>Greg Schofield:
> > Perhaps the real political question is how could you help not improving it?
> >
> > Was it not Marx who specified the role of communists in
> > realising the IMMEDIATE interests of the working class as
> > one of the defining differences between them and the the sects?
>
>What are the _immediate_ interests of the (which?) working
>class as of December 21, 2001? And what do we mean by
>"interests", anyway -- what we think their interests are or
>what they think their interests are?
I'm with Nathan and Greg on this strategic question.
To have a go at answering Gordon's question about immediate interests but at a high level of abstraction
I would say:
policies that put the needs of living labour above those of dead labour.
Unless you take a narrow marxist definition of living labour, and I think Marx was using these terms figuratively, that includes that labour which is done outside the commodity system but adds considerably to the quality of peoples lives, the social capital (including the richness of their interpersonal and perhaps even sexual lives, why not...)
Fortunately or unfortunately placing the needs of living labour over dead labour does not require a revolution. It requires reforms of the global financial system to ensure its fluctuations cause as little turbulence as possible to people's lives.
I think this highly abstract principle is immediately applicable in Argentina for the immediate interests of the working people.
Chris Burford
London