I should add in reference to earlier statements that we welcome your participation here. In regards to your background, your present circumstances don't seem all that bourgeois. You recognize the nature of the system and seem more than capable of making a conscious choice to take the side of the working class against capitalism. Given the present small numbers of militants, in the US as elsewhere, we do need all the assistance we can get.

Sandman

Your final question has touched on something we have been discussing here in the UK. Marx did not leave a picture of a future communist society as a deliberate choice. It was not some theoretical faliure. On the contrary he was convinced that revolution was a practical movement which would face real issue and it would be up to the working class at that time to solve them. That is why he did not leave a blueprint. He did however leave principles and these are the founding ideas for any conceptions we might have. Some of us think we should try to present a vision of the kind of society we envisage in order to inspire people. Others (the majority I would say but we have had no vote since it is not that kind of issue) think this could be dangerous and potentially misleading (as if we had all the answers). Obviously we envisage a society in which there is no money, no compulsion to work but a general will to work for the benefit of the community, with no standing armies, national frontiers or classes. The state will have withered away and there will be no permanent professional politicians but a system of rotating delegation from the local community to the global level to coordinate production and distribution on a world scale in order to banish famine and shortages. This will only happen in the process of a revolution which will alter human conceptions (which obviously are today dominated by a capitalist agenda and mores).

Put like this it sounds easy but Marx did not think it would be. I don't know where you get the "spontaneous melting away of capitalism" in Marx (unless that is your interpretation of what he wrote in the Communist Manifesto) but try the German Ideology and see what he says about revolution there. One thing for sure is that you are right - we will have to fight for it - not only against the plutocrats of the system but also against those on the traditional left who have distorted Marxism into a statist ideology. Fortunately the movement to restore the revolutionary core of Marxism has been growing over the last few decades (and that includes the USA) . We have a long way to go (I can hear my comrades saying "and that is putting it mildly!") but the current crisis and the growing recognition of what responsible revolutionaries should do is a more hopeful sign than we have had for thirty years. Despite your self-deprecation people like yourself have a lot to contribute to this as your posts here already show.

I self identified as a Communist, and now I am 24..... still in full rejection of capitalism

If you're objectively a capitalist even a small one I find this hard to believe if not completely hypocritical.

It's all well and good having a proletarian outlook without being one but then the question arises, what if the exploited class rejects such people? I'm certainly tempted to. Is it a weakness on my part?

...I wonder if Marxism can make me some money?

Maybe there is a wider issue here.

Recently the CWO has had a little internal wrangling (minor) re this

lrb.co.uk

A quote from it....

We have an affluent bourgeoisie which is international but which in the Western world forms the majority of the population...........

IIRC certain Maoist groups say something similar, the first world workers are a reactionary bloc with their imperialist bourgeois allies...

And there's some material basis for it.

Benefits, pensions, a host of money not springing from the salary mean many workers adopt national/racial outlooks.

Bank products like bonds , private pensions, ISAs held in shares are all part of the working class experience.

Just as having a capitalistic mindset.

However, this deliberate attempt at papering the class gap is weak, does not remove the fact of net exploitation and host to extraction of surplus value.

It is a temporary situation. Wealth polarisation/concentration, deterioration of w/class conditions will only advance as the long running crisis which has exhausted speculative and debt alternatives reluctantly has to dismantle the social safety structures which support w/class collaboration.

The moment of the comfortable, integrated first world proletariat, to whatever extent it was ever a reality, is fading into history as the crisis reproduces its antithesis- class war.

It might be appropriate to mention that the working class, those exploited as a part of the process of capitalist production is a category much larger than radical bourgeois reformism envisions. Is a truck driver not proletarian, after all he isn't actually producing commodities in a large factory with 5,000 other workers? Nevertheless his labor still is a part of the production process, and a key part, without which the distribution of commodities would be impossible. Likewise, many workers in "service" industries, like restaurant workers, do in fact produce commodities. The narrowness of definition of the working class is the reflection of a reliance on bourgeois categories to define the revolutionary class.

Many industries still remain in "first-world" capitalist metropoles out of necessity. The process of deindustrialization only continues so long as labor hasn't been devalued adequately to make it exploitable once more. In the "first world" US there isn't a whole lot of "labor aristocracy" left, workers may or may not be more or less under the sway of dominant ideology, but it is hard to argue that they are really embourgoeoisified when their wages and purchasing power have been declining for forty years. The labor aristocrat argument used by Third-Worldists, particularly from Maoism doesn't really hold up in the face of what we see before us in the developments within capitalist society today, perhaps forty years ago it did. Consider that today the labor in coal fields in West Virginia has become cheap enough to start hiring workers again. Obama himself hailed the hiring of 300 workers at Master-Lock in Milwaukee as his example of "insourcing", that is to say paying labor a wage equivalent to that found in China in purchasing power.

Proletarianization is an ongoing process where once hallowed professions become nothing more than the skilled-labor for the capitalist class. Stalinists at one time, considered a proletarian as one who can only be worker in a large factory who is also a member of a labor union. Right there, they alienate in their theory most of the proletariat from its own social class. Likewise, a capitalist is one who controls capital and profits from wage slavery. Often a capitalist in the minds of radical left-reformists has traditionally been boiled down into the top-hatted cigar smoking guy from the New Masses and the board game Monopoly.

Workers excluded from the production process are classically considered a part of the reserve army of labor. They don't stop being workers. Ironically this reserve army of labor is so necessary to the capitalists for shoring up falling rates of profit that the worker who has no work is as important to the production process as the worker who does have a job. Without the unemployed mass of commodified labor there would be no primary mechanism to keep the costs associated with variable capital down. Without this systemic unemployment there wouldn't be a "labor market".

Of the embryonic forms of the dictatorship of the proletariat there are two initial beginning glimpses offered in the experience of the Paris Commune and the Soviets in revolutionary Russia. I would argue that they show that workers can organize themselves in a revolutionary situation along more than one line. The Soviets after all were regional bodies, and the factory committees existed in the workplaces where workers were concentrated. There is no reason why workers can't create their own radical rupture with capitalist society and form their own "dictatorship" workers over the bourgeois class and start to forge a society without social classes, all without having to be employed at an enormous factory like Ford's River Rouge plant.

Workers in their struggles are often held back by their own learned behaviors and misconceptions, their belief in their citizenship, their nation, their republic, their Gods. It isn't hard for the bourgeoisie to derail a struggle after having had so much practice at it, while the workers struggle to regain their consciousness naively and have to relearn from every mistake. I have seen a situation where workers who had the collective strength present to do so could've taken a struggle much farther, but did not because of the radical and liberal reformists of the bourgeoisie always act to steer a struggle off the class terrain and into the arms of the bourgeoisie. Three choices present themselves to those who are becoming politically conscious, to not try and thus already be defeated, to try and fail, or to succeed. I would prefer to take the last two options. I hope some of this makes sense and holds to the topic of discussion. My apologies for running on.

Back in April radical chains wrote "It's all well and good having a proletarian outlook without being one but then the question arises, what if the exploited class rejects such people? I'm certainly tempted to. Is it a weakness on my part." Why should the exploited class reject someone who has a proletarian outlook? The more people who appreciate and endorse the proletarian cause, the more successful the revolution is likely to be. People from a bourgeois background who embrace proletarian class consciousness are okay; it's people from a working class background who defend bourgeois ideology, like the Freikorps in Germany, in 1919, who murdered Luxembourg and Liebknecht and many others, who are to be rejected. We need all the fully conscious support we can muster.

I don't think he did since he adopted the proletariat. Class origins are not necessarily a definition of class allegiances although most of the CWO are the other way round. The progeny of the proletariat who have been educated by the bourgeoisie but refused the temptation of managerial posts.

And I'm not sure that you are right about the Freikorps either Charlie. 250,000 ex-officers with guns came back from France and Belgium and they seem to have been the backbone of the Freikorps.

Even those who were originally from a lower class background were in any case under the control of that officer class.

But (and I forgot to acknowledge this) what Pantaloons has to say on the subject (I hope he keeps "running on" some more) seems more important.

Well the "third-worldist" position in a nutshell is derived from the idea that the workers in the "first-world" form a "labor aristocracy" that benefits from the exploitation of "third-world" labor. The term "labor aristocracy" was lifted from Lenin who only was speaking of a specific layer of priviledged workers and never meant it to deny the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. Mao's three worlds theory was a really strong theory in the wake of the political implosion of Stalinism. "Anti-revisionist" Stalinists looked to China and Mao as an example. The workers of the "first world" turned away from Stalinism and Stalinist intellectuals in the wake of Stalin's purges, the Hitler-Stalin Pact and finally Kruschov's rebuke of his Stalinist predecessors. Ex-stalinist intellectuals like Gorz, responded by abandoning the working class as a political subject. The ensuing political search for another revolutionary subject led some to look to students and identity politics as a agent of revolutionary change, while others looked to nationalist revolts in the "third world" as being the vanguard of a new revolution.

Often the third worldist position points to Lenin's referring to a certain layer of workers in the first world as forming a labor aristocracy as the starting point for their theory, thereby giving it the benediction of Lenin in the process. However, the nationalist anti-colonial uprisings of the fifties and sixties were historically bound to the collapse of the old imperialist order led by the European bourgeoisie and tied invariably to the new post-WWII world order tied to the USA and the USSR. In the wake of the decline and collapse of the USSR nationalist movements proliferated and took on more and more the character of armies of a biblical apocalypse rather than anything liberating. It is a point of view that rejects a historical materialist understanding of imperialism in that it claims that a country in the "third world" can somehow remove itself from the world imperialist order. Instead the marxist view of imperialism was entirely vindicated in that in the epoch of imperialism a state that is subject to the great centers of imperialism can only move from one imperialist bloc to another.

In the "first world" the third worldist position tends to adopt the struggles of minorities as the struggles of a third-world-within-the-first-world. While castigating all the workers that ignore them as white supremacists or labor aristocrats. Not only did these first-world maoists largely reject the working class, they tend to view peasants as a more revolutionary class while viewing the proletariat with suspicion. In practice the Maoists didn't really do anything different from any other leftists. In the US the Maoist/Castroist/Third Worldist tendencies grew out of the explosion of SDS in the seventies. They engaged in the same reformists movements as the old Stalinists engaged in. They worked within the same "labor aristocratic" AFL-CIO unions as the Stalinists and Social Democrats before them did. Rhetorically it is simply a way of dismissing the working class whenever that working class doesn't respond to their radical reformist and bourgeois idealism. Classically, the third worldist position claims a vanguard role for the peasantry of the capitalist perifery and looks on the proletariat of capitalist heartlands as having a supporting role at best.

Stalinism was popular particularly among the bourgeoisie of the "Third World", like the Castro brothers in Cuba for example, precisely because it promised them a greater level of capitalist development under the auspices of the state and more control over the capital within the borders of their impoverished bourgeois fiefdoms.

Apologies for lack of imput on the forum due to not having internet at home.

I am trying to get by without a landline, I'm not earning much so expenses are cut back.

For some reason the leftcom site is pretty difficult to use on the local library computers, most other sites do not share the problems.

I think the implications of the Maoist or Third worldist perspectives which lump 'first world workers' with their ruling class as one reactionary bloc are pretty obvious, reinforcing a socialism in one country or bloc falsification.

Accepting that the proletariat of the advanced countries is hopelessly lost, rather than the attempt to create an international revolutionary party and the declaration of a relatively simultaneous global revolution as the only way forward corresponding to Marx's theories, instead a path involving the pursuit of capitalist development in China and elsewhere is promoted.

In our perspective, Capitalism is forced to attack the conditions of the workforce everywhere due to its profitability crisis and the erosion of the material underpinnings of class collaboration will result in rising levels of working class resistance which will offer opportunities for the injection of revolutionary perspectives.

The alternative is devaluation of capital to the extent that only generalised imperialist war offers, which we also consider to be a possible outcome of the crisis process.