#4

#4

The method of confirmation, the conclusion of thought's refutation, here by this mode of philosophical abstraction, not forgotten, is that the historical action is the historical demonstration of the historical proletarian. This world in its totality operates via the consciousness of its historicity, nothing less than revolutionary, revolutionary proletarian practice; its praxis salvaging its historical axis. “{I}n order for the proletariat to become the new 'producer class' it {has} to equal and indeed surpass capitalism's formidable organizational capacity, not only in production, but in all its revolutionary structures.”¹

So, private property remains subject to ownership but membership, membership of a public body, solely, belongs to the proletariat corporeally; the means of production cannot be owned by the agents of corporate commerciality. We have to relinquish this idea that capital is private. Kapital is ephemeral.

To negate the negation, to see power as ephemeral, forms a major part of the project of our commons. So, if power deludes the viewer of its form through its symbol then the question remains for those mounting a challenge as to how to coopt or remove the symbol to reveal the vacuum that lies behind it, in order to fill it.

Citizen Anonymous, who writes to us from 1978, explains how, just three years earlier “in 1975, at United Aircraft near Montreal, workers were savagely beaten by a pack of police, dragged before the courts and thrown into prison for the crime of having struggled to keep their union. Or again, at Robin Hood in 1977 private militia shot at workers whose only crime was refusing the wage freeze.”² So, it begs the question as to whether the proletariat should have its own public militia, considering that it appears acceptable for the ruling class to deploy violence to attain their ends - why should it be any different for the working class? “Wherever the workers stand up and resist the bourgeoisie and its State,” writes Citizen Anonymous, “they must confront the arsenal of repressive instruments by which the bourgeoisie exercises its dictatorship against them.”³

Citizen Anonymous, writing for the Leftist periodical, En Lutte, tells us that, in 1978, the Draft Program of the Canadian proletariat took a hardline militant view, by writing that “the program specifies that the party of the proletariat has the task of arming the masses to face reactionary violence and to guarantee the victory of the revolution in any insurrectional situation.”⁴

Citizen Anonymous contrasts this by explaining that the Communist Party of Canada stated that the working class could “carry out the transition to socialism without a civil war.”⁵ Citizen Anonymous ascribes the initiation of this attitude of pacification to Krushchev and the Soviet revisionists who saw parliament as the arena through which the working class could revolutionize the State but also acknowledges the contradiction in this since judges, generals, police and high-placed civil servants would remain.

So, on the one hand lies a proletariat as part of a military organization and on the other participating in a “strategy of open conciliation...” The working class as a massive body have their opposite and their opposite is hegemony. Why should it matter if either side is military? The equation is simple, if both sides are armed then the side with the greater majority prevails, no matter what the arsenal entails.

Citizen Anonymous writes that “the Draft Program clearly affirms, it's not a question of arming a few individuals or only the vanguard elements of the working class, but rather, the broad masses under the leadership of the proletarian party.”⁶ This same Draft Program, from 1978, saw socialist revolution in Canada as necessitating the arming of the masses.

1McNally, M. (2008) “The Organization of Balance and Equilibrium in Gramsci's Hegemony.” History of Political Thought, Vol. 29, No. 4; p.666.

2Citizen Anonymous (1978) “Can we achieve socialism without making revolution, without arming the masses?” En Lutte, May 11.

3Ibid.

4Ibid.

5Ibid.

6Ibid.

©Elijah Nathaniel James.

#1

#1

Representation recedes directly; the intermediary draws away from actuality. The spectacle of mediation accumulates an immensity of production under the condition of domination.

Socialism coexists with the production of the commodity; {C}. Kapital {K}, abstractly, is the commodity.

Kapitalismo-sozjietie is a “social formation in which the presence of commodity production reflects the struggle within the bureaucracy and between the bureaucracy and the proletariat.”¹

Victor Riesel writes from 1970 concerning wage labour, portraying the immiseration of the Kansas City labourers union of unskilled workers. Citizen Riesel uses the term proletarian explicitly, a term not anachronistic to 1970. Citizen Riesel writes from a time when strikes in The United States of America spanned across 22 states. Rather than the mobilization of the sickle and the hammer, Citizen Riesel's comrades lay down their arms. America's “endemic rebels,” according to Citizen Riesel, redistribute the capital of their expropriation by means of the strike.

George Shultz and then-president Richard Nixon author the apology of capital's representation. The proletarian, the immiseration, the expropriation. Citizen Riesel assigns power to the radicalism of rebellion with a juxtaposed view of an establishment that considers the strike to be “militant.”²

In a 1970's America, those who built the structures owned the houses whilst those who did the talk wore the trousers, the labourers were the lower classes remaining expropriated and immiserated in their masses.

A rise in wages means a rise in commodity exchange value which has lead to a rise in the number of bureaucrats serving the bureaucracy that upholds capitalist domination. If each and every one who considered themselves a bureaucrat, thereby recognizing themselves as the proletariat – Citizen Smith addresses ye, o people of the telephone call centre, the mill worker, the night-shift shelf filler – and walked out «en masse» on bank holiday Monday in the month of May then each and every one of us would get their own way, put it to a vote, let each and every one have their say.

That is what Kapitalismo-sozjietie does.

The collectivity, extending to all members of the commonality, share a belief-system brought about by cohesion. Between individuals consensus is established. “At the same time, their voluntary consensus links up with a coercion imposed upon them 'from within' – that is, by the collectivity greater than their sum.”³ Conscience collective describes the process of coercion by consensus. “Or, to reformulate, conscience collective is the norms, constraints, moral or religious sentiments, and all manner of symbolic representation that express a society and legitimate both its institutions and the actual behaviour of the people in it.”

°There must be something wrong with society if I'm behaving badly° thinks Citizen Smith.

The freedom to make choices falls under the illusion of external forces that nullify any determination of individual behaviour. Depressions mark the oscillations of liberal culture, the very thing that determines our behaviour, liberal culture. Material circumstances delimit the determinations that give us real choices.⁴

“Consciousness of the material origins of culture and its relation to material progress, the history of the material struggle of classes is disprivileged. This favours an appeal to 'man's history' in which the unified subject 'man' has progressed. It is 'in our day' that this progress is said to be challenged.”⁵

1Gillette, C./Raiklin, E. (1988) “The Nature of Contemporary Soviet Commodity Production.” International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 15, No. 516; p. 65.

2Riesel, V. (1970) "Nation Disdains Much Authority." Rome News-Tribune, Jun. 23.

3Shevtsova, M. (1989) “The Sociology of the Theatre.” New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 18; p.182.

4Wallis, M. (1994) “Pageantry and the Popular Front: Ideological Production in the 'Thirties'.” New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 38; p.140.

5Ibid., 141.

©Elijah Nathaniel James.