This misses the whole point of my subject line. Let's approach it more slowly.
But first a quick response.
To those who would see it as privileged whining: Well fuck you then, go join the cops.
The WHOLE point of my two demands is that they join the two ends (in respect to wealth) of the working class. Any program that does not join these two ends (illegal stoop workers in the berry fields, half-million dollar software engineers or what have you) is worthless except maybe to help another DP motherfucker to the white house.
Those are the quick answers, and actually where the slow answer will more or less end up. ------
I have indicated before that there is no General Theory of revolution (or of mass movements). I have also indicated before that revolution is merely something that happens nearly by accident in a mass movement. So there is no significant contradiction between revolution and those reformers who see reform as coming through mass movements, not through fucking around forever in building an electoral force for something or other. There is one principle, however, that seems to me essential for thinking about mass struggle during quiet periods, KM's "The andatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape," or (as Bertell Ollman puts it) "Doing history backwards." If you start in the present and try to think forward from it (as your quoted statement does, but not most of your post), you kill off any useful political thought from the beginning. (This is probably the core content of Rosa Luxemburg's "The final goal is everything, the movement is nothing.") The appropriate point in the future here is the existence of a mass movement _and_ the existence of a partry or coalition of parties exercising partial hegemony within that movement (of what exact structure these parties will be we do not know, except it will be neither that of 2d _nor_ of 3d International parties. (I see the 4th as merely a wrinkle on the 3d.) Those parties or that coalition is our provisonal "final goal" in RL's terms. It is from that perspective that we examine the present. (The ape, seen only as ape, offered no illumination on the human anatomy: history makes no sense read forward.)
We select principles then that that coalition _must_ build itself around, and those principles must be such as to unify both in theory and practice the working class, conceived not as identity (as in all pass struggles from Baboeuf to the present) but as relation and process. And this is where The next point I ground in Marx, and specifically in perspective on Marx offed by Gáspár Miklós Tamás, in "Telling the truth about class," the essay "New Angel" recommended to the list some months ago. (I think the two demands make sense without recourse to Marx.) he following passage states some of the core points:
ROUSSEAU VERSUS MARX
The main difference between Rousseau and Marx is that Rousseau seeks to replace (strati?ed, hierarchical, dominated) society with the people (a purely egalitarian and culturally self-sustaining, closed community), while Marx does not want to 'replace' society by annihilating 'rule' and the ruling class as such, but believes that capitalism (one speci?c kind of society) might end in a way in which one of its fundamental classes, the proletariat, would abolish itself and thereby abolish capitalism itself. It is implied (it is sous-entendu) that the moral motive for such a self-abolition is the intolerable, abject condition of the proletariat. Far from its excellence - extolled by the Rousseauians - it is, on the contrary, its wretchedness, its total alienation, that makes it see that it has 'nothing to lose but its chains', and that it has 'a world to win'. In the Marxist view it is not the people's excellence, superiority or merit that makes socialism - the movement to supersede, to transcend capitalism - worthwhile but, on the contrary, its being robbed of its very humanity. Moreover, there is no 'people', there are only classes. Like the bourgeoisie itself, the working class is the result of the destruction of a previous social order. Marx does not believe in the self-creation or the self-invention of the working class, parallel to or alongside capitalism, through the edi?cation of an independent set of social values, habits and techniques of resistance.
]Note: That is, for Marx there cannot be, there should not be, a "working-class culture." That is to make an identity of "working class," and in doing so to perpetuate capitalism. -cbc]
Thus there is an angelic view of the exploited (that of Rousseau, Karl Polányi, E.P. Thompson) and there is a demonic, Marxian view. For Marx, the road to the end of capitalism (and beyond) leads through the completion of capitalism, a system of economic and intellectual growth, imagination, waste, anarchy, destruction, destitution. It is an apocalypse in the original Greek sense of the word, a 'falling away of the veils' which reveals all the social mechanisms in their stark nakedness; capitalism helps us to know because it is unable to sustain illusions, especially naturalistic and religious illusions. It liberated subjects from their traditional rootedness (which was presented to them by the ancient regime as 'natural') to hurl them onto the labour market where their productive-creative essence reveals itself to be disposable, replaceable, dependent on demand - in other words, wholly alien to self-perception or 'inner worth'. In capitalism, what human beings are, is contingent or stochastic; there is no way in which they are as such, in themselves. Their identity is limited by the permanent reevaluation of the market and by the transient historicity of everything, determined by - among other contingent factors - random developments in science and technology. What makes the whole thing demonic indeed is that in contradistinction to the external character, the incomprehensibility, of 'fate', 'the stars', participants in the capitalist economy are not born to that condition, they are placed in their respective positions by a series of choices and compulsions that are obviously man-made. To be born noble and ignoble is nobody's fault, has no moral dimensions; but alienation appears self-in?icted.
Marx is the poet of that Faustian demonism: only capitalism reveals the social, and the ?nal unmasking; the ?nal apocalypse, the ?nal revelation can be reached by wading through the murk of estrangement which, seen historically, is unique in its energy, in its diabolical force. Marx does not 'oppose' capitalism ideologically; but Rousseau does. For Marx, it is history; for Rousseau, it is evil.*****
The wretechedness of the proletariat, a wretchedness that remains whether pay be high or low, is that its _TIME_, its living activity, is not its own. That is why the demand for ever shorter hours (with no reduction of pay, of course) is the key to an enhanced human life under capitalism, for actual human life under socialism. And of course the demand should be not only that no one would be required to work over 20 hours, but that no one would be _allowed_ to work over 20 hours. (For a taste of the result: probably no major league team could play more than two games a week at most, since each game clearly consumes at least 10 hours, including practice, game preparation, etc. If more games are desired, the number of players must be vastly increased. Ditto movies and stage plays.)
These are both agiatational demands under capitalism (and as such subject to endless haggling) and opening demands upon a socialist world, thus pointing beyond capitalism for their full fruition. They link high and low paid workers in present struggle, and the class as it exists with its disappearance in a socialist future in time. They begin the task of replacing the struggle for equality which has characterized class struggle for 200 years with the struggle for freedom (which means, in essence, free time and free movement) which can lead to the future.
For some of the aspects of shorter hours as a current demand, see the recent posts of Gene Coyle on Pen-L, and what "The Sandwichman" has been writing there for years.
Carrol