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December 5, 2011 9:41 PM
Polemic On Revolution
By Lil Joe
Classes rule, States are instruments of class rule. Revolutions are insurrections by means of which the rising classes displace the ruling classes.
"For instance, privilege, the institution of guilds and corporations, the regulatory system of the Middle Ages, were the only social relations that corresponded to the acquired productive forces and to the pre-existing social conditions from which those institutions had emerged. Protected by the corporative and regulatory system, capital had accumulated, maritime trade had expanded, colonies had been founded—and man would have lost the very fruits of all this had he wished to preserve the forms under whose protection those fruits had ripened. And, indeed, two thunderclaps occurred, the revolutions of 1640 and of 1688. In England, all the earlier economic forms, the social relations corresponding to them, and the political system which was the official expression of the old civil society, were destroyed."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1846/letters/46_12_28.htm
From the late 16th century into the first decades of the 20th century there arose capitalist establishments in connection with world markets - capitalist commodity production and appropriation on a global scale and the Industrial Revolution that drew peasants, vagabonds, runaway serfs, slaves and corvee labour servants from feudal forms of bondage where products had been appropriated by landed aristocracies as rent and taxes, in kind or cash. The capitalist mode of appropriation of labor power is by purchase.
"In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02.htm
In the the industrial capitalist enterprises, the capitalists were in possession of money - often derived from finance capital, and would purchase the raw materialis, coal, charcoal from landed aristocrats and rent locations to erect their factories and productive forces -machines and so on served as constant capital in the possession of the industrial capitalists. Labor power purchased by capitalists is employed as variable capital. The labor process is the activity by which the value of constant and variable capital is preserved and transferred (sublated) but at the same time new or fresh value is added to the product [valorisation] that is surplus value, the basis of profits.
Fri Aug 6, 2010
Flowery rhetoric and demonising demagogy v Empirical analysis in Polemic
by Lil Joe
The reason I am writing and posting this extensive response to Felix Diawouh and forwarding it is not because Felix is important or even a worthy opponent. Rather, it is because he perfectly regurgitates US imperialist press and media propaganda. In refuting him I am addressing and refuting the political and propaganda networks whose rhetoric he so perfectly regurgitates.
A Negro Tea Party advocate who parades around as an African immigrant, Felix is perfect in his regurgitation in that he has so completely memorized the talking points and flowery rhetoric promoting the wars and mass murder campaigns of US imperialism and Israeli Gestapo occupation forces, as well as demonising accusations of enemies of US imperialism and Zionism, that he has become the Negro faced personification of fascism in America.
continue...
Re George Ayittey and Somalia: A Polemical Response
by Lil Joe
June, 2010
***
Lil Joe's Response:
No one said that Somalia is not on what today is called the African continent. But, what constitutes it a continent? What has being Arab got to do with continental borders? It is a myth that continents are determined by and comprised of race and have a common 'race culture'.
(See Joseph Graves The Myth of Race @ http://www.ahc.umn.edu/bioethics/afrgen/html/Themythofrace.html)
There are for instance modern Ghana and Madagascar, Zimbabwe and Egypt, Mazambique and Sudan, Nigeria and Ethiopia, Gabon and Eritrea, Lesotho and Djibouti, and Swaziland and Somalia are all on the African continent, the same way that Indonesia and Russia, Syria and Korea, Iraq and Laos, Turkey and India and Saudi Arabia and China are all on what is presently identified as the Asian Continent, Greece, Britain and Norway in Europe, and Alaska, Georgia and Mexico are part of North America and Peru, Brazil and Chile are part of South America. Continents are modern political geographical concepts, the divisions are ideological rather than geological.
***
continue...March 8, 2007
Faith, Reason and the Science of Marxism
BY Lil Joe
Readers:
This polemical essay is against one named Merion Kessy, an anti-communist who has been red baiting me for some time by associating Marxism and the materialist conception of history, along with Marx's economic writings, with the Soviet Union on one hand, and with a "religion" on the other. There are of course thousands of anti-communists such as he is, who never actually made a single analysis of either "Marxism", the Soviet economy, materialism, or critiqued Marx's "Capital". They play on the ignorance of the masses in the United States, and the prejudices and fears derived from the so-called Cold War.
In the following I will respond to this Kessy character,
not because there is anything intellectually outstanding
in his regurgitation of anti-communist rhetoric and
attacks on Marx and "Marxism", but because in his own
play at cleverness he puts those attacks together in
a way that summarize the propaganda in these attacks.
This enables me to present, by contrast, what the Marxian
materialist conception of history is and the tools of
economic analysis as a science, in contrast to what
he calls a "religion" and "faith" which he wants to put
in opposition to "science" and reason.
Lil Joe
============================================
Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2006 13:46:53 -0700
April 14 Declaration
Comrades,
You know, we fight where we must fight, and not always under the most favorable of circumstances. The objective however is victory, which comes by minimizing our casualties as much as possible and inflicting as much damage on the enemy as possible. When we are attacked, as in the case of this anti-undocumented worker legislation, we must respond. We do respond. But, not by running out blindly, or being caught up in childish unplanned adventurism, nor allow ourselves to be manipulated by agents of the other side, or opportunists on our side who just as well might be agents. We call them agents' provocateurs.
It is better to err on the side of caution than to be lured into a trap. I'm talking strategy and tactics here - strategy is determined by objectives of a struggle, tactics arise in battle determined by the existing correlation of forces in particular squeamishness. Class war is real war, and there will be casualties.
Working class politics is neither romantic, nor is it some messianic jihad. We do not seek martyrdom. As Mao said, and we used to quote as inexperienced 'Black revolutionaries' in the 60s: "wherever there is struggle there is sacrifice, and death is a common occurrence..."
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 15:11:11 -0800
Russia Struggles to Contain Hate Crimes
Davi Joseph wrote:
Lil Joe, How can you fight for the unity of workers without reaching out to the largest demographic in the western world (European American working poor)?
Lil Joe Response: There is only one world economy, the capitalist global economics of commodity production by wageworkers. Capital accumulates only by the exploitation of labor in capitalist commodity production. I don't have to 'reach out' to any workers based on what you call race or demographics: the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working classes themselves.
The European proletariat is the oldest, most class-conscious (they know class war isn't what you call a "game") and are organized not only in powerful labor unions engaged in labor struggles (which you think are fun and games) but are also organized into, or affiliated with Social-Democratic, Socialist, Labor and Communist Parties, and are always in motion against capital and the state.
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2006 22:39:55 -0800
Pt. 2 - Polemic on socialism, communism, selfishness,"Marxism"...
Modupe Odusanya wrote:
Lil Joe, You are definitely unable to make the distinctions between human failings and economic systems.
Lil Joe Response:
No, Modupe, what I am "definitely unable" to do is to submit to an illusory "distinction between" humanity and society. Humanity is society and society is society; humanity exists in an ensemble of social relations; thus, the individual is society from a particular point of view.
Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2006 00:12:25 -0800
Polemic on socialism, communism, selfishness,"Marxism"...
Modupe:
The definition of communism, or it's variant, Maxism, below exposes their inherent weakness which had been borne out by emperical evidence in places where they had been practised or are still being practised around the world. Communism or Maxism are ideals that ignore the inherent selfish nature of man. They are both therefore not practical in a world inhabited by humans.
Lil Joe Response:
Socialism/Communism "or Marxism" is predicated upon the assumptions that:
1) There isn't any absolute or eternal and changeless "human nature", "selfish" nor otherwise. That is nothing but the bourgeois "ideal", that is asserted but never empirically demonstrated.
2) The level of development of the productive forces determine relations of production, forms of appropriation (exchange or lack thereof) contextually political institutions, ideologies, culture.
September, 2005
Resurrecting Karl Marx?
HOOVER INSTITUTION
Paul Craig Roberts
Paul RobertsThe Honorable Paul Craig Roberts is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, and research fellow at the Independent Institute.
A former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992, he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993, the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of its top seven journalists.
April 17, 2004
Polemical Response to Anti-Communism
by Lil Joe
Joe_radical@earthlink.net
This is a revision of a response to a "Black" bourgeois nationalist. The same as all bourgeois ideologists "nationalism" is conservative of the bourgeois order, and[is] reactionary in [its] opposition to proletarian internationalism. As in most cases , bourgeois nationalist ideologists are anti-communists who play upon the ignorance and prejudices of Americans and wrongly associate Soviet state-monopoly capitalism with "communism". They praise [the] "collapse" of the Soviet Union as the triumph of the 'evil'/'selfish' nature of 'man'. The "death of Communism" to them constitutes the end of economic planning on altruistic principles. I made revisions and corrections for a wider public dissemination.
February 2, 2004
Materialism and Social Science
by Lil Joe
Joe_radical@earthlink.net
Introduction.
The article to which I respond here (below) is a presentation of a paper "On Science and Doctrine" by the Institute for the Study of Science and Society (the "Institute"). The "Institute" is an ostensibly Marxist-Leninist think-tank. In my opinion, the article is a quintessential example of ostensible Marxist scholarship adopting and adapting to the latest craze in bourgeois socio-philosophical theory that, supposedly, goes beyond "archaic" Marxism, and "Dogmatism" or "Sectarianism." However, this is not an issue of "Orthodox Marxism" versus "Revisionism." This time, the "new," "more recent" theory/idea is a synthesis of Alvin Toffler's "Third Wave" theory, (propagated by the anti-trade union, conservative Republican, Newt Gingrich), and the liberal left's post-modernist ideology.
Following this Introduction, I will present my comments in a somewhat polemical format -- quoting the Institute paper followed by my comments -- that affords me the opportunity to deal with the differences between science and doctrine/dogma.
The ABCs of Class Struggle
By Aduku Addae
Scientific Socialism is now just two dirty words. One dare not mention these words in polite circles. And, that is a grave pity, for, the organizations of the working class are in disarray and the struggle for social equity has stagnated because workers have foolishly abandoned five centuries of working peoples' history. Discarded along with this history are a unique anti-philosophy, a system of critical thought, a methodology of struggle, and the tools for analyzing the contemporary social drama. Assuredly, the worker's instinct will direct him/her to the rediscovery of Scientific Socialism. Working people have been so directed at other times in history. I am, however, impatient of the laborers' natural inclination to return to studying history and shaping human destiny through self-conscious action. So, at the risk of being impolite, perhaps to the extent of being unpopular, I would like to initiate a discussion about Scientific Socialism and the working class struggle in the age of "global" Capitalism. I am not proposing here to revive some tedious debate over "Marxist" minutiae. I am talking about getting back to basics.
Comments on Addae's "The ABCs of Class Struggle"
By Lil Joe
One of the main things raised by Addae's article The ABCs of Class Struggle is the question, "where do we go from here." This question is best approached openly and with critical thinking, and not by lashing out at Addae because of his criticisms of Lenin.
The responses to Addae's article have been interesting, to say the least. On e-mail list serves that are comprised predominantly of the White Left, the article gets lip service agreement regarding the prominence of class struggle, and of the prominence of the struggle of labor against capital. But, then those same people spend the majority of their comments denouncing Addae for criticizing Lenin. Most all dismiss Addae by accusing him of "ranting" against Lenin.
On e-mail list serves that are comprised predominantly of the Black Left, the article by Addae (seemingly Marxist) is largely ignored.
The issue, however, is not Lenin [1870-1924].
