And the Communist Manifesto* (*See Notes and 3 Appendixes)
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Rough Draft – 1/5/2021 Uniting the Poor! and the Communist Manifesto* (*See Notes and 3 Appendixes) Introduction “You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh's court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that's the beginning of getting out of slavery.” - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top” (1968) “In its struggle for power the proletariat has no other weapon but organization.” -- V. I. Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward (1904) 1 One speaks of generals without an army, but in reality it is easier to form an army than to form generals. So much is this true that an already existing army is destroyed if it loses its generals, while the existence of a united group of generals who agree among themselves and have common aims soon creates an army even where none exists. -- Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (1930s) The masses in any given place are generally composed of three parts, the relatively active, the intermediate and the relatively backward. The leaders must therefore be skilled in uniting the small number of active elements around the leadership and must rely on them to raise the level of the intermediate elements and to win over the backward elements. A leading group that is genuinely united and linked with the masses can be formed only gradually in the process of mass struggle, and not in isolation from it -- Mao Tse-tung, Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership (1943) This paper compares the main conclusions of the pamphlet, Five Ingredients in the Poor Organizing the Poor (Appendix 1) with those of the Marxist classic, the booklet, Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in 1848. The comparison is being done in the present context in which the United States and the entire globe are undergoing an unprecedented and the most comprehensive technological revolution in human history. This micro-electronic technology revolution is colliding with and undermining the very nature of the capitalist economic system. This technology revolution is fundamentally different from the two major industrial revolutions of the steam engine and electricity globalizing the two basic antagonistic classes of the capitalist society analyzed in the Manifesto. In comparison the pamphlet, Five Ingredients was based on an analysis continuing the fundamental characterizations of the capitalist economic system made by the Manifesto to the new qualitative and quantitative developments of today. In other words, the pamphlet is a beginning response to the newly emerging social and political consequences of the unprecedented and globally comprehensive micro-electronic technological revolution. This new period of departure in world history has also been called the new “Digital Age” of the “Information revolution.” The Communist Manifesto summed up the history of societies stating that after the pre-written history of primitive tribal communal societies it was a “history of class struggles.” It pointed out how in the era of capitalism the struggles of many classes were broking down into simply two hostile camps, one consisting of the Bourgeois class, the capitalist ruling class and the other of the Proletarian class, which is the revolutionary dispossessed or property-less class. “By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, 2 the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.” –Note of the Communist Manifesto These two hostile camps of capitalism as of the mid-19th century mainly encompassed Western Europe and North America. This early analysis also accurately predicted the continuing breaking down of the structural foundation of capitalist economic society into two antagonistic classes each an enemy of the other. In doing this, the Communist Manifesto, which remains today one of the world’s leading and best-selling booklet, still stands as a preeminent and instructive application of Sun Tzu’s over 2500 years’ historically confirmed dictum. Today in 2020 both camps have become globalized. The arising life and death struggles of this poor and homeless mass worldwide is being thrown against the organized violence of the state apparatuses, which protect the capitalist profit-making and poverty-producing system. Poor And Dispossessed – The Revolutionary Social Class Force Today “The dispossessed of this nation -- the poor, both white and Negro -- live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against the injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty. There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life... " we will be recruiting three thousand of the poorest citizens from ten different urban and rural areas to initiate and lead a sustained, massive, direct-action movement in Washington. Those who choose to join this initial three thousand, this nonviolent army, this "freedom church" of the poor, will work with us for three months to develop nonviolent action skills." --The Trumpet of Conscience (1967) In its analysis of how capitalist society is breaking down into two basic antagonistic classes, the Communist Manifesto identifies the most revolutionary class force. That is that socio-economic force destined to abolish the entire capitalist private property system itself, that is, who the Manifesto calls “the gravediggers of capitalism,” the proletariat or the exploited and oppressed class of the property-less. It states, “But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians… 3 “Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product… “All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air… “… The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association… What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” V.I. Lenin, in his essay, “Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism” goes on to affirm this strategic conclusion pointing out that, “People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self- deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realize that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society, which surrounds us, the forces, which can— and, owing to their social position, must—constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organize those forces for the struggle.” The 19th century industrial technological revolution gave rise to two basic and antagonistic industrial classes abolishing the old classes and strata of the feudal Middle Ages. The Communist Manifesto scientifically summed these revolutionary developments showing how modern society was breaking down into two camps of two hostile classes, the industrial based bourgeoisie and industrial proletariat. At that time these advanced developments were limited to western Europe and North America. Today the latter 20th and early 21st centuries micro-electronics technological revolution, which increasing colliding with and chronically destabilizing the modern capitalistic society itself encompassing the entire globe. This is resulting in major shifts in the capitalist economy today, which involve fundamental changes in the composition of its workforce. These shifts are 4 causing an unheard of accumulation, concentration, and centralization of wealth and big capital that is increasingly global and mobile. And they are replacing the industrial proletariat with the increasing employment of computers and robots. In other words, we are witnessing the continuing growth of a de-industrialized, increasingly impoverished and economically excluded section of today’s proletariat. The social consequences are dislocating, deadly, and socially explosive. The poor today are unlike that of yesterday, that is, the poor of ancient slavery and feudalism nor that of early industrial pauperism. The costs and productivity of the labor-power of today’s poor and property-less are having to increasingly compete with the rapidly decreasing production costs and efficiency of labor- replacing computers and robotics. Thus this new and growing section of the world’s workforce is being transformed from a surplus reserve industrial army to an increasingly superfluous industrial waste.