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.
January 6, 2012
Discussion of Herder/ Hegel, Marx and nationalism, romanticism of mysticism.
by, Lil Joe
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The reason that I am responding in detail to Gary’s article is because of his claim that his regurgitation of nationalist lies are attacks on what he calls Marxist methodologies being outdated and displaced by bourgeois nationalism as new, ’disinterested reason’ of the Enlightenment, and as in contrast to a failed ideal of international working class solidarity of cosmopolitan class interests as human interests.
Gary has mixed together several items from distinct categories of logic, history, philosophy and actual anthropology, either naively and inadvertently or deliberately confusing and deceptive, is asserting pure patriarchal-monogamy ideology in that what is implicit in this presentation of the concept of the family isn’t anthropological systems of consanguinity but he is speaking specifically of ideological political patriarchal monarchy but mixing it up with philosophical advocacies as an ideal, then mixing this with natural sexual pairing a natural location of love, then connecting Desmond Morris' concept of family unit and male protector confusing it with the philosophical concept of the State as protection, which he wrongly associates as a natural extension from family to nation.
I am not criticizing people who choose to get married. What I am responding to is the American political conservative ideology of family and nationalism and oppose it being forced on others. I am not opposed to marriage, nor suggesting or opposing any system of consanguinity, patrilineal nor matrilineal, polyandry, polygamy, monogamy, adultery, faithfulness, promiscuity, abstinence, celibacy, homogamy, heterogamy or whatever is up to the consenting individuals involved. I am not opposed to anyone having, believing in or proselytizing their religious beliefs regarding marriage. I'm opposed to anyone presenting myths and especially lies as assertions of facts: here reactionary rhetoric declaring the lie that ‘the family is the cornerstone of the nation’ - by which is of course meant patriarchal monogamous family as ‘natural’, and denouncing those who choose otherwise as contrary to ‘nature’.
December 24, 2011
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Discussing working class struggle, reform and revolution
By Lil Joe
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Lil Joe Reply: The theoretical issues you raise regarding the practical struggles of the working class and of revolution are critical questions.
The various answers to the issues of strategy and tactics for workers, depends upon what one understands to be 'the capitalist system' and what is its present condition, as these are the basis from which the proletarian praxis will compel the political movement, of workers as working class by the dynamic of class struggle toward proletarian revolution.
Every class struggle is a political struggle, a struggle to maintain or ascertain political -i.e. State - power by means of which to govern in its class' interests. In this connection, and in direct response to your challenging question of how do the American workers become a class for itself; an independent, self conscious movement of the working class in a struggle for political power.
I wrote 'workers as working class' in this connection because of the deliberate lack of class-consciousness on the part of wage workers in America is internalised bourgeois patriotic consciousness, owing to socialisation and mis-education in the American bourgeois ideologically saturated culture.
Workers in the US do not regard themselves as a working class, with class interests that are directly opposed to and irreconcilable with capitalist class interests.
Thursday, Dec. 8, 2011
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Analysis of Occupy L.A. work
By Dave
Occupy Wall Street [OWS] that morphed into the national [indeed: international Occupy Movement!] has succeeded at capturing the interest and imagination of the American working class as a class on the move for the first time since the Congress of Industrial Organization [CIO] strike waves in response to the collapse of the market economy [the so-called Great Depression] engendered labor defensive and offensive activities in the formation and fight for recognition of industrial mass unions and the Unemployed Labor League which fought foreclosures and evictions of workers from their homes. Similar conditions exist today - the so-called "Great Recession" and labor unions have been responding as in Wisconsin's mass protests and demonstrations against government attacks on unions, and similarly in Ohio where unions took to the Initiative process to repeal such attacks while the 0ccupy Movement is encouraging and actively putting people back into their foreclosed upon homes.
Working class youth, whether 'college students' or not, unemployed or not, have been inspired by the Wisconsin mass movement, occupations, if you will. But, that is not all. The Wisconsin union uprising itself occured and its methods inspired by the occupation of Tahrir Square demonstrations and labor union general strikes in Egypt, and these part and parcel of general strike waves in Italy, Greece and Spain.
The Occupy Movement in the U.S. has been based on working class interests, notwithstanding the ambigous formulation of working class interests in American cultural lingo as the interests of the 'Ninety-nine percent'. Their statement of grievences included critiques of the capitalist class government of the Democrats and Republicans and especially noted that (OWS that is):
"They [capitalists and their political lackeys] have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions."
"They [capitalists and their political lackeys] determine economic policy..."
November 23, 2011
Commentary on the Black Riders Liberation Party
By Lil Joe
The Bloods and Crips being politicised by the global economic crisis of capitalist commodity production, expressed in the collapsing of this capitalist mode of appropriation -commerce - is resulting in mass unemployment in South Central and Watts, workers in these communities having lost jobs and income and welfare reform of the 90s throwing single moms off public assistance, working people residing in these neighborhoods having their cars repossessed and home foreclosures tossing them to sleep in the cold in the streets. These experiences are shared by working class populations and communities all over the world, including all over the United States.
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Critique by means of Commentary:
"The Black Riders Liberation Party was formed in 1996 by Bloods and Crips in the California Youth Authority college class. As their political understanding grew, especially being inside the belly of the beast, they were able to see up close how oppressive and dehumanizing the system of capitalism is. They recognized the need for a political party that was going to represent the needs and desires of Black people inside Amerikkka's neocolonies, the ghettoes."
Comment:
The Black Riders Liberation Party [BRLP] philosophically and ideologically bases its activities on and has advanced its ideologico-political perspective as 'African intercommunalism'.
November 1 2011
By Adaoma
Introduction:
City Mayors of Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, Oakland, Denver and its state governer, the administors of city and state government, and the chiefs of police directing violence against citizens are not Republican men, but are Asian, Black, Jewish and Hispanic, male and female, and gay. They are a very diverse group. What they all have in common, is that, they are all members of the Democratic Party. They are Democratic Party heads of State and municipalities that are directing the violence against workers in the streets.
Not the proverbial 'white man', nor the 'conservative Repbulicans' can alone be blamed for brutality against workers...but members of the Democratic Party. This puts an end to the illusions of bourgeois 'identity politics' that emerged from ethnic and gender fragmentations that rejected the working class as 'white rcists' and 'middle class' 'white skin priviledged'. What moreover ending delusions of grandeur of ethnic chauvanism and genderism is not just that the State's administrators of violence are 'people of color' and both gender and sexual orientation, but more importantly that it is the working class and the unions that are thoroughly diverse and united on common class interests that are the content of the present revival of social rebellion in response to the war on the working class.
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October 31 - November 1, 2011
Revised from: "Unions Assume A Support Role For Occupy Movement" and Response
By Lil Joe
"Labor unions have become a growing force in the Occupy movement. That shouldn't be surprising since the movement is succeeding at advancing a message unions have been trying to convey for a long time: that the ultra-wealthy are taking more than their fair share. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka delivered a speech on Wall Street shortly after he took office in 2009. "Our economy falters and people suffer," he said then. "But the richest 1 percent — they're living high on the hog."
Subjective anger and denouncing of 'Wall Street fat cats', 'banksters', 'the top 1%', 'the rich', and slogans such as 'feed the needy, not the 'greedy', and 'people before profits', show the success of demogogues appeal to emotions rather than reason and the gullibility of those who don't understand the objective laws of motion of capitalist commodity production by wage labor, proposing proclivities -virtues and vices - of individuals, as opposed to objective analysis of capitalist modes of production and appropriation determining class interests in conflict. Here is Rhodes, leap here!
The issue is not one of who is an 'ultra-wealthy' or 'richest 1 percent' that's 'living high on the hog' [see http://www.cnbc.com/id/44960983/Protests_Target_One_Percent_But_Who_Exactly_Are_They] - the question is not who they are but, in the language of economic category, what they are.
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October 1, 2011
Cornel West Martin Bashir Spar About Obama [9-21-2011]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MpQAzHYQ9U
By Adaoma
In this piece, Cornel West advocates a Progressive Opponent to Obama from the Democratic Party for the upcoming primary. Progressive and Democratic Party are oxymoronic terms.
Senator Bernie Sanders (VT-Independent) has a viable suggestion of strengthening Unions and fighting to maintain and restore collective bargaining.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=k_oRiLPSAzkGiven the actions of the Democratic Party in recent years, the advocate of working class interests is most likely to come from the working class, not enablers of capitalist interests by way of the Democratic Party. In recent years, the Democratic Party and all of their identity politics caucuses, have funded wars, bailed out banks, and proposed trillion dollar cuts in vital programs for poor and working people in this country. The recent actions of Democratic the Party has enabled record profits of billions of dollars as wages decrease.
While the Democratic Party and the Republican argue over taxes for the nation's wealthiest, a bipartisan "lockstep" agreement on slashing funds to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security is being promoted as a jobs bill and infrastructure improvement project. Workers will not be fooled by this red herring.
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October 1, 2011
Bernie Sanders: A Minority of One
By Lil Joe
Bernie Sanders is a sterling example of a socialist who campaigns as such, winning elections by financial means from organized labor and direct working class participation.
What's more important in this connection is the contrast to capitalist financed Democrats and Republican patriotic red herrings, the campaign victories, against both Democrats and Republicans has been as an Independent. Sanders has campaigned on working class interests, openly as a socialist.
Sanders campaigns are for the most part financed by and based on labor union. Union financing of an open socialist has won elections for the first time since the `Red Scare' – anti-communist clauses and McCarthyism.
U.S. politicians being endorsed and financed by labor union officials isn't new nor unique, because other members of Congress and candidates have been and are financially aided by labor unions. What is new is their open association with socialists.
After all, the Teamsters endorsed and aided the Republicans e.g. Nixon and Reagan, and PATCO officials endorsed and aided the campaign of Republicans, e.g. Ronald Reagan – thus the oxymoron “Reagan Democrats”. The AFL-CIO has and continues to endorse, aid and campaign for Democrats – Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey, Carter, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, Obama. The reward for this endorsement and aid from labor has more often than not resulted in labor being kicked in their guts and asses for their brown nosing support for the parties of their class enemies.
The significance is that Sanders' campaigns are for the most part financed by and based on labor unions. Union financing of an open socialist for the first time since the ‘Red Scare’ – anti-communist clauses and McCarthyism.
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September 18, 2011
Citizen Cain's fallacious analogy of taxes and tithes, 9-9-9
By Lil Joe
CAIN: Let's cut to the chase, this is what business people do and politicians don't do. Here's how I would fix this economy, first, eliminate the current tax code. It is a drain on entrepreneurs, it is the biggest barrier that's holding this economy back, and what I would do is to propose a bold plan, which I have already released. I call it my 9-9-9 economic growth plan. Throw out the current tax code, a 9 percent tax on corporate income, our 9 percent tax on personal income and a 9 percent national sales tax. If 10 percent is good enough for God, 9 percent ought to be good enough for the federal government. This will replace all federal income taxes. It'll replace all federal income taxes. It will also replace the payroll tax, so everybody gets some skin in the game. And it replaces the capital gains tax. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/us/politics/08republican-debate-text.html?_r=2&pagewanted=3
First of all, the demagogue that he is, Herman Cain's premise is based upon nothing but demagogic rhetoric. He has neither presented any evidence for his bare assertion that taxes are what is 'holding this economy back'; nor has he defined 'economy'. But, his assertion that the 'tax code is a drain on entrepreneurs', indicates what he means by 'the economy': economic interests are identified as capitalist's interests, since capitalists own the national wealth, the means of production and distribution, the nation's productive forces are capitalist's private possession.
Second, Cain's assertion that existing capitalist taxes paid in the framework of the existing progressive tax code 'is the biggest barrier that's holding this economy back' is a lie. The real barrier to the self-expansion of capital is the inherent contradictions in capitalist commodity production by wage labor, the appropriation and exploitation of wage labor, valorisation in the labor process itself, require capitalists to sell those commodities in order to realize profits to reinvest. The current collapse in the markets, the bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of appropriation, by reaction bankrupts the capitalist industries, both industrial capitalist commodity production and agricultural produced commodity production, and that's what's 'holding this economy back'!
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September 11, 2011
On the "Middle Class" and Modes of Income
by Lil Joe and David
Republican debate of September 7, 2011
The language referencing of a "middle class" that the Republican Mitt Romney Presidential campaign refers to in his Monday Manifesto and against the Obama government at the Republican Presidential Debate, on Wednesday, is to appropriate the rhetoric of the Democrats. Romney’s Presidential campaign aims at the jugglers of the ‘defend the middle class from the Republican crazies attacks’ demagoguery of the Democrats, to displace the Democratic Party itself with that of a Republican man with a plan to defend of the ‘middle class’.
By presenting itself as the ‘true’ defenders of the middle class’ and the Obama economic policy as ‘hurting the middle class’ –against which this ‘middle class’ needs to be ‘saved’ and enabled to ‘prosper’ by a Romney Presidency. Nonetheless, this is a falsehood in either case because there is in reality no such thing as a ‘middle class’ that is ‘under attack’.
The working class is under attack, not consumption lifestyles.
The capitalists actually need workers to purchase the products associated with a 'middle class' consumer pattern, having money to increase demand schedule to meet their supply.
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September 3, 2011
Class Domination Politics and the Democratic Party’s Congressional Black Caucus
Lil Joe from Compton, MarxistThe syllogism: The U.S. government is the political -lackey of capitalist class interests. The Democratic Party is a political party in this government. The Democratic Party is therefore a party of capitalist’s political lackeys.
On this logical basis I recognize Democrats who are Black to be no different than any other Democrat; they are also capitalist’s political lackeys. They prove it by the legislation they put forward and/or vote for or against. Politics are not determined by the content of one’s genetic heritage, the color of one’s skin, but by material social class position and the interests of that class.
As a political partisan of the working class, recognizing the capitalist relations of production to be based on the dominance of the capitalist classes, is the understanding that the economic political interests of capitalists and wage workers is dominate to subordinate in economic relations of production and therefore in politics the trade unions in the Democratic Party are in a power-dependence relationship. The trade unionists in the Democratic Party are toadies.
I have always fought for a Labor Party that is financially based on the trade unions outside and independent of the Democratic Party. The material interests of capital and labor are mutually exclusive. Capitalists appropriate and exploit wage labor, and the quantum of profits and wages are inversely related, therefore the only interests that can be represented politically is either the one or the other, not both. The Democratic Party inasmuch as it is the political lackey of capitalists is the party of the class enemy and therefore is itself the political enemy of the working class.
In that the interests of wage labor and capital are mutually exclusive and the Democratic Party is the political lackey of the capitalist class, the class enemy of the proletariat, the working class and the surplus population of the unemployed, the self-described Black Congressional Caucus, the same as the Hispanic Caucus and the so-called Progressive Caucus are just as much the enemy of the working class as are the Blue Dog Democrats, Conservative and the so-called Moderate Democrats. These are just so many labels of factions of capitalist political lackeys, and are enemies of the working class.
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July 31 , 2011
Tea Party Representative Debates Union Representative
By Adaoma Lil Joe and David
The Ed Show for Wednesday, July 13, 2011
[with guests including: Judson Phillips - creator of Tea Party Nation Corporation, Leo Gerard - president of the United Steelworkers (USW)]
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SCHULTZ: Well, he‘s willing to cut $4 trillion. And your Tea Partiers are standing in the way of it, because you won‘t give up any more revenue from the wealthiest Americans. I mean, Mr. Phillips, that‘s where we are tonight.
PHILLIPS: It‘s not the wealthiest Americans. It‘s entrepreneurs. It‘s small businesses. It‘s the people who create the jobs in this country.
The gentleman said there‘s a job crisis. Yes, there is a job crisis. You want to create jobs, let‘s make it easier for people to create jobs.
Let‘s cut the taxes. Let‘s cut the regulations.
GERARD: Ed, let me calm down and make this one point. We just extended the Bush tax cuts last year. Coming on the heels of 10 years of those massive tax cuts that have helped create this huge deficit and they haven‘t created any jobs. Trickle down doesn‘t trickle down.
All it does is line the pockets of the already rich and powerful. And what we need now, is we need jobs, we need a jobs bill. If people were going back to work, the deficit would come down.
SCHULTZ: All right. Gentlemen—
PHILLIPS: I‘m just curious who you think creates jobs? Who creates jobs?
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIPS: Or do you create jobs? I think the rich people of this country do create jobs
Let‘s sample people. Create jobs. You don‘t create jobs. You create a lot of hot air, but that‘s about it.
GERARD: Not the billionaires that are sitting on a trillion dollars on their bank accounts and not spending it.
PHILLIPS: What did these people do, win the lottery out of the blue? No, they got out there, they became successful and they created jobs.
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43755972/ns/msnbc_tv-the_ed_show/
Lets first of all present the issues in scientific terms and dismiss the demogoguery of the capitalist partisans flowery rhetoric of referring to capitalists as 'entrepreneurs' and 'job creators'! Phillips, shameless partisan of big capital that he is, knows full well that 'small business' - i.e. the petty bourgeoisie - is dependent upon the big bourgeoisie, i.e. agricultural, industrial and finance capital to provide the wherewithal to supply their business operations.
Moreover, it isn't the quantity of money taxes appropriated from the petty-bourgeois by the State, that are driving the petty bourgeois 'small business' out of 'business', but is the domination of markets by big monopoly capitalists that is doing this, eliminating the petty bourgeoisie as a class.
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July 15, 2011
Re: [laborpartypraxis] Minimum wage and class struggle in Nigeria
Comrades,
Quite happy about Lill Joe sharing perspectives on the on-going class struggle in Nigeria.Just to add by circulating the leaflet being circulated by the SWL & which is receiving enthusiastic acceptance in the protest marches & demonstrations presently ongoing here.
Vinceremos! We shall win!
Baba Aye
The Chair, SWL
Struggle for new minimum wage; struggle against capitalism!
Once again Nigerian workers march to the barricades to fight against the country’s ruling elites and their state, for a better life. The struggle for the implementation of the N18,000 minimum wage is a struggle for economic reforms that are meant to improve the living standards of workers even if just minimally. Every mass action of workers for the improvement of our lives, particularly general strikes, is a struggle against capitalism.
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July 16, 2011
Regarding: Pessimism deepens as economic concerns rise: Reuters/Ipsos poll
by Lil Joe
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Pessimism and optimism are irrelevant terms, as they are subjective and without empirical proof neither the one or the other. For instance, the analogy usually used to 'define' pessimism v optimism is whether one subjectively regards a glass of water "half empty": pessissimism or "half full": optimism.
This 'optimism' versus 'pessimism' ideological mumbo jumbo derives from Ronald Reagan's rheoric, when referring to the wreckage of the economy in the 1980s and the objective falure of voodoo economics 'supply-side'/ aka 'trickle down' economics of the pseudo science of the 'Laffer Curve', Reagan 'the optimist' side, where others see dark, ominous clouds, he sees a silver lining, or where 'pessimists' see the glass half empty, 'optimists' sees it 'half full'.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=reagan+optimism&aq=0p&aqi=p-p1g9&aql=f&oq=reagan
http://www.google.com/search?q=reagan+optimism+half+empty+half+full&btnG=Search&hl=en&source=hp&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=This analogy is swept aside by empirical analysis of the facts in progress: if one begins with a full glass of water and, is in the process of drinking it, looking to see how much has been drank from it thus far at the half way mark, it is half empty. On the contrary, if one is in the process of pouring water into the glass, at the half way mark, it is half full.
If you are stranded in the desert and your canteen is half empty, whether you regard yourself 'optimistic' and regard it as half full, the fact remains that when you take the next few gulps of life giving water from it, it is now less than half full, it is now three/quarters empty! You may still be 'optimistic', or rather delusional, and now prefer to tell yourself it is not three'quarters empty but one/quarter full. But, after the final few gulps of water has been drunk, it is fully empty! That is an empirical fact.
Economic facts are external to the subjective wishes and delusional views of individuals. What has to be analysed are the empirical data of economic trends, not some nebulous pseudo-scientific lingo regarding 'consumer optimism' v 'consumer pessimism'.
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July 9, 2011
PROGRESSIVE DEMOCRATS
by Lil Joe
Given the objective character of human physical existence and behavior, notwithstanding delusions and illusions, objective affirmations and deceptions, deliberate or the result of ignorance and gullibility of self-consciousness, individuals are part and parcel of group consciousness. Analysis of human behavior must be objective - i.e. scientific, empirical analysis of empirical behavior of individuals and of groups of individuals who are in similar or conflicted situations, empirical analysis does not classify the individual or group - social individuals - by what she or he, or her and his personal opinion of themselves or the self-consciousness of the group. Rather, what an individual human being and group do for a living, the material conditions of life that compel those individuals to do and think of themselves determine his and her socioeconomic category in which he, she and they exist. You are what you do.
The State is the State, the empirical fact thereof is that it is an instrument of class domination by repressive violence, police, courts, prisons ... Governments are in the management of material violence that function as its 'legitimate' power, together with its propagandists that use ideology of divine right or legislative authority to declare or legislate laws that make State violence legitimate. (See Max Weber's Politics as Vocation @ http://www.ne.jp/asahi/moriyuki/abukuma/weber/lecture/politics_vocation.html
I am in this article dealing with the State of the United States, in which the political lackeys of the capitalist classes - the Democrats, as well as the Republicans - dominate the bureaucratic -military State machine of management of it, the military, court and prison structures with a constant staff and officer corp, the empirical apparatus of domination and repression. Whereas, on the other hand, the faces in high places of the visible Government, the members of Congress, the office of the President, and so on are, are variable, i.e. change, as results of elections.
Yet, what must be clearly recognised is that the classes that dominate the U.S. economy, which possess the material productive forces, and thereby the means of life, are members of capitalist classes, landlords and government, and that this class ownership does not change.
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July 6, 2011
A Reply to Richard Trumka's 'Stuck in a Ditch'
By Lil Joe and Dave Moros
The issue isn't the abstraction of 'peoplepower', because in the industrial capitalist democracies there are not 'peoples' independent of relations of production, but individuals comprising classes.
In the United States, today, just as in every other industrial capitalist society, it is the capitalist ruling classes that have monopolised political power. In opposition to capitalist class power, what is to be expected from the AFL-CIO, as the economic representative of labor power as a class of workers is workers power.
Every class struggle is a political struggle in which the shock of body against body is the warfare of class against class, the capitalistic appropriating classes in class conflict against the rising appropriated laboring classes. This is the historical logical premise predicated upon which our polemic against the AFL-CIO bureaucracy, that is at the same time as members of the Democratic Party are political representatives of the capitalist class in the working class unions.
We do not regard Trumka an isolated individual worker outside the class struggle, but a product of those class battles. Were he just an individual outside capital relations of production his being a Democrat would be irrelevant. But, this is not the case.
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June 12, 2011
Re: AFL-CIO Welcomes Labor Campaign for Single Payer
By David Moros
Calling single-payer "the only way to cure the healthcare problem," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, a leading member of the Democratic Party, as such has welcomed political partisans of the Democratic Party delegates to the Labor Campaign for Single Payer National Meeting at the AFL-CIO in Washington, DC on Friday, June 3. "Representatives Conyers, McDermott and Kucinich also addressed the meeting..."
The Democratic Party when the 'majority' in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, as well as the Presidential administration of Barack Obama, has proved by their 'negotiations' with Republican minority in both chambers, on their own accord as a Party, rejected to even so much as to present legislation for a single payer system.
Lest we forget, it is to be recalled that it was as the party majority, Democrats in the House, Senate and 'oval office' of the Presidency, that they themselves proved that their 'constituency' and their loyalty is to the Insurance companies, and 'big pharma' capitalist interests that finance their campaigns, and not to workers and labor union's so-called 'special interests'.
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June 2,2011
In Need of a Socialist Analysis and a Labor Party
by Lil Joe, David and Adaoma
What is glaring, though one may not have noticed, in AFL-CIO's President Richard Trumka's speech at the National Press Club, Washington DC on May 20 2011, is that there is no mention by him of President Barack Obama. (Text and video below). No mention and therefore no criticism of this Administration that the AFL-CIO endorsed, wasted tons of union wages dues and thousands of hours of members time promoting and campaigning for Democrats.
The AFL-CIO's bureaucracy in the Democratic Party has to accept responsibility for having endorsed, helped fund and campaign for it. The absence of Obama's name in Trumka's speech is an indication that the AFL-CIO is leaving its options open - that it may not support the Democratic Party this coming Presidential election in 2012.
Congress, and Republicans in particular were criticized for its 'canvas of cruelty', toward poor and working people. But, by omission AFL-CIO's president neglecting the mention of the Democratic Party is objectively to remove it from the same criticism of the Democratic Party. Yet, the Democratic Party's bipartisanship, in both the House of Representatives and Senate, has resulted in anti-worker policies.
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Sunday, May 22, 2011
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DEMOCRATIC PARTY FACTION FIGHTS
by Adaoma
Whether or not anyone agrees with Cornel West's criticisms of President Obama or stands with those who criticize West for doing so is irrelevant. What is relevant is not a critique of Barack Obama's personality , but a critique of the Democratic Party for which he stands, in general, and a critique of capitalism by which both the Democratic and Republican Party enable multinational corporations to continue exploitation of the working class, specifically.
Cornel West and his detractors either participated in the endorsement, campaign, support, publicity, and/or the election of the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. They are all, therefore, responsible for US domestic and foreign policies, funding of the wars, soaring of profits, scarceness of employment and the state of workers, in as much as they endorse the Democratic Party.
From the corporate bail outs, to the funding of wars, to the tax cuts of record profit-making companies, to the cutting-off of public sector workers, to the cutting back of funds for education, elderly, the poor, the sickly, and the student, it is clear that Democrats in every area of national and local government worked in bipartisanship (with Republicans).
This is a squabble amongst Democrats over personality. Obama's and West's. This media blitz over Obama/West is a rant between factions of the Democratic Party.
May 20, 2011
Re: [laborpartypraxis] Request to Laborpartypraxis Members
***
2011 has reached nearly a full decade of the existence of our egroup -
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Laborpartypraxis.yahoogrooups.com. It started off with a general list of
objectives of the time, practical working class agenda items to draw
similar minded critical thinking. If without revolutionary theory,
can be no revolutionary movement, and the working class is the
revolutionary class, insomuch as the existence of revolutionary ideas
presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class, the working class'
politics cannot become revolutionary politics unless and until it
evolves critical thinking.
There are individual and groups members from various political and
ideological tendencies and representatives here that are from
organizations that otherwise wouldn't be on the same list. That is
great, because if no idea or dogma is sacred, then everyone is free to
post from their perspective without fear of being denounced as heretic,
renegade, revisionist ...
Tue May 17, 2011
NATIONAL LABOR-COMMUNITY CONFERENCE TO DEFEAT THE CORPORATE AGENDA AND FIGHT FOR A WORKING PEOPLE'S AGENDA
Working people across the country - from Wisconsin and Ohio to New York, Oregon, and California -- are facing unprecedented attacks by corporations and the rich with the help of the federal, state and local politicians that they fund.
The corporate agenda is clear: It is to bust unions and cut workers' pay and benefits -- both in the private and public sectors. It is to erode and privatize Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. It is to dismantle the public sector and social services by denying funds for job creation, education, health care, environmental protection, and rebuilding the infrastructure. It is to ensure that taxes on the wealthy are constantly lowered while the bite on workers and the poor is constantly increased. It is to perpetuate U.S. wars and occupations whenever it serves the interests of the multinationals. It is to divide the working class by race, gender, national origin, religion, and sexual orientation. It is also to limit and restrict constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties. The list goes on.
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Tue May 17, 2011
CORNEL WEST WEIGHS IN- PART 1
By Adaoma
ANWAR SALANDY: From researching your work, Dr. West, it appears you had a public disagreement with Al Sharpton, another activist. What was the nature of that disagreement?
DR. CORNEL WEST: Well, Rev. Sharpton and I, we go all the way back, I've got his book right up there, which is, "Go Tell Pharaoh", which is a powerful title, guess he's been tellin' Pharaoh for a long time, now he's pretty close with our dear brother, Barack Obama, who's in Pharaoh's office. Now, that doesn't really Barack an automatic Pharaoh, but, for those of us concerned with poor and working people, the powers that be do not make poor and working people a priority. That, for me is a certain type of a definition of a pharaoh-like figure.
But, no, I have a deep love for Al Sharpton, a deep respect for the brother. I was just a little afraid that he was allowing himself to be used by the Obama Administration as a cover for some of the issues that need to be head-on: Prison-Industrial-Complex, dilapidated housing, disgraceful school systems, homeowners loosing their homes in foreclosurings. Those are not priorities.
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Saturday May 14, 2011
"Shared sacrifice" "shared prosperity" "shared responsibility"?
By David Moros
To meet this challenge, our leaders came together three times during the 1990s to reduce our nation's deficit. They forged historic agreements that required tough decisions made by the first President Bush and President Clinton; by Democratic Congresses and a Republican Congress. All three agreements asked for shared responsibility and shared sacrifice, but they largely protected the middle class, our commitments to seniors, and key investments in our future. *** http://www.politicalruminations.com/2011/04/transcriptpresident-obama-speech-on-\ fiscal-policy.html
With all this talk about "shared sacrifice", "shared prosperity", "shared responsibility" let's make clear where what's being "shared" and "sacrificed" comes from and who's responsible for "prosperity".
The shill cry and phrase mongoring, from Barack Obama to MSNBC's Ed Shults, about "protecting the 'the middle class'", is nothing but demogogic euphemism used by them to divert from the realities of the producing working class.
As political and ideological representatives of the appropriating capitalist classes the mentioned Democratic and Republican Presidents, Senators and Congresspersons represent the classes that derive their profits from the exploitation of the working classes - young and old - "seniors' is not an economic category. "Inventments" are not for "our future" as workers, but the future purchase and exploitation wage labour by and for the the future profits of future capital investors - young and old alike.
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Fri May 13, 2011 10:01 pm
Senate Grilling of Big Oil CEO's over subsidies
By Adaoma
Big Oil was grilled in 2005, 2008 by the Senate. Since it did not lead to reforms then why would it lead to reform in 2011? It does not follow. And, why should it lead to reform. Senate is being lobbyed with millions and millions of oil dollars to keep policies just as they have been. Its campaign time, posturing time, promising time, shamming time. This is the time when workers are being fooled into voting, once again, for Democrats...or Republicans...no difference. For Congress, lobby money trumps the interests of workers. It may change when workers represent our own interests. Congress does not represent workers interests.
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Monday April 18, 2011
On Labor Productivity Profit and Employment
Adaoma writes:
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Greetings All:
The profitability of corporations does not translate to jobs. While gutting public sector jobs and services to workers, the representatives of international and domestic capital, Republicans and Democrats, respectively, are giving tax cuts to wealthy corporations. These politicians attempted to justify doing so by saying these capitalists are the 'job generators', when, as it turns out, all these capitalists are generating are profits, huge profits.
While tax cuts to these wealthy corporations are said to be used as 'incentives' to create jobs, these corporations are cutting jobs and freezing worker forces. Corporations are making more profits by increasing production and paying fewer wages, so that record profits co-exist with record unemployment.
"The private sector has not only been the chief source of massive dislocation in the labor market, but it is also a beneficiary. Over the past two years, productivity has soared while unit labor costs have plummeted. By imposing layoffs and wage concessions, U.S. companies are supplying their own demand for a tractable labor market. Private sector union membership is the lowest on record. (7) Deutsche Bank Chief Economist Joseph LaVorgna notes that profits-per-employee are the highest on record, adding, "I think what investors are missing - and even the Federal Reserve - is the phenomenal health of the corporate sector." (8)
April 1, 2011
THE IRRELEVANCY OF IDENTITY AND SKIN POLITICS
By Adaoma
While the world watched the US and allied forces invade Libya, an article entitled "America's 1st Black President Invades Africa" was posted to one of e-forums that is frequented by Africans and African immigrants and some discussion followed.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NIgerianWorldForum/message/101021
This provocative title caught my attention because it seemed to suggest a contradiction. The contradiction was that the first Black President that had come to power in a nation built on the brutalized backs of African slaves, segregated sharecroppers, tradesmen and wage workers lynched and disenfranchised in struggle for civil rights... that the first Black President would/could, invade Africa, a continent ravished of its human and natural resources by colonialist, imperialists and capitalist.
Under the racialist framework that the title suggested, this would be a contradiction. But often identity politics presents contradictions where there are none.
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February 13, 2011
Revolution as class warfare: Marx's Civil War in France, the Paris Commune
By Lil Joe
By way of Introduction to American workers concerning the empirical existence of classes and for these worker's to understand the concept of middle class as it is understood in Europe, the 'bourgeoisie', as distinct from both the landed aristocracy and the proletariat - working classes and toiling masses: to understand this language as it is used by Marx's analysis of "Civil War in France" as conscious class warfare, class struggle.
This is needed because, as we shall see in this FYI, the transmitters of "American culture" have deliberately, via the illusion promoted as 'American exceptionalism', cut the US from the rest of the world and from one generation to the next deliberately has confused the concept of class, which in empirical actuality are empirical universals that are varifiable economic categories, to mushy phychologica attitudes and issues of so-called 'status', lifestyle, neighborhood in which a person lives, or pseudo-economic 'categories' such as 'Joe Sex Pack' vs the Wall Street 'Fat Cats'.
More often than not, the Democrats and their media representatives call the working class a 'middle class'. This is also arbitrary and misleading. In the 'middle' of what? Middle income? Well, in the United States, there are capitalist billionaires, and there are top athletes, entertainers and propagandists who get paid millions of dollars annually. The executives of capital get tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars and stock options as payment and bonuses, every year. By this, the upper most 'category' would be a median of hundreds of millions of dollars if not billions at the top, and zero income of homeless vagabonds at the bottom. Thus, these being the parameters of top and bottom and high and low, the American so-called 'middle income' individuals would not be at $250,000 a year, as the Democrats assert, but middle income workers to be placed 'mid-way' between billions at the top and zero at the bottom would have to be making a median income of at least $500,000,000 a year, if not more. This is obviously not the case, but would in fact be an absurd assertion.
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