The social wage gets some of that
wealth back to the workers.  The social wage
is funded by taxes on the wealth workers
produce.  Trickle down economic theory states
that the taxes on the upper 10% should be cut.
This leads to the declaration of 'budget emergencies' 
by conservative politicians and to calls for
either more regressive taxes e.g. widening and
raising the GST or cuts to public health, education
and welfare, including the age pension.

How much wealth would be produced in Australia
during the month of May, if everyone who depends
on wages to make a living went on general strike
from May 1st to May 31st?

Wobbly times number 165

"Today, a vague mood of “anti-imperialism” is back, led by Venezuela’s Chavez and his Latin American allies (Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia), more or less (with the exception of Stalinist Cuba) classical bourgeois-nationalist regimes. But Chavez in turn is allied, at least verbally and often practically, with the Iran of the ayatollahs, and Hezbollah, and Hamas, as well as newly-emergent China, which no one any longer dares call “socialist”. The British SWP allies with Islamic fundamentalists in local elections in the UK, and participates in mass demonstrations (during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, summer 2007) chanting “We are all Hezbollah”. Somehow Hezbollah, whose statutes affirm the truth of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is now part of the “left”; when will it be “We are all Taliban”? Why not, indeed?"

Loren Goldner

I'm for common ownership of the collective product of labour; the abolition of the wage system and production for use and need,what Marx had called in CAPITAL the "union of free individuals", not State controlled commodity production for sale to producers in bondage to an employing class. Leninists are always on about their 'socialist State'. Marx never wrote about establishing a 'socialist State' because for Marx the State was synonymous with the dictatorship of one class over others. Thus, a 'socialist State' would be a theoretical and material contradiction.  The State, as Marx used the concept, was the governing instrument of class rule.  Socialism was to be a classless society. Perhaps socialism would flow out of a workers' controlled democratic republic in less developed industrial States, a republic in which the workers would see a need to allow capitalists and peasants to continue to function as separate classes until social ownership of the collective product of labour i.e. socialism, could be effectively established.  But such a proletarian democracy was never the reality of Leninist Party political practice.  The absolute dictatorship of the Party was its preferred method of rule.    

To my way of thinking, "Stalinist" means, above all, setting up a Soviet style wage system, including the sort of equality of wages (a measure Proudhon called for in his brand of anarchist socialism) which existed in Cuba for awhile, of course with upper echelon party bureaucrats getting extra shall we say 'perks'. The Soviet style wage system was more or less copied by all the Marxist-Leninist ( M-L) regimes with slight variations. Tito's Communist Party (CP) led Yugoslavia was an exception to the rule when 'self-management' of their wage system was introduced. The lack of civil liberties was/is ubiquitous in M-L States. 

In reality, Lenin's theory failed its own historical test of practice. The apologists for what issued out of the Bolshevik political Revolution are many, varied sects now, some Stalinist, some Trotskyist and all mostly ignored by the working class who see no advantage in changing bosses from one set who allow civil liberties to another who don't. Every M-L State dictatorship has failed to transition to anything but another capitalist system of wage-slavery. Cuban workers only recently were granted the privilege of Internet access. In short, you can't blame Marx for Lenin's theoretical failures.

The Cuban CP has basically ignored Marx's critique of political economy as they believe that the old Leninist dictums concerning the transition to communism via a 'socialist' wage system and CP State controlled commodity production will work. But, as it has become apparent to all that this sort of Idealism only results in a kind of frustrated capitalism, despite the moral suasion of Fidel and his comrades, the whole Leninist ideological edifice of the Cuban political revolution will crash as history has already demonstrated with the USSR and other Leninist States. 

Karl Marx's theory of how to establish socialism via the abolition of the social relation of Capital was probably spot on but, it has yet to have been grasped and established through workers praxis. Workers are the only ones who can establish communism.  The communist social revolution is a class act. For socialism to work, the collective product of labour must be socially owned and democratically managed by the freely associated producers themselves in a classless society where the wage system has been abolished. This is what Marx was talking and writing about: eliminating the alienation of the product from the producer.  The legal, State enforced separation of the product from the producer  defines the character of political-economy in class divided political States. The Leninists maintained that alienation via Marxist-Leninist Party control and effective ownership of the social product of labour using their own brand of wage system. Most workers have seen through this failure for expanding their freedom and have rejected it in one way or another, which is why Leninism is dying on the vine the world over.

Wobbly times number 163

“It is above all necessary to avoid postulating ‘society’ once more as an abstraction confronting the individual."  Karl Marx



MONEY MAKES THE WORLD GO ROUND

Money is a commodity.  The commodity is the seed from which the collective product of labour is turned into private property.  Money is the commodity which allows traders to trade their wares and services for something easy to carry and which can be used to obtain other commodities and pay taxes.  To abolish money, you need to abolish commodity production and institute production of goods and services for use with distribution of natural and human created wealth based on need. Money exemplifies the abstraction of commodification which rules today.  Everything which can be commodified will be turned into a commodity under the rule of the capitalist class, while the actual power relationship between the producers and the collective product of their labour will continue to be mystified.  

"How?" you ask.

How much labour time is embodied in a Euro, a hog, a dollar, a Mercedes Benz, a yen, a can of beer, a house and so on?

This is why Marx would promote 'labour time vouchers' to replace money in a socialist society, as labour time vouchers would make the relation between product and producers' time at wealth production transparent, just after the social revolution from class dominated society to a classless democracy of social ownership of the collective product of labour. 

Commodity production itself would be abolished in a classless association of producers who would democratically plan what they themselves need in the way of goods and services.   Abstractions confronting the individual today are e.g.: 'debt', 'the government', 'corporations', 'bureaucracy' and 'human nature', all of which are used by conservatives ideological justifications for all the social ills which flow from unequal political power between people. 'The economy' which is actually produced by employing commodified human and using private property in nature, is THE ABSTRACTION.  Embodying abstractions with human power is the stuff of reification.  It is the bane of revolutionary subjectivity.

Common ownership of the collective product of labour is socialism, in my book. There is no socialism as such in the world, nor has there ever been more than attempts to establish it, beginning with the Paris Commune of 1871. With wage labour, the producer sells his or her skills on the labour marketplace for a price over an amount of time. In this sense, labour power, just like any other commodity, is sold for a price. The difference is that commodified labour power produces more wealth, when at work, than it is bought for in wages. This social relation of product and its producer is obscured by the vast division of labour necessary for industrial production; still it applies. 

As a class, those who work for wages in order to make a living and their dependents make up 90% of the population and produce 100% of the wealth. The resulting fact is that 10% of the people in the world own and control 71% of the wealth produced. A system of common ownership of the collective product of labour would see 100% of the people owning/enjoying and controlling 100% of the product of their labour.  

Wobbly times number 159

The Soviet Wage System:

a snapshot of changes in average monthly wages and pensions in the U.S.S.R. from 1965-1973

(in rubles)

Group                                1965                                         1973                       %increase

________________________________________________________

state apparatus             106                                            126                            19%

engineer/techno            148                                            185                             25%

education/culture         94                                              121                             29%

service/trade                   75                                               102                             36%

white collar                      86                                               119                              38%

blue collar                       102                                              146                              43%

state farm                          72                                              116                              61%

collective farm                49                                                87                               78%

all workers average       97                                               135                              39%

(excluding collective

   farmers)

Total expenditures      101                                              184                                82%

on pensions

________________________________________________________

sources: most from Narodnoye Khozaystro SSR v. 1973  and "Problems of Communism" March/April 1973, p.13


Putting the Soviet wage system in its best light, what one can discern from looking at this statistical collection is the intent of the CPSU leadership to use their very controlled wage system as a means to bridge the rural/urban producers' wealth divide. Compare the higher the percentage increase in 1973 with the lower the wage in 1965.  NB: collective farmers percentage increase verses pecentage increase for workers in the state apparatus.   

CPSU State controlled commodity production also included controls on the prices of commodities which were to be marketed to the producing wage-labourers.  For example, rents paid to the collective State landord were extremely low.  The price of bread was also kept extremely low as were a whole host of commodities e.g. public transport.  Many services, like education and health care were taken out of commodity production and distributed freely on the basis of need.  At the same time, many luxury commodities like furs were kept at prices higher than their exchange-values.  Of course anomalies occurred with respect to the wages and privileges of more valued members of Soviet society e.g. top scientists and bureaucrats of the politburo.

Production was planned but, not by the rank and file producers.  The producers remained wage-slaves, the social product of their labour remained alienated from their control, from common ownership.  Rather the CPSU appointed bureaucrats to plan production/consumption of both commodified and non-commodified goods and services. This pattern of political power between subaltern wage-slaves and party bureaucrats as  wage-slave drivers and rulers became the time-tested formula for implementing Leninist models of socialism.  Marx and Engels critiqued the wage system as being the foundation of the capitalist mode of production.  Marx and Engels proposed changing the mode of production to one where wealth was not commodified and sold rather, wealth would be produced for use and distributed on the basis of need.  (See Wobbly times number 88-89)

One of the worst things about the Soviet wage system was the lack of freedom and power allowed the working class by the ruling party. This led to the typical dominance and submission social psychological character structure one sees in all class dominated societies.  Dominance and submission is a dialectical tension against which the instinct to remove the collar from one's neck continually batters. For example, unemployment was, for all intents and purposes non-existent, indeed, it was against the law to be unemployed.  As the propaganda of 'actually existing socialism' was experienced in daily life as wage-slavery, the body politic moved increasingly over time toward a favourable view of  the realities of the higher standard of living and civil liberties in what were officially labeled, 'imperialist countries', the industrially developed capitalist States.  Thus, the much touted transition from, the CPSU version of socialism to, the New Jerusalem of the higher stage aka 'communism', came to be seen for what it was, a lie used to maintain the power and wealth privileges of those at the top of the Soviet wage system.  If one was an astute wage-labourer in the USSR, one could readily see in the works of Marx and Engels (works widely available in the USSR) that there was no theoretical distinction made between what they termed 'socialism' and 'communism'--the concepts were used interchangeably to mean a classless society where the collective product of labour was owned in common while production would be engaged in for use with wealth distributed on the basis of need.  In fact, the abolition of the wage system and commodity production were Marx and Engels' theoretical foundation of socialism/communism, viz: "With the seizing of the means of production by society production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer." 

On top of this, the obvious contradiction of maintaining a political State and calling it 'socialist' added insult to injury, as Marx and Engels continually point out in their very own writings.  

"The people’s state has been flung in our teeth ad nauseam by the anarchists, although Marx’s anti-Proudhon piece and after it the Communist Manifesto declare outright that, with the introduction of the socialist order of society, the state will dissolve of itself and disappear. Now, since the state is merely a transitional institution of which use is made in the struggle, in the revolution, to keep down one’s enemies by force, it is utter nonsense to speak of a free people’s state; so long as the proletariat still makes use of the state, it makes use of it, not for the purpose of freedom, but of keeping down its enemies and, as soon as there can be any question of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist. We would therefore suggest that Gemeinwesen ["commonalty"] be universally substituted for state; it is a good old German word that can very well do service for the French “Commune.”"   Engels' letter to Bebel, 1875

In the world at large, the capitalist propaganda about 'socialism' meaning a system of bureaucratic State despotism more and more took on the mantle of  THE TRUTH thus feeding right-wing conservatism both inside and outside the USSR.  At the same time, Soviet anti-capitalist propaganda increasingly came to be seen  as, a BIG LIE both within and without the USSR and other 'actually existing' socialist States.  The result of all this all too obvious attempt to manipulate workers' consciousness was the more or less unanimous embrace by the workers of capitalism in M-L State after M-L State in the historical approach to 1989.

For a more complete analysis of the Soviet wage system see:
Seongjin Jeong's paper:

 https://thenextrecession.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/sovietplanningltc_seongjin_urpe20180928.pdf

Wobbly times number 150

On progressive nationalism

"The right of self-determination means that a nation may arrange its life in the way it wishes. It has the right to arrange its life on the basis of autonomy. It has the right to enter into federal relations with other nations. It has the right to complete secession. Nations are sovereign, and all nations have equal rights."  Stalin, Marxism and the National Question

To speak or write about 'nations' doing this or that or having rights is a prime example of reification.  Stalin was a revolutionary social democrat in 1913 when he wrote the above and like Stalin, most social democrats of the time thought similarly about the right of national self-determination.  The ever growing move away from promoting class conscious praxis for the abolition of the wage system, toward what might be called 'progressive nationalism' on the eve of World War I, demonstrates how far the socialist workers' movement which Marx and Engels had been part of, had been coopted and folded into the dominant ideas of the capitalist epoch through reified thinking in general and political opportunism in particular.  

As Marx critically observed about reification in The Holy Family Chapter VI

"Once man is recognised as the essence, the basis of all human activity and situations, only 'Criticism' can invent new categories and transform man himself into a category and into the principle of a whole series of categories, as it is doing now. It is true that in so doing it takes the only road to salvation that has remained for frightened and persecuted theological inhumanity. History does nothing, it “possesses no immense wealth”, it “wages no battles”. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; “history” is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims."

Nationalism is the political movement of the capitalist class (aka the bourgeoisie) to achieve domination of the producing classes through the establishment of its own political State.  The conception of national sovereignty for the capitalist class develops within and emerges from the womb of feudalism, the system the bourgeoisie sublates via political revolution.  Under feudalism, political power is held by the aristocratic class and sovereignty is in the hands of a monarch, aka the sovereign.  Thus, the 'right of national self-determination' is the political program of those rulers in waiting who wish to impose the wage system on the majority, the working class.    

Colonialism grew out of aristocratic class rule and the well learned historical examples for the projections of class power presented by the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Sumerian etc. slave owning classes.  The primary difference between the ancient domination of slave producers within empires, from feudalistic empire building, was the ever growing wealth and consequent political power of the capitalist class, a class which began to seethe and chafe under aristocratic rule as its colonialist mercantilism expanded in historical tandem with the closing of the commons by aristocrats in search of private sources of wealth.  Privatisation by class ruled governments is hardly a new concept.  Henry VIII made vagabond (read 'unemployed) peasants criminals, having them hanged along the roadsides of his kingdom. However, the major political-economic consequence of the closing of the commons was the ever growing employment of displaced peasants as wage-labourers, the workers who created the product of their collective labour as commodities, owned by the employing class and made available in markets for sale with a view to profit.  In the West, this roiling, ever wealth accumulating capitalist class began to show its political face in alliance with the landlord class in parliamentary institutions. In the ideological sphere the decline of feudalism was marked by the gradual decline of feudalist legitimising religions e.g. in Europe, the Catholic Church and with that decline, the rise of the Protestant movement with its work ethic and the ever dominating ideology, bourgeois individualism.  "Dieu et mon droit" was dying.

Whether or not it is labeled 'progressive', nationalist ideology is based on the notion that the employers and the workers have class interests in common.  But within the inherently exploitive wage-system, exploiters and producers have no class interests in common: Buyers do not have interests in common with sellers when they come to the marketplace for commodities.  Anti-colonialist nationalism has been and is the struggle of nascent ruling classes to cement their sovereign rule over the producing classes of workers and peasants through the establishment of a political State.  While the establishment of a capitalist political State may liberate the bourgeois from domination by monarchists or faraway colonial ruling classes, it does nothing, in terms of promoting the emancipation of the workers from wage-slavery.  

"The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the workers themselves"   This was the principle on which the First International was based.  That principle is as true now as it was then.  The wage-system existed then and it exists now, even within political States labeled, 'socialist'.  

In order to emancipate themselves, the workers will have to abandon contemporary leftist mythologies concerning 'progressive nationalism', 'boring from within' the pro-capitalist trade unions and parties, as well as the absurdly conservative notion of, 'a fair day's wage for a fair day's work.'  Until they do, they will continue to spend their lives, as they spend their money, as wage-slaves, all equal under the law, in their own identities, democratically voting for bourgeois to lead them in government, while competing with each other for approval-votes from employers--because, as bourgeois ideology goes, the only way one can be free is if, some other one is un-free.  C'est la vie under the rule of Capital.    

Wobbly times number 145

For those who attempt to understand the material universe using dialectical logic, there are conceptual tools which the mind can use to orient perceptions within the myriad phenomena: the unity of opposites, the categories of universal, particular and individual and the totality, among others e.g. the transformation of quantitative changes into qualitative change.  The following is my own dialectical analysis of 'identity politics':

Classes developed within classless populations of hunter/gatherers as agriculture and animal husbandry were brought into being--products of human labour and innovation.  This occurred first around 10,000 years ago when humans began their march out of a total dependence on hunting, fishing and gathering within Nature alone, towards class dominated civilisation in which human beings had some certainty and control over the security of their food supplies, which had previously been left to the dependency structures demanded of humans adapting to their immediate, multiple Earth-wide environments; the exodus out of Africa put humans everywhere by 8,000 BCE.  This was the moment when humans first discovered that certain plant foods could be domesticated, along with the possibility of domestication of certain animals. Breeding domestic animals was, I think, the beginning of a 'scientific' understanding of reproduction amongst humans i.e. the parts which males and females played in the process, which beforehand had remained ensconced, within the sphere of human reason, in mystified religious explanation.  

Within pre-agricultural society, political power remained at an egalitarian level. Along with the politics of dominance and submission, based on private ownership of wealth which mark the generation of class society, came other dynamics of unequal political power, most especially that between men and women.  Patriarchal systems of dominance and submission sprang from necessities born of maintaining the dominance of the class of appropriators of wealth over the producers of wealth. During the earliest ages of planned production, the political dominance of owners of food surpluses of domesticated plants and animals grown and raised on their private land over and above that of the immediate needs for sustenance of producers themselves became the accepted norm. These owners of food surplus became the first ruling class. The mutual recognition amongst humans within their communities that private ownership of surplus was just, led to rules/laws for maintaining and protecting the priority of private ownership of property/wealth over possible communal need, an aspect of human social relations absent in the classless hunter/gatherer societies. This dominance (inherently an aspect of political power) was and continues to be maintained through force and violence or the implied threat of same within the social relations between human beings organised in political States. This phenomenon also occurs, most often murderously, within the political boundaries of so-called, 'failed States', e.g. 2012 Somalia.  The violence inherent in the political relationship between men and women flows out of the ownership of surplus wealth and the mutual recognition inherent in sustaining private ownership of same.  Within this mutual recognition, lie the seeds of the modern political State, the form of government within civilisations based on class rule and the maintenance of patriarchal forms of marriage.  

Class rule is perpetuated in the patriarchal organisation of class society and justified to its members on the basis of the need to identify offspring in the male line in order to pass on accumulated wealth.  Monogamy and polygamy become the only legitimate forms of marriage recognised within class society's political State.  These marriage forms are a direct result of the dynamics of unequal political power fundamental to the establishment of class divided society. They reflect a legitmation of male control over the female and a generalised preference for maintaining male ownership of lion's share of the class society's collectively produced wealth.  And with wealth comes dialectical opposite, political power. (I realise that there have been exceptions to this rule in history e.g.  Queen Elisabeth I, Gina Rinehart, Cleopatra and so on.)

Applying a dialectical analysis to what is known today as 'identity politics', one can logically discern the interconnection or unity of opposites within the various levels of the universal, particular and individual.  On the universal level, we can start with living beings.  Amongst the living beings, we can logically separate life into plants and animals--flora and fauna.  The totality of life, of course, continues to exist, independent of our efforts to logically grasp particulars and individuals within it. Amongst the animals, we can logically separate forms of life into various species, including, human beings. Most animal types are divided sexually between male and female. Exceptions, of course are those animals such as amoeba which replicate through self division.  Amongst humans we can further logically divide, in our minds, necessarily connected opposites or unities into classes, based on the producers of wealth and the appropriators of same.   

The differences between identity politics and class politics start with differing philosophical dynamics.  Identity politicos are committed to positively maintaining themselves as a particular ideological subset within the totality of humanity.  Class conscious workers are committed to negating themselves as a class and with that material feat, the elimination of the ideological subset of class. Whereas the practitioners of identity politics emphasise the positive differences between their particular identity and those who are not of their  identity, maintaining and recognising their identities of ideological subsets in the present and into the future; class conscious workers see the need to differentiate between the class interests of those who produce wealth from those who appropriate the lion's share in order to end this macro-dynamic of political power.  Ending the political domination of one human being over another is the end result of negating the class dominated civilisation.  Equal political power between all human individuals is communist praxis.       

To be sure, a worker can be for negating the negation of class rule while embracing some particular ideological subset of humanity.  Most individuals in this day and age identify themselves with one or more of these ideological subsets e.g.: the national, the religious, the political, the philosophical, the professional and so on.  Most individuals mentally place their various ideological identities into some hierarchical priority.  Most individuals who engage in identity politics, not only self-identify as this or that part of the myriad ideological subsets of humanity, they also identify other human beings as belonging some ideological subset of humanity, whether they, the others, want to be so identified or not.  A prominent example is race.  Although, most anthropologists and biologists would agree that there is only one race amongst human beings, the great mass of people have been socially schooled to identify two, three or more races amongst humans.  On the positive side, one human will identify him or herself as being 'white' or 'black' or 'red' etc.  By positive, I don't mean 'good', I mean more or less the affirmative, a 'yes' to the question, 'which race are you?' followed by the answer, 'I am this or that separate race.'

Identity politics have everything to do with saying, "I am".  Identity politics become for many individuals, a preferred escape route from the social alienation and oppression which are generated within the power dynamics of class dominated civilisation and its governmental expression, the political State. The longed for community (Gemeinschaft), which humans lost when they developed class dominated civilisation, expresses itself in stunted form with identity politics.  Identity politics can lead in all kinds of political directions, from a conservative's embrace of a particular nation State or race, to a liberal's love affair with celebrating the diversity of 'races' (which don't exist on a biological level) and nation States, which after all, are the governing structures of class rule.  

Identity politics are about preserving an ideological subset of humanity, of positively identifying one's self or one's perceptions of others as being something other, more than 'just' another alienated individual human being in class society. Within the scope of identity politics comes the struggle to place one identity's priority over another identified subset.  Thus, in racist politics, one race is given priority over another.  In sexist politics, one sex is given priority over another.  Where physical power to coerce is non-existent, moral suasion is used to promote political hierarchies of identity. In the dynamics of political power, dominance and submission always come into play.  With moral suasion comes brow beating guilt into those who will not submit sufficiently to the other identity's perceived priority.  Thus, the inherent tie to class dominated civilisation's social psychology of sado-masochism continues to be generated through identity politics.  As a result, the possibility for members of the working class to see themselves as the producers of all wealth not found in Nature and emancipating themselves from the exploitation inherent in the wage system i.e. making a social revolution for themselves, is retarded at best and at worst is squelched from yet another direction. 

Cui bono?  

About 10% of the population, the ones who scarf up over 70% of the world's wealth--the ruling classes on our planet, who, along with their flunkies, are the ones who benefit from maintaining the rule of the social relation Marx called Capital.

Wobbly times number 123

From the pages of the "Industrial Worker" circa 1995

RED LONDON, by Stewart Home ISBN 1 873176 12 0 Published in 1994 by AK Press 22 Lutton Place, Edinburgh EH8 9PE, Scotland, UK 5.95 Pounds + 10% handling U.S. order to AK Press, POB 40682, San Francisco, CA 94140-0682 $12.95 + $2.00 shipping

 RED LONDON is a novel about a revolt of the oppressed against their oppressors. Its protagonists spend their working lives as members of what is termed these days by official authorities from Clinton to Habermas as the "underclass". The sell their time as prostitutes, obscure rock musicians, porn magazine photographers and so forth; while devoting their free time to sexual pleasure and the murder of the ruling class. They are libertines with visceral passions. Their practice of meeting out class vengeance is both crude and ruthless. They are serious proles with serious lusts.

 RED LONDON is not for the squeamish or prudish of heart. Stewart Home's prose is on a par with the Marquis de Sade when it comes to sex and violence. Here's a taste. The setting is a rock concert for conservative teens, given by an older Tory rock star, Sebastian Fame, whose neurosis of choice happens to be pedophilia. Security for the concert is by a gang of fascist boot boys, known as the Aryan Youth League. Nobody suspects that the Soho Prostitutes Collective has planned a guerrilla action.

 "The minders jumped to attention when a van skidded to a halt outside the hall. Twelve masked wimmin leapt from the transit, while the driver remained at the wheel. The heavies relaxed. Obviously these birds were a part of some practical joke, one of their mates had no doubt set them up by writing to Jeremy Beadle. The two AYL yobs were mentally incapable of accepting the fact that many of the greatest fighters down the ages had been wimmin.

"'We don't need to see your faces', the fatter of the pair laughed,'just get your tits out.' "'Get your tits out, get your tits out, get your tits out for the lads!' his mate chanted, but not for long! "Cleo floored the sexist retard with a kidney punch that brought blood bubbling up through his mouth. Then the kung fu chick broke the bastard's spine by bringing her boot down on th back of his neck. There was the satisfying crunch of splintering bone and the fascist bore became just another name on the Met's long list of murder victims.

"Simultaneously, Melody Thrush slammed a clenched fist into the other minder's mouth. Having rearranged the brickhead's teeth, she landed a devastating blow to his stomach and within seconds, the prick was puking his lunch. If nature had been left to take its course, it looked like the bastard would have retched up his guts, piece by little piece. Instead the steel toe-capped boots of several SPC members rained in against his body. After the first few ribs had snapped with a sickening crack, a badly aimed kick hit the cunt's head and the beer boy's body went limp. It was bloody unfortunate that his brain no longer registered the searing pain which accompanied the early stages of the beating. But, to the fascist, the icy numbness of physical blackout was more welcome than a million pound win on the pools.

"Sebastian faltered and broke off midway through a song as the SPC cut through the hall in a flying wedge. After a few screams, the crowd fell silent and the only sound to be heard was the tramping of boots on the wooden floor. Cleo and Melody grabbed Fame. The other SPC members herded the audience into a side room. Adults were simply shot through the head and left where they fell.

"Sebastian was shoved across the stage and held against the wooden cross. Melody removed two hammers and a fistfull of six-inch nails..."

RED LONDON is Home's latest novel. Like his previous works of fiction: NO PITY, PURE MANIA and DEFIANT POSE, Home has set RED LONDON in a Britain which has already raced through the cautionary traffic light, flashing " a clockwork orange", into a nearly visible future populated by an increasingly class conscious, if semi-educated, proletariat, who live within the socio-economic boundaries of a capitalist system in terminal decay. In RED LONDON, the self-appointed vanguard of the lumpen and proles is composed of young men and wimmin, who have cut their ideological teeth on a tract penned by the then notorious K.L. Callan.

Callan's famously banned book, MARX, CHRIST, and SATAN UNITED IN STRUGGLE is passed in xerox copies between self-styled anarchist fighting units and individual anarcho-nihilists, like Adolf Kramer. Kramer is the main protagonist. His mental interior reads like a politico-genetic cross between Charles Manson and Ulrike Meinhof. He is the archetypical child of the urban terrorist movement, grown more sly; but just as psychopathically dogmatic as his forbearers. Adolf and his comrades are prone to using the blood of their class antagonists to dab quotes on walls at the scenes of their actions. It is invariably K.L. Callan's MARX, CHRIST and SATAN UNITED IN STRUGGLE which is quoted.

 "Adolf slit Gallon's throat with a flick-knife, then set to work ritually mutilating the bodies of the two class traitors. After dipping his fingers in the gouts of blood that were still spurting from Gallon's bulk, Kramer scrawled the following observation across the living room wall: Contrary to orthodox opinion, be it Situationist or conservative, it is quantitative--not qualitative--problems that lie at the root of the current crisis. "It was a quotation from MARX, CHRIST and SATAN UNITED IN STRUGGLE, magnum opus of that most mysterious of nihilists K.L. Callan."

 These exiles from main street move within a milieu of militant vegans, situationists, buddhist priests, nazis, skinheads and other assorted denizens of lumpen and prole origins. You follow them through the pages of RED LONDON as they drink, fight, and sexually amuse themselves in the public housing projects, whorehouses, streets and bogs of the city. RED LONDON is a simple book, written in a minimalist style, with more than a few repetitious icons e.g. the ubiquitous bottles of 100 Pipers Scotch, preferred brand of the underclass; the ever present sexual motif of couples, "beating out the primitive rhythm of the swamps." It's also an exciting bit of anarchist pulp fiction. The sex and ultra-violence can stir up your deepest Id-ish fantasies. But, I don't think that it should be read as an organizing prescription, the way its heroines/heroes seem to have read K.L. Callan's MARX... . Nor do it think that Stewart Home sees himself as the K.L. Callan of today. There is more tongue in cheek within RED LONDON than is to be found in the numerous scenes of oral sex. No. RL might better be read as a warning; much as the proles of yesteryear read Jack London's IRON HEEL, that foreboding tale predicting the advent of the fascist States of the mid 20th Century. The warining this time is for the bourgeois of the world, whose commodified morality leads them to treat their wage-slaves as nothing more than carbon-based biological work units to be thrown on society's scrap heap when they're all used up. Home has given us a novel about a pissed off underclass of midnight ramblers who are going to be the first to stick their knives right down the throats of the ruling class--and baby it hurts! The warning is as simple as that old working class aphorism--what goes around, comes around.

Wobbly times number 109

Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
by Joe Bageant

These "Dispatches from America's class war" ring as true as America's Liberty Bell. Of course like the "Liberty Bell", the American Revolution's promise of "liberty and justice for all" cracked on first use. As with other bourgeois democracies, the ideals of the the American capitalist revolution were undermined by class rule. Liberty, equality and fraternity tended to break down under the rule of Capital, where, as the old wag's saying about the golden rule goes, those with the most gold, have made the rules. What Joe Bageant has done in DEER HUNTING WITH JESUS is to give his readers an up-to-date snapshot concerning the preemptions of America's revolutionary ideals as he focuses on the lower strata of the rural based working class. His microcosmic example is focused on the majority of the people who now live and work in his old home town of Winchester, Virginia. To be sure, he also shines in a light on his fellow workers' rulers: the lawyers, real estate agents, landlords and small business people (aka `cockroach capitalists', in Old Wob tongue).

Bageant describes Winchester's cockroach capitalists this way:

"Members of the business class, that legion of little Rotary Club spark plugs, are vital to the American corporate and political machine. They are where the institutionalized rip-off of working class people by the rich corporations finds its footing at the grassroots level, where they can stymie any increase in the minimum wage or snuff out anything remotely resembling a fair tax structure. Serving on every local governmental body, this mob of Kiwanis and Rotarians has connections. It can get that hundred acres rezoned for Wal-Mart or a sewer line to that two-thousand-unit housing development at taxpayer expense. When it comes to getting things done locally for big business, these folks, with the help of their lawyers, can raise the dead and give eyesight to the blind. They are God's gift to the big nonunion companies and the chip plants looking for a fresh river to piss cadmium into--the right wing's can-do boys. They are so far right they will not even eat the left wing of a chicken." p.45

Mr. Bageant peppers his aphoristic style with enough humour to keep all the but the most dour social stoic smiling. In his chapter titled, "Valley of the Guns" (a piece of writing sure to upset liberal gun control advocates like Michael Moore), Bageant explains his book's title.

"To nonhunters, the image conjured by the title of this book might seem absurd, rather like a NUKE THE WHALES bumper sticker. But the title also captures something that moves me about the people I grew up with, the intersection between hunting and religion in their lives. The link between protestant fundamentalism and deer hunting goes back to colonial times, when the restless Presbyterian Scots, along with English and German Protestant reformers, pushed across America, developing the unique hunting and farming-based frontier cultures that sustained them over most of America's history. Two hundred years later, they have settled down, but they have not quit hunting and they have not quit praying. Consequently, today we find organizations such as the Christian Deer Hunters Association (christiandeerhunters.org), which offers convenient pocket-size books of meditations, such as "Devotions for Deer Hunters", to help occupy the time during those long waits for game. Like their ancestors, deer hunters today understand how standing quietly and alone in the natural world leads to contemplation of God's gifts to man. And so, when a book like "Meditations for the Deer Stand" is seen in historical context, it is no joke. For those fortunate enough to spend whole days quietly standing in the November woods just watching the Creator's world, there is no irony at all in the notion that his son might be watching too, and maybe even willing to summon a couple of nice fat does within shooting range." p. 124-125

The ideological crack between the more liberal, more urban, coastal based U.S. workers and their small town, conservative rivals, living in the interior of the country, is one of the main political thrusts of DEER HUNTING WITH JESUS. The gun control issue is but one of many sore points dividing the U.S. working class thus, making its members easier to rule. The elephant standing in the room is the issue of work-time. Too many hours sold to the bosses makes it difficult for small town wage-slaves to do much in the way of educating themselves, reading or expanding their views of the world beyond the easily accessed, instant, canned gratification available from conservative Republican corporate AM radio pundits and their brethren on the bully pulpits of the nation's fundamentalist Christian churches. The toilers of Bageant's home town are literally being worked to death at jobs which market for low wages, kept even lower by the anti-union ideology which is so common in their everyday parlance as to be taken for `commonsense'. The same can be said for their socially conservative cultural traditions concerning: race relations, the possession of firearms, Big Gov'mint, namby-pamby intellectuals and warlike nationalism. Across that great bellwether, the great crack in the working class remains unrepaired as left liberal workers sit and sit and sit, disdaining contact with their `benighted' fellow citizens thus, leaving both sides ignorant of what the other is saying or doing and by extension the potential of their power as a class united. According to Bageant, this is a recipe for continued impotent expressions of working class power, while serving to maintain a ruling class status-quo which is on track to continue cutting U.S. workers' living standards and furthering the commodification of human values and humane relations.

Joe Bageant has written a book which should be on every IWW organiser's shelf. DEER HUNTING WITH JESUS answers many of the questions concerning how and why the workers in the USA are largely blind to their own class interests.

The Australian edition of DEER HUNTING WITH JESUS comes complete with an Australian oriented preface.

Wobbly times number 105

The Paris Commune of 1871 was the workers' first attempt at ruling a society. As has been the case so far in history, capitalists, landlords and their hireling allies have been able to crush every attempt at expanding democracy beyond the bounds imposed by the system of wage-slavery.

Wobbly times number 92

What is 'class'? Who is in the working class? Who is in the capitalist employing class?

Class is defined by how one makes a living. The working class are those people who must sell their skills on the labour market to an employer for a wage or salary in order to make a living. The workers have nothing else to sell in order to make a living. Once in awhile, workers will market things they already own in garage sales; but, for the most part, workers are totally dependent on capitalists to hire them in order to make ends meet. They must go out in the market, hat in hand and say, "Please Mr. Boss. Please buy my services."

The capitalist class make their living from buying workers' skills, as they buy other commodities e.g. petrol, trucks, buildings. The difference with labour power is that it can be employed to create more wealth. Capitalists only buy workers who can be useful to them. This is the law of the marketplace for commodities. Commodities can't be sold unless they are useful. Workers thus purchased are employed by capitalists for periods of time, at places of employment which the capitalist owns. This is, in fact, how capitalists become wealthy. Once the sale by worker and purchase by employer are completed, goods and/or services are created by the workers. This newly created wealth (the goods and/or services) is what the capitalist claims ownership over. Just to be crystal clear: workers are not paid based on the quality or quantity of product of their labour; they are purchased on the labour market according the going rate for their skills. The capitalist then hires other workers to sell these goods and/or services, which have been made by their hirelings, in the marketplace for commodities. This selling requires a market of consumers who find the goods and/or services the workers were hired to produce, useful. From the sale of the wealth in goods and/or services the workers produce, comes the capitalists' profit. Some of this profit is called 'capital' and reinvested in buying more workers and means of production. Some of the profit goes to taxes to support the capitalist State and some to help keep the polytricksters beholden to the ruling capitalist class. Some of the profit is saved for a rainy day and finally more is spent by the capitalists on themselves. Fancy cars, fast models and big mansions can be expensive.

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The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

FROM THE PREAMBLE TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD

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Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him. ^[4]

If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist. ^[5]

The capitalist then takes his stand on the law of the exchange of commodities. He, like all other buyers, seeks to get the greatest possible benefit out of the use-value of his commodity. Suddenly the voice of the labourer, which had been stifled in the storm and stress of the process of production, rises:

The commodity that I have sold to you differs from the crowd of other commodities, in that its use creates value, and a value greater than its own. That is why you bought it. That which on your side appears a spontaneous expansion of capital, is on mine extra expenditure of labour-power. You and I know on the market only one law, that of the exchange of commodities. And the consumption of the commodity belongs not to the seller who parts with it, but to the buyer, who acquires it. To you, therefore, belongs the use of my daily labour-power. But by means of the price that you pay for it each day, I must be able to reproduce it daily, and to sell it again. Apart from natural exhaustion through age, &c., I must be able on the morrow to work with the same normal amount of force, health and freshness as to-day. You preach to me constantly the gospel of “saving” and “abstinence.” Good! I will, like a sensible saving owner, husband my sole wealth, labour-power, and abstain from all foolish waste of it. I will each day spend, set in motion, put into action only as much of it as is compatible with its normal duration, and healthy development. By an unlimited extension of the working-day, you may in one day use up a quantity of labour-power greater than I can restore in three. What you gain in labour I lose in substance. The use of my labour-power and the spoliation of it are quite different things. If the average time that (doing a reasonable amount of work) an average labourer can live, is 30 years, the value of my labour-power, which you pay me from day to day is 1/(365×30) or 1/10950 of its total value. But if you consume it in 10 years, you pay me daily 1/10950 instead of 1/3650 of its total value, i.e., only 1/3 of its daily value, and you rob me, therefore, every day of 2/3 of the value of my commodity. You pay me for one day’s labour-power, whilst you use that of 3 days. That is against our contract and the law of exchanges. I demand, therefore, a working-day of normal length, and I demand it without any appeal to your heart, for in money matters sentiment is out of place. You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and in the odour of sanctity to boot; but the thing that you represent face to face with me has no heart in its breast. That which seems to throb there is my own heart-beating. I demand the normal working-day because I, like every other seller, demand the value of my commodity. ^[6]

We see then, that, apart from extremely elastic bounds, the nature of the exchange of commodities itself imposes no limit to the working-day, no limit to surplus-labour. The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible, and to make, whenever possible, two working-days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the labourer maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working-day to one of definite normal duration. There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides. Hence is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class.

From CAPITAL, Volume I, section on the 'working day'.

Wobbly Times number 70

Make 'em


Keep 'em tied to the capitalist system
That's what our rulers say
Give 'em healthcare tied to keeping their jobs
so they don't go getting all class conscious
and organising to demand more wages
free healthcare, shorter work time and the like
Make 'em think that meaning in life is tied to having kids
in private school
and a house with a mortgage hanging over their heads
for the rest of their working lives
Make 'em believe that more debt slavery
is freedom,
'trade in your union cards
for credit cards'
Have 'em sit in front of their masters' voice
during their free-time,
'listening for the new told lies
with supreme visions of lonely tunes'
Finally
tie their retirement to
the stock market gambling machine
via 401Ks and superannuation
Make 'em truly believe they have a stake
in the system of wage-slavery

Wobbly Times number 68

THE INSTINCT FOR FREEDOM


Plato didn't have much written history to make more than an Idealist stab at what needed doing in his REPUBLIC. At least, he made the political equality between men and women part of his proposed utopia. We've seen social relations change a lot since the 5th Century BC. Back then, slavery was considered an unchanging norm of society and to be sure, Greece at that time was a class dominated society, even though Athens had a political democracy, limited as all political democracies are, to empowering the those with ownership of property over those without ownership of property. Remember, slaves and women were considered property in that era.

Social relations of power are grounded in material relaties of wealth ownership. I would argue that those relations have changed and have been changed by an rising sense of entitlement to freedom and democracy. The historical process has been slow; but it is inexorable because it is firmly founded on a part of our human nature to wit the instinctive desire amongst all animals not to be caged, tied down or fettered and instead to be free.

To be sure, to be free in nature is to be more or less totally dominated by nature. A lion cannot live outside its hunting ground unless it is caged and fed at a zoo. Survival is a strong driving instinct too.

Civilisation is like a zoo with the zoo keepers in the role of rulers. The difference though, is that humans possess reason as their primary adaptive trait, their evolutionary trump card. And as human reason develops, it can begin to shape its own environment through imagination coupled with reason. And that's precisely what humanity has done over the eons.

When humans are able to dream and plan for a better, freer world, they start forming that new world within the womb of the old world. Looking back at history, we can see this developing consciousness emerging in the ancient, feudal agrarian societies which dominated before the 15th Century AD...and then came the invention of the printing press, literacy for the many in the venacular as opposed to just for the few in sacred languages/foreign tongues of the past and so on......under all, lay the drive to become freer, an instinctive drive.