Labor Party Praxis is an organization and e-group that is committed to participating in the self-organization of the working class as a class and, consequently, a political party. History has shown that every class struggle is a political struggle.
Based on monopoly possession of the productive forces, the most powerful, economically dominant class is the most powerful politically dominant class. Those who own do not work, and those who work do not own. It is only when the working class is a community of owners of the productive forces and agriculture that we will become the most powerful, economically dominant class.
The productive forces are forms of wealth derived from the mode of appropriating labor and/or the products of labor. The capitalist mode of appropriation -- the result of the capitalist mode of production of commodities -- produces capitalist private property. The form of wealth is capital, and the economic domination of capital compels the individual members of society -- having no means of production of their own -- to capitalize their labor ability, that is, to sell their labor power in order to live.
Labor Party Praxis challenges this arrangement, and fights for a society in which the working class becomes the ruling class. We posit that winning the battle of democracy, taking the productive forces from the capitalist class, and transferring those means of social production and distribution from the private sector to public property could accomplish working class ownership of the means of social production.
The struggle by the working class for state power is a political struggle that requires an active and energetic American Labor Party that competes in the electoral arena against the Democratic Party as well as the Republican Party. The formation of an American Labor Party must be financially based in, and accountable to, the trade unions, and socially based in the class as a whole. This requires nothing short of internal revolutions in the trade unions -- throwing out of office the Democratic and Republican parties' advocates and representatives in the trade unions, and by replacing these with union representatives and officers that are committed to building the American Labor Party.
This is the praxis -- the practical-critical, revolutionizing activity in the self-organization of the working class. The focus is on this praxis as a strategy toward winning the battle of democracy in order to become the majority in the American House of Representatives, and to engage in class war with the Senate, Presidency, Judiciary, and their Constitution.
The struggle for democracy is necessarily the struggle for a Labor Party majority in the House of Representatives -- comprised of workers (industrial workers, agricultural workers, service workers, salaried medical professionals, sanitation workers, etc.) and members of oppressed ethnic and gender communities who are also overwhelmingly working class. This working class majority in the House of Representatives will:
Legislate the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Law;
Restrict the Labor Relations Board to working-class members;
Place the Civil Rights Commissions in the oppressed ethnic and gender communities;
Legislate a Living Wage equal to the Median Income;
Reduce the working-day from eight to six hours a day in order to re-employ the sectors that capital has displaced and tossed out as a surplus population;
Legislating the expropriation of all plants and factories and agribusinesses that refuse to implement these changes or move abroad;
Legislate free health care facilities for everyone in America regardless of national origin;
Legislate the free movement of workers in the NAFTA countries and formation of cross border trade unions;
Legislate free public education with open enrollment from kindergarten through graduate school, open to all who live in America without regard to race, ethnicity or national origin;
Legislate the funding of these programs with a progressive income tax, capital gains tax, and inheritance tax written into the tax code, so that capitalists who try to worm out of these taxes by loopholes will go to prison, and the expropriation of any and all capitalist businesses that refuse to continue to invest in those taxed companies or seek to relocate.
Labor Party Praxis will be in the trade union movement and the Labor Party fighting for these perspectives. We urge all to form or join unions, join the Labor Party, and participate on these e-group discussions. This list is independent of the Labor Party and is unmoderated. Join us!
The working class making demands of our own!
The same process of natural history has produced human beings and human culture through it's creation of productive technology. The proletariat class, wherever it exists, has a natural relationship to the productive forces, as work is a natural human activity. The proletariat, wherever we exist today, are a product of advances in technology, and the capitalist mode of appropriation (method of distribution): the market. In the market economy, the working classes are, having no means of production of their own, reduced to selling their labour-power in order to obtain the wherewithal to live, money to purchase means of subsistence (food,clothing,shelter), constitutes the proletariat. Proletarians of all countries participate in the same historical process. The proletariat is a cosmopolitan class and thus it's class and class interests are present in every country of the world today. The economic interests of the working class are the same in all countries. The working class should be organized as they actually exist, internationally. We demand internationalist trade unions.
The cosmopolitan nature of capitalist industrial production has created technological economic conditions in which human beings must produce socially on a global scale to continue to exist as a species. The productive process is a socially necessary activity. Every living thing interacts with it's natural environment, produces, changing and consuming things provided by nature, soas to survive and multiply. The same for human beings. So long as we have existed, we have produced, socially. Today we produce socially on an international scale. Unlike any other species though, the means of human social reproduction, the production process, are controlled by a tiny sub-group/class. Private control of means of social reproduction is not necessary. Not all working class have access to productive technology. All humans can and should benefit from modern industrial mass-production technology. We therefore demand a full technology transfer to equalise the productivity of human labour to the highest available, in all branches of production, everywhere, globally.
Any worker, anywhere in the world today, given state-of-the-art technology, in any branch of industry or agriculture, mining, etc., can produce great surpluses of value/products over-and-above the daily needs of the producers themselves. Any worker can produce enough value in one week to sustain the worker and family for fifty weeks for example. We thus demand full employment; that the unemployed/under-employed working class be reabsorbed back into the workforce by reducing the workweek of those employed, spread the workweek equally among all, with a living wage for all.
The capitalist class of all capitalist countries enter into trade agreements among themselves so that their particular commodities (raw materials, semi-finished/finished products,etc.) can move without restriction across national borders, in search of markets. We demand that the working class as well should have the same ability to move, unrestricted, across national boundries in search of the highest price (wage) with our unique commodity, labour-power.
MUST CHRISTIANS OBEY THE STATE?
by Adaoma
INTRODUCTION
"The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and for the latter all they have to offer is the pious wish that the former may be charitable...The social principles of Christianity declare all the vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either a just punishment for original sin and other sins, or trials which the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, ordains for the redeemed...The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submissiveness and humbleness, in short, all the qualities of the rabble, and the proletariat, which will not permit itself to be treated as rabble, needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread. The social principles of Christianity are sneaking and hypocritical, and the proletariat is revolutionary. So much for the social principles of Christianity."
KARL MARX
The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/09/12.htm
Karl Marx, in his critique of the Christian church misrepresents the doctrines of the Bible.
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Jan 24, 2010 12:01 AM
AFL-CIO on the Democrat defeat in Massachusetts' Special Election
By Lil Joe
Liljoe.radical@gmail.com
This is an FYI and not an endorsement of the AFL-CIO's bureaucracy's analysis. Most of the union leaders in this union coalition are members of the Democratic Party and delegates to the Democrats State and National Conventions, even speakers there. My analytical expose is a denunciation of the Democrats as political representatives of the capitalist class who masquerade as 'friends of labor' and 'the Party of the common man', that only reinforce illusions prevalent among the American working class that it is a 'unique' and 'classless democracy' (American exceptionalism). The reaction to the Democrats doing the business of the capitalist class rather than the working class is consistent with that Party being financially and socially based in capitalist funding and associations. The US Senators don't hang out at working class bars and bowling alleys, and certainly not in Roxbury.
The labor union bureaucrats are a barrier to the development of a rank and file based trade union politicalization that endorses and participtes in the building of a Labor Party that is financially based on the trade unions and socially in working class neighborhoods, including Roxbury. By 'barrier' I mean in the Hegelian sense that they limit by restricting working class consciousness and politics to the confines of the Democratic Party. But, for every barrier, once the defective character of the unity or being is recognized, there springs antithesis to it: there arise consciousness of its need to be negated, therefore an ought within which inhere the new possibilities that can be freed and those limits destroyed.
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1-22-2010
Massachusetts Special Election 2010. Results and Prospects: Party and Class
By Lil Joe
Liljoe.radical@gmail.com
Anger over Health Care Bill Creates Uncertain Future
by Jane Slaughter January 20, 2010
A Massachusetts local union president called it before the January 19 vote for senator: "I've never seen this much anger at the Democrats from union people," said Jeff Crosby, president of a General Electric factory local near Boston, as he prepared a last-minute leaflet to hand out in the plant. "It's worse than NAFTA."
Top union leaders had bargained a compromise slowing down the health care benefits tax President Obama insisted on, but it was not enough to placate union members-and others-infuriated that Obama had broken his campaign promise not to tax benefits.
Crosby said his members were threatening to vote Republican to stop the tax, since 60 Democratic senators and no Republicans had voted for it. In Massachusetts' special election they chose empty-suit Republican Scott Brown over a Democrat bound to cement the benefits tax in place.
In a Suffolk University poll conducted a week before the election, union-household voters in Massachusetts reported only 45 percent support for the Democratic candidate; union voters nationally backed Obama by 60 percent in 2008. From: theorganizer@earthlink.net Sent: 1/20/2010 3:31:30 P.M. Central Standard Time
Trade unions, primariy, are organized by workers to defend and advance the immediate economic interests of its members. Were there a functioning trade union financed labor party, based socially in working class neighborhoods and districts, it would be a united front of workers. It woud be both union and not yet unionized, employed and unemployed labor leagues, that insomuch as it becomes a class organization fighting the capitalist class, and every class struggle is a political struggle to keep or win political administrative management of State Power, the legislating of laws this State would enforce, a collective economic organization of workers as a class for itself would actualize their collective interests as objective class and political interest promoted by the Labor Party on the political offensive.
But, the American working class has no such class party, and individuals that comprise the working class, including the unions have illusions that the Democratic Party is 'pro-labor', the party of the 'Middle Class' and the 'Average American'. The trade unions, blacks and gays, Latino/as and feminists, and those 'progressives' who even believe themselves to be 'socialists' and 'communists', went all out, spending time and donating treasure to achieve the Presidency of Obama, together with super majority of Democrat seats in both the House and Senate.
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November, 2009
Imperialism and Ideological Bigotry
by Lil Joe
LilJoe.Radical@ Gmail.com
The ruling classes are the dominate economic classes of a kingdom or nation and empire whose members are in possession of the Society's productive forces. According to the level of development of those productive forces are a given division of labor that constitute relations of production constituent of the dominate mode of production and form of appropriation of the labor of the direct non-possessing toiling classes.
But, it is not possible for these ruling classes, which are the minority of property owning classes, to exploit the propertyless toiling classes without backing by bureaucratic-military States. The most powerful, economically dominate class is the most powerful, politically dominate class. The bureaucratic military State is an instrument of political domination by special bodies of armed men, with prisons, &c., at their disposal.
But this is not sufficient. The masses of the working and toiling classes of these societies must believe the existing mode of production and appropriation is natural and that the State which dominates them is legitimate: they must accept the authority of the class that own the productive forces and the State which protect and serve these appropriating classes have the right to do so. This is where the ideologists of the ruling classes come in.
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August, 2009
Revolutionary Posturing, Rhetoric and Actuality of Reactionary Policy,
Critical Commentary on Malcolm X' 1963 "Message to the Grassroots",
by Lil Joe
LilJoe.Radical@ Gmail.com
In the 1963 "Message to Grassroots" Speech at a Detroit Church, The Shrine of the Black Madonna, Malcolm X presented his concept of 'revolution' and of 'Black revolution', which he contrasted to civil rights, civil goals and political methods of civil disobedience and alliance with organized labor. This speech, and Malcolm X's delivery of it against the civil rights movement - its objectives and methods of achieving them through the politics of civil disobedience has become the defining moment of and for what has come to be the ideology and advocates of black nationalism qua 'revolutionary nationalism'.
The way in which Malcolm X achieved this was by demagogy of analogy, fallacies. The fallacy is based upon the false premise that slavery is a biological rather than an economic category, there were black slaves in Muslim Africa -Mali, Songhai - but also 'white' slaves in Greece and Rome, as well as native American slaves in the Aztec, Tolteca, and Inca empires, Asian slaves in Mesopotamia, Assyria, Persia, India, China, Japan &c. Slaves as a class has always been integrated!
In America the indentured servants originally were an integrated class, which, in consequence of the world-market engendered capitalist terms of trade and comparative advantage, the triangular trade favored the African slave trade thus Africans displaced all others to become this economic class.
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July 5, 2009On Iran
Lil Joe
Rep. Jim Moran: "Iran won the the war in Iraq" (30 June 2000)
Lackey Reese Erlich: The leftist critics must answer the question: Whose side are you on?
"We take the side of the Iranian people to have human rights, to have the freedom that we deem universal." McCain, who holds a warmongering line on Iran, also took one further bold step in questioning the legitimacy of the Iranian government. "The fact is that the Iranian government is now illegitimate."
"When I returned from covering the Iranian elections recently, I was surprised to find my email box filled with progressive authors, academics and bloggers bending themselves into knots about the current crisis in Iran. They cite the long history of U.S. interference in Iran and conclude that the current unrest there must be sponsored or manipulated by the Empire. ... This is no academic debate or simply fodder for bored bloggers. Real lives are at stake. A repressive government has killed at least 17 Iranians and injured hundreds. The mass movement may not be strong enough to topple the system today but is sowing the seeds for future struggles." -- Erlich
"We want the Iranian people to be able to stay one step ahead of the Iranian regime, getting access to information and safely exercising freedom of speech and freedom of assembly online," said [Senator Joe] Lieberman, who is among the US Senate's fiercest hawks.
These statements of urgency from McCain, Lieberman and Erlich are but demagogic manipulation of the unfolding political conflicts taking place in Iran.
American demagogues play the humanitarian card by means of which under the rubric of "the people" America's political and ideological representatives of US capitalist ruling classes and their economic imperialist campaigns are presented through flowery rhetoric, buzz words and loaded terms and phrases that manipulate the ignorant, the gullible and the naive to believe US imperialism is good, that it is benevolent and the motives of its government in international affairs are altruistic in the promotion of what it calls implimentation of its 'democratic values' - and promotion of 'human rights' and 'freedoms'.
US imperialist's politicians, the print and electronic media propaganda and NGOs present America as "unique", as a nation founded upon ideas and ideals: human political equality, endowing every man with 'rights' to 'life, liberty and pursuit of happiness' and 'government by the consent of the governed': ignore the empirical data -
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Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 8:22 PM
The Black Panther Party. Race, Class and Revolution
Lil Joe liljoe.radical@gmail.com
A social revolution requires a passive element, a material basis: it is the transfer of the productive forces from one class to another. The rising class emerges from changes in the economic mode of production [means of production determined] changes in the mode of appropriation of labor. These changes in the economic base both creates and empowers the rising class and enables it to expropriate the productive forces and do away with the existing mode of production and thereupon to attack existing relations of production and corresponding property formation: the rising class is objectively positioned to take the production forces and destroy the existing mode of appropriation of labor and relations of production.
This is accomplished by the corresponding political revolution, whereby the old ruling classes are overthrown and the rising class becomes the new ruling class. Whether this revolution is accomplished by violence or not depends on the political situation, that is the degree of resistance of the old class power, and in particular whether their desire to hold power resorts to violence. If peaceful evolution is impossible, then the ruling classes make violent political revolution inevitable means of transfer of the economy from one class to the other.
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. ... The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class; about the premises for the latter sufficient has already been said above. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm#b3
Toward the end of his life by assassination by cultural nationalists of the Nation Of Islam Malcolm X came to realize revolutions are a transition from an economy based on class exploitation to another economy, the exploited and oppressed class being historically positioned objectively and subjectively determined to overthrow the exploitative and oppressive economy and establish a new one by their self-emancipation from the old. Thus Malcolm X became a conscious critic of the capitalist mode of production and appropriation, capitalism.
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Sunday, June 21, 2009 10:51 AM
Fake Leftists and Lessons on The Matter of a Free Palestine
By Lil Joe
***
During its campaign to win executive office, the Democratic Party and its candidate, Barack Obama, claimed that were Obama to win, it would deliver to 'the American people' prizes: from peace to universal health care to an economy that puts Main Street before Wall Street. This being echoed by the CPUSA above.
"If Obama's candidacy represented nothing more than the spark for this profound initiative to unite the working class and defeat the pernicious influence of racism, it would be a transformative candidacy that would advance progressive politics for the long term. The struggle to defeat the ultra-right and turn our country on a positive path will not end with Obama's election. But that step will shift the ground for successful struggles going forward. One thing is clear. None of the people's struggles from peace to universal health care to an economy that puts Main Street before Wall Street will advance if McCain wins in November."This was the demogogic basis that West, Baraka, Chomsky, Zinn, and others reduced class politics to individual personality contests and a fake distinction of "progressive" vis-a-vis verses "ultra-right". I say fake distinction between Obama's policies and McCains, and between "progressive" vis-a-vis verses "ultra-right", because once in office Obama and the Democrats have followed the exact policies of what they said were those of the Republicans and McCain of putting "Wall Street before Main Street", lack of health care universal programs, and expanding the war. The Obama administration and the Democratic Party, if these policies constitute the "ultra-right", are behind their claim of being "progressive" actually themselves ultra-right by dolling out trillions of dollars to banks while workers houses are being confiscated by foreclosures, and hundreds of billions to industrial Auto-capitalists, as workers are being fired, and plants closed while government approves bankruptcies to end previously agreed upon union contracts. Universal health care (single payer health insurance) has been deleted into trash the bin. Tens of thousands more troops are being sent to kill and be killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and instead of peace the war is expanded into Pakistan.
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June, 2008
Preface to "Strategy for a Working Class Electoral Agenda"
By Lil Joe
LilJoe.Radical@Gmail.Com
The article following this Preface was written in 2005 following the 2004 election. In this article, which was initially written as a commentary on the lessons of Bernie Sanders, a socialist winning a seat in the US Senate (after several terms in the House of Representatives) was the context in which this article was written.
This article is the result of 40 years of direct participation in the Black liberation and socialist revolutionary movement, and study. Malcolm X said to Black revolutionaries that of all our researches, history rewards best. In the 60s and 70s, Black liberationists and socialist and communist revolutionaries studied and integrated the national liberation movement's strategies and tactics - especially the combined national liberation and socialist revolutionary wars led by Mao in China, to integrate it into strategies to take power in the US.
The assumptions of this article is that America, in the 20th -21st century, is one of the world's most technologically advanced industrial capitalist democracies on Earth, based completely on wage labor, unlike rural, peasant based less developed China in the 1920s -40s when the People's Liberation Army fought imperialist and Kuomintang nationalist lackeys of imperialism. In America, the revolution will take place in the cities, in connection with a national strategy for winning State Power. Thus, I spent a couple of decades doing serious studies of urban revolutions in Europe.
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Original draft posted May 31, 2005
A Working Class Strategy To Win The Battle of Democracy:
A Red-Green-Blue Electoral Alliance
by Lil Joe
Snip: "That support is evident at the Old Labor Hall in Barre. "He is as good as they
come," says Sue Lucas, a nurse in Morrisville. "He is about everything we believe in."
"He is not afraid to stand up to either party," said Jim Genovesi, a worker for an
electric utility in Rutland. "He doesn't seem to be affected by political pressure or
lobbyist pressure. He stands his ground."
"Sanders' booming voice fills the hall as he nears the end of his speech. "We know that
our opponents have hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars that they put
into the political process. We know they control much of the media. We know they
have an attack machine that goes from Fox to Rush Limbaugh, the Drudge Report and
all over the place.
"We know that is what THEY have," his voice thunders.
"But there is one thing they do not have. They do not have ordinary people prepared to
knock on doors and organize all over America. "That is what WE have.
"They have the money. We have the people.
"And when push comes to shove, the people are going to defeat the money."
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Lil Joe Comment: Of course, 'ordinary people' versus the rich folk is not a clear statement of partisan working class socialist politics. It is populism bordering on demagogy, but in America, for a successful populist running as an open 'socialist' in independent campaign races, beating Democrats as well as Republicans, is very significant. Sander's successes in House races, which aren't as expensive as Senate races, shows to the Green Party, the Peace and Freedom Party, and to the Labor Party activists that it can be done.
Rather than Greens, Socialists and Communists spreading money and resources running of symbolic --- so-called "educational" candidates for President, Governors, the US and State Senate, with no chance of winning those races --- it is demonstrated by this maverick Congressman, Bernie Sanders, that we can in fact win seats to the House of Representatives.
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Iraq - Sudan - Haiti - U.S. - Science - Polemics - Philosophy - Political Economy - Economics/Politics
