Human-Centred Progress Versus Neo-Liberal Retrogression Within the social relation between the working class and finance capital, the working class sells to the owners of capital its capacity to work over a lifetime. This arrangement means that workers should be assured of a lifelong means of living including maintenance through childhood, education, health care, retirement and during periods of unemployment or incapacity to work for whatever reason. Within the arrangement, finance capital assures workers of work and payments for their capacity to work throughout their lifetime. In return, the working class assures capital that workers are always available and willing to work except during disputes over particular terms of employment. Within the arrangement, the claims of workers on the value they produce are variable according to the level of productivity in the economy and the concrete conditions of the class struggle. This arrangement based on recognition of the rights of the working class, which includes the right to unite in legal collectives to defend its claim on the social product, brings equilibrium to the social relation. The General and the Particular The general arrangement for equilibrium, which developed spontaneously for mutual survival within the antagonistic social relation, is masked by its particular features, somewhat akin to the old saying of not seeing the forest for the trees. In the particular case, the use-value of an individual worker, the capacity to work, is sold as exchange-value in small amounts hourly, daily, or monthly to an employer. In return, the worker receives wages, benefits and possibly a pension plan from the employer. Within the particular, the level of payment for the capacity to work is dependent on the qualifications of the worker and on the collective of workers forming a trade union to fight for better wages and working conditions. To the buyer of the workers capacity to work, the individual is not important only the quality of the capacity to work and its availability. If the worker retires or is sick, injured or goes on to other work, the particular capital replaces the particular worker with another. Within the social relation, workers are always available and conversely capital should always be available to buy a workers capacity to work. The particular worker and capital come out of the general. The particular aspect of working and receiving a wage is the momentary sensory living aspect that is most real. The particular experience appears normal and inevitable. Little thought is given to the general until the particular stops for whatever reason such as injury, a workplace closure and high general unemployment where finance capital refuses to provide work. Without work, and with little work available of similar quality, or with working blocked through injury or other reasons, the particular worker becomes overwhelmed with a sense of insecurity. What was once unthinkable is now real: the work and wage have stopped. Are social programs in place to guarantee the well-being of the particular worker now faced with unemployment, injury, illness or retirement? Is capital going to live up to an arrangement with the working class that guarantees its rights? What institutional and ideological norms exist to defend the particular worker without work and without a wage? The particular worker now without a means of living can only hope that capital will live up to an arrangement with the working class to maintain workers without work. Of course, hope is the weakest emotion for it depends on anti-consciousness and inaction. The working class arrangement with capital to sell its capacity to work for lifetime guarantees cannot be based on hope. It must be based on conscious organized class struggle. The direct experience of the working class throughout the twentieth century teaches that an arrangement arising spontaneously can only be maintained with conscious organizing work of particular workers who unite with one another to guarantee both their particular and general security. For particular workers, an important task is to see beyond their particular situation and grasp the reality of the general. The general arrangement with capital is only as strong as the unity, determination and organized conscious class struggle of workers to enforce it. Individual workers must unite with other workers in conscious participation in acts of defending their rights within the social relation with finance capital. Developing and strengthening their consciousness and organizations, especially their mass Communist Party, Groups of Writers and Disseminators and trade unions, workers and their allies will be able to defend themselves within the social relation and one day overcome the social relation itself and strike out on their own in a new direction without the dead weight of finance capital dragging them down. Equilibrium Under Stress The equilibrium of the social relation is always under stress from the basic contradictions within the arrangement itself and the capitalist economy. The uneven anarchic development of the socialized economy because of private ownership of competing parts results in recurring crises. The narrow private interests of the competing parts of the economy clash with the needs of the broad economy. Problems are left unresolved because they are not our problems or because their resolution may conflict with the contending private interests of particular parts of the economy. Economic crises become more severe and longer lasting, as monopolies grow ever larger and more reckless in their schemes for big scores, for example, the recent economic crises with the irresponsible activity of finance capital selling bundled bonds of subprime mortgages throughout the world. A most pressing contradiction arises from the law of a falling rate of profit brought on by increasing productivity. More and more capital is required to generate a fixed amount of profit, which depresses its rate in relation to the total capital invested sending owners of capital into a rage. Owners of monopoly capital in various ways use their economic and political power to overcome their own particular problems. They pillage the public purse to prop up their rate of return on their investments. They scheme to push down the overall claim of workers on what they produce, both the direct wages in their particular part of the economy and those amounts received through social programs, which are required to maintain workers while not working such as pensions, unemployment insurance, and injured workers compensation. With free trade agreements, they move capital around the world without restrictions or consideration of the damage they are inflicting upon the working class and the social and natural environment. The internal contradictions and laws of the capitalist economy, the ferocious competition amongst its privately-owned parts including global competitors, the recurring crises and the claims of the working class within the social relation, all interfere with the aim of capital to make as much money as possible in the shortest time, the greatest return on invested capital. Within this situation, finance capital is extremely restless and adventurous. It continually tests the mettle of the working class to see how strongly it would resist if capital fails to deliver within the existing arrangement. The two most significant attempts of monopoly capital to deprive the working class of any arrangement within the social relation include the pre-WWII fascist movement of monopoly capital and the current neo-liberal assault. During the prolonged economic crises in the 1930s, finance capital launched unrestricted assaults on peoples rights, most importantly the right to live in sovereign peace. The attacks of monopoly capital resulted in a heroic worldwide united front against fascism and the defeat of the German Nazis, militarist Japan and their entire axis. The victory over fascism and militarism opened up a progressive path for socialized humanity that U.S./Anglo imperialism quickly moved to block with its military and subversive campaign for the containment of communism. Neo-Liberal Retrogression The current neo-liberal anti-social offensive of finance capital unilaterally to deprive the working class of an arrangement within the social relation began in earnest with the rise to power of Thatcher in Britain, Reagan in the U.S. and Mulroney in Canada. On every front, monopoly capital is denying its responsibility to hold up any arrangement with the working class. The failure of finance capital to deliver on the arrangement has seen a global collapse into anarchy and violence with U.S.-led predatory wars and unrelenting attacks on the rights of the people and claims of the working class. Finance capital is withdrawing the public authority on every front, which had responsibility to guarantee an arrangement with the working class including the legal right of unions to defend their members through collective action. Pensions, injured workers compensation, insurance during periods of unemployment, welfare for workers incapable of working for whatever reason, public health care and education, other social programs, public services, regulations governing industrial behaviour and even science are under attack. Not a day goes by without government words and actions designed to deprive the people of their rights and dignity. Recently, Harpers Cabinet Minister James Moore declared in a public forum that the federal government is not responsible for feeding hungry children. The onslaught of manufacturing closures across the country is casually described as private business decisions in which governments cannot and will not intervene. The cuts to social programs and public services and the withdrawal of public authorities from regulating the social and natural environment have led to tragedies such as poverty, lower levels of education and health care, the railcar explosion at Lac-Mégantic and widespread industrial pollution. The drive to privatize everything thats not nailed down including valuable sources of public revenue such as Canada Post, liquor and beer retail sales and municipal services is bankrupting a public authority that is confined more and more to funding the most powerful monopolies as its main preoccupation. Even the police and military are being privatized to serve the private particular interests of the monopolies. Within the ruling political institutions at all levels, the private interests of the monopolies have been politicized. The forces behind the neo-liberal destruction of equilibrium in the social relation believe finance capital can survive and prosper in an atmosphere of anarchy and violence where the working class is suppressed as disposable slaves and a reserve for imperialist war. The working class cannot and will not let this pass. Workers globally proved that they were up to the challenge in the battle against fascism in the twentieth century. The working class today with even more experience in the class struggle is already responding with a high level of organizing and militancy. Workers and their allies are discovering ways to activate the human factor/social consciousness to involve their peers in elaborating the agendas they demand and need to deal with the escalating disequilibrium and violence in the social relation with finance capital. The propaganda for neo-liberal retrogression to cut social programs and public services, extort concessions from workers, wreck manufacturing and promote war, attempts to create a diversionary reality from the one the people face. Harper, Rob Ford, Wynne, Redford, Marois, other political representatives of finance capital, academics and media concoct a reality to suit the private narrow interests of monopoly capital. This fantasy says each individual is in competition with all others for the available resources, wealth, jobs, security, goods and services. In this hyper-competitive environment, the neo-liberals contend that individuals must be left alone to both prosper and not prosper according to their own devices. Individuals are left to fend for themselves while the state provides the most powerful monopolies, those too big to fail, with massive handouts, decides on all matters behind the backs of the people both at home and abroad and entrenches class privilege in practice and throughout the culture. Decisions in the economy affecting hundreds and thousands of people and entire communities are left to those who control the socialized means of production, the value, wealth and power usurped by them forcefully under the hoax of hereditary and natural right. The collective wealth of the public treasury is used selectively in pay-the-rich schemes to prop up the most powerful monopolies while the levers of state power are employed to suppress the rights of the working class. Within this situation, the neo-liberals declare that the rights of individuals can only be affirmed if they too acquire the monopoly right of power, wealth and class privilege and have their private interests politicized to the detriment of the public interest and the general interests of society. Today, individual class privilege is expressed most starkly as monopoly right, which tramples even bourgeois right. Monopoly rights crushing of public right and the rights of all and any arrangement for equilibrium within the social relation with the working class is the ugly face of neo-liberal retrogression. Human-Centred Progress In the modern world, people are born to society and the socialized economy forms its economic base. People have rights by virtue of being human. For the society to function it must recognize the rights of the people in organized political and economic forms. The rights of one are no more or less important than the rights of others and all must be affirmed. For this to happen, class privilege and its current extreme expression as monopoly right must be opposed and deprived of its power to deprive the people of their rights. The politicization of private interests and monopoly right must be opposed and stopped. The political and economic forces promoting and politicizing monopoly right must be deprived of the power to deprive public right and the public interest of their central position within society. The people themselves must become the decision-makers and develop new political and social forms for empowerment with the power to deprive monopoly right and monopoly capital of their power so that the rights of all can be affirmed and given a guarantee. The individual and collective interests of the working class are served by moving the country forward to new arrangements that harmonize the individual interest with the collective interest and the individual and collective interest with the general interest of society. The socialized economic base of society produces the goods and services needed to guarantee the rights of all. The society must have access to the produced value, the social product, so that it can uphold its social responsibilities to guarantee the well-being and rights of all. The outmoded relations of production that divide the economy into privately-owned parts and perpetuate the antagonistic relation between owners of capital and the working class deprive the socialized base of its capacity to fulfill its role. The antiquated relations of production deprive the actual producers of assuming leadership and control over their socialized forces of production and distribution, and the social product. The working class, upholding its human-centred perspective, is determined to bring into being new relations of production in harmony with the socialized economy. (Next: Part Two -- Discussion of a New Direction for the Economy) cpcml.ca/Tmlw2014/W44002.HTM#3
Posted on: Fri, 17 Jan 2014 19:41:03 +0000
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