Negri on globo

Charles Brown CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us
Thu Jan 10 10:47:46 PST 2002


Negri on globo

- --- Charles Brown <CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> wAlso, Marxists
> emphasize ownership relationship to the means of
> production, but this has never meant ignoring the
> poverty of the relative surplus population/reserved
> army of unemployed, or failure to acknowledge
> different income strata in the working class or
> attention to the poorest and most oppressed sectors
> of the working class.
>

Really?

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CB: Yes, really.

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Depends on which "marxists"?

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CB: The Marxists who follow Marx.

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I haven't seen too many of the various communist parties around the world taking up in a big way the sort of oppresion of housewives and students. In fact, most of them in the

"developed countries" seem to still think that it's the 1930s and that the concentration of political activity has to be in "heavy industry".

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CB: Full employment at a living wage is pretty universal in Communist Party programs. After Engels, CP's advocate work for women. USSR had universal childcare at work, free college education.

Concentration in heavy industry doesn't mean ignoring the workers outside of heavy industry, but it is attention to the greater potential strike/etc. power of workers in strategic areas of the economy. Even in the '30's Communists in the U.S. were famous for starting Unemployed Councils, putting those evicted back into their homes in defiance of sherrifs, raising demands for unemployment insurance and welfare for the poor.

In the present, Communist Labor Party is famous for starting the Welfare Rights Organization in the U.S.

CPUSA program aims for "A life free of exploitation, insecurity, poverty; an end to unemployment, hunger and homelessness. An end to racism, national oppression, anti-Semitism, all forms of discrimination, prejudice and bigotry. An end to the unequal status of women. "

===== "The tradition of all the dead generations

weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living"

- -Karl Marx



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