At 2:50 PM +1100 1/11/07, Mike Ballard wrote:
>If a proletarian democracy were found to be essential/necessary by the workers
>themselves,
Bill:
That seems to be the current situation, right? There is democracy, and the proletariat is the overwhelming majority, so I guess we must have a proletarian democracy already. ******************************** Mike B)
We disagree here, Bill. In Australia and other capitalist democracies, we do have the right to vote for the candidtates whom the power brokers choose and in that sense "the people rule". It seems to me though that politics is a power game and the people with power in bourgeois society are those who own/control most of the wealth and the people who have the wealth are those who appropriate/own Nature and rent it to the rest of us and those who own the social product of our labour. I see these people as the selectors of the poltical reps whom we proles vote for, if we vote at all. To be sure, grassroots candidates without money can run for office. Heck, my wife is doing it. But these candidates will never be known to the vast majority of potential voters who currently tend to see and accept TINA to the capitalist/landlord alliance. Even if they got some major attention, they'd never achieve legitimacy in the media organs of the powers that be--the outlets everyone watches and listens to in order to know which candidates are legit and which are not. Obvioulsy, class rule can coexist with democratic forms in Australia and other "industrial democracies". But the form of class rule is ever dominated by the content of class rule, which is founded in ownership of the wealth produced--in the modern era, within industries of capitalist society. The more wealth owned, the more power a person has to influence the people within the political structure. The continuance of the wages system ensures that the lion's share of the wealth produced by the working class (as they 'earn' a living) goes into commodities owned by the capitalist class--which are marketed for profit. Some other people can own parcels of Nature and dervive e.g. mineral rights too or own your abode and rent it to you i.e. the landlord class. Combined, these people in these two classes have an overbearing influence on politics within bourgeois democracies, IOW, they rule. They have the power. Political power is a commodity which can be bought and sold in capitalist society.
A proletarian democracy would see democratic control of the social product of labour exercised by the producers themselves, legitimated and enforced by the workers' State. Capitalists could still own the means of production here and there; but the proles would control where the wealth they produced would be allocated because they would have control of the State and by extension the legal system. They would also control the financial intstitutions. As time passed, they'd wrest by degrees more and more of the social product of labour from capitalist hands and eventually the capitialist class would be divested of all ways of making a living from owning and have to give up private ownership of the means of production in favour of social ownership of the associated producers. To be blunt, to make a living, former capos would have to join the associated producers or go off on their own and try to make a living selling some skill or service or good they could produce directly and market to users. Class rule would thus wither away. As landlords are essentially a useless class, they could be divested more or less immediately by legislation in a proletarian democracy. The class which would rule in such a democracy would again be the class which controlled the wealth produced by the working class-- the proletarian producers themselves.
Mike B)
>then other classes would still exist and so would the State i.e.
>the communist reconstruction of society would have to be delayed until other
>classes "withered away".
Bill:
Other classes aren't ever going to wither away while the working class is prepared to stay slaves. But the very day the working class ceases to obey orders then the ruling class will instantly and completely cease to exist. There will be no chance for it to peacefully "wither away". *********** Mike B)
I agree with you, if the scenario of instantaneous awakening were to occur or if we sufficiently organized the new society within the womb of the old one, say through One Big Union... yes, this would most likely be the result.
>I didn't intend to "blow" Angelus off with whatever slogan you think I was
>using. But then, I suppose you think, you're just blowing me off as an empty
>sloganeer.
Even if you are something of a sloganeer Mike, who says that's a bad thing? Depends on the slogan and whether its empty depends on the content. **********
Thanks, I guess. ;p In general, I agree with most of the propositions which you and Angelus put forward. I do use concepts like "class" and "the wages system" and "the State" a lot, plus maybe some others. These concepts do have clear, material content, as far as I can tell. I know that there are others who disagree with me; but they haven't been able to convince me yet that these concepts are as empty, fuzzy or just sloganeering when I use them. Who knows though. They might succeed yet.
Mike B)
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