Best,
Jordan
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I posted this before as a suggested listen to. It's David Harvey's lectures on Marx's Capital.
However most people don't have the time to do the reading and listen to the lectures like they were supposed to do in college or high school.
So, I can narrow it down to one lecture, Lecture 8. Go here first:
http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/
Read down the list and then select Class 8:
http://davidharvey.org/2008/08/marxs-capital-class-08/
This covers the first part of Chapter 15, and focuses on a footnote for the entire lecture. The relevance to OWS. That footnote outlines the elements of social change the capitalism untook to overhaul societies, in other words, how capitalism revolutionized feudal societies. Marx reasons that we have to do something similar to overhaul capitalism into another way of life.
The element are: 1) Relation to Nature, 2) Relation to technology, 3) Social Relations (class, gender, race), 4.) Organization of Production, 5.) Mental Conceptions of the World, 6. Relation to Daily Life, 7.) Institutional relations.
The additional concept is a change in the theory of cause and effect, where C ==> E. Instead think of the dialectic as a reciprocal relation, of A <===> B. Another way to say the same thing, is to consider 1-7 above as something like an ecosystem that has 7 co-evolving species. The footnote depends on Marx reading Darwin and seeing social change as similar to evolution in nature.
When you start to think about this lecture you can see its relevance to movements for social change. Whenever OWS becomes more self-aware, OWS in a collective sense should go back to this lecture and listen again and they will find themselves in that talk. OWS should evolve rather than `organize' because in that evolution is the potentially different way to organize. In my opinion, different social context require different methods.
Lately, I've been trying different ways to re-organize a part of a community non-profit that had evolved from a once highly effective political advocate into a collection of grant writers with no political muscle at all.
Wheelchair repair sounds like an extremely unlikely wellspring for items 1-7. I never would have thought so, before I actually discovered it in the concrete. It comes from a natural urge to talk to a mechanic while he (she) is working on your chair. That talk comes from the sense that people want to manage their own affairs and have power over their means to social and political life. A wheelchair has evolved into a means to social life. Virtually every item on the 1-7 list is covered.
The relation to nature has two components. Nature can be seen in our relationship to our bodies and its ability to move through our environment, in this case a city. Wheelchair ramps are access to a public life, through the technological means of a push or powerchair. This in turn creates the social relation to others, which is a relation to daily life, which in turn effects both disabled and non-disabled conceptions of the world, that has and will continue to effect our institutional relations.
Employment discrimination, based on the ideas of discipline, speed and efficiencies, automatically discriminate against those who can not keep up the demanded pace. So who said such a pace was essential? And back we go to break down capitalist time, the smallest fraction of time that money flows through the system, demands people who are highly regimented, young, physically strong, so they can run as fast as a machine.
The list of Marx applications goes on and on. At some point, I had to ask myself why is Marx so practical? How is it that he could talk to me, in my worker mode of being so clearly? While he never worked in a shop, he studied them in Engles cotton factory. Just go down to the floor and look around.
In his discussions of steam power, I could see two things, his reading the practical history of steam engines in the British Museum, and his wonder at watching the giant belt systems that ran the spinning machines. The evolution of the belt system to transmit power was an evolution of water machines invented in the Roman empire to process grain using the power of gravity as water fell onto paddles to turn, with wind power added in the Middle Ages for wind mills. The whole point was to get rid of slaves and peasants originally by themselves, then running burros or horses to turn giant mill stones.
I spent a lot of fun hours going through Capital, or almost through, reading passages assigned by Harvey and then amplified by speculation and endless hours on the web.
CG