Thursday, October 26, 2006

Lumpenproletariat

In Marx's time they were called the Lumpenproletariat......

How Globalization Is Creating a New European Underclass

Rather, what stand out are the symptoms of intellectual neglect. The poor of today watch television for half the day. These days, television producers even refer to what they call "Underclass TV." The new proletariat eats a lot of fatty foods and he enjoys smoking and drinking -- a lot. About 8 percent of Germans consume 40 percent of all the alcohol sold in the country. While he may be a family man, his families are often broken. And on Election Day, he casts a protest vote for the extreme left or right wing party, sometimes switching quickly from one to the other.

But the main thing that sets the modern poor apart from the industrial age pauper is a sheer lack of interest in education. Today's proletariat has little education and no interest in obtaining more. Back in the early days of industrialization, the poor joined worker associations that often doubled as educational associations. The modern member of the underclass, by contrast, has completely shunned personal betterment.

He likewise makes little effort to open the door to the future for his own children. Their language skills are as bad as their ability to concentrate. The rising rate of illiteracy is matched by the shrinking opportunities to integrate the under class. The Americans, not ones to mince words, call them "white trash."


And the old debate on whether they are revolutionary or reactionary returns.
The Philosophical Roots of the Marx-Bakunin Conflict

The Revolutionary Agent

Another strategical disagreement dividing Marx and Bakunin centered around the question of who would lead the revolution. Both agreed that the proletariat would play a key role, but for Marx the proletariat was the exclusive, leading revolutionary agent while Bakunin entertained the possibility that the peasants and even the lumpenproletariat (the unemployed, common criminals, etc.) could rise to the occasion. Bakunin argued, for example, that the peasants were a revolutionary class for three reasons: (1) They have retained “the simple, robust temperament and the energy germane to the folk nature.” (2) They work with their hands and despise privilege. And (3) as toilers they have common interests with workers

In other words, being close to nature, the peasants are less alienated from their true, natural essence since they have suffered less corruption by the evils of society. Bakunin adopted a similar argument in relation to the lumpenproletariat:

“By flower of the proletariat, I mean precisely that eternal ‘meat’, ... that great rabble of the people (underdogs, ‘dregs of society’) ordinarily designated by Marx and Engels in the picturesque and contemptuous phrase lumpenproletariat. I have in mind the ‘riffraff’, that ‘rabble’ almost unpolluted by bourgeois civilization, which carries in its inner being and in its aspirations ... all the seeds of the socialism of the future....”

In both cases, Bakunin’s conclusions flow directly from his conviction that inherent in humanity is a natural essence which can be suppressed but never entirely extinguished. Those in society who are more distant from the State apparatus (the peasants are scattered throughout the countryside, the lumpenproletariat simply refuses to obey the laws) are accordingly natural leaders.

In contrast, Marx consistently argued that the proletariat alone was the revolutionary agent: “Of all 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.”Here again their different philosophical frameworks led these revolutionaries in opposed directions. Because Marx believed human nature was shaped by the economy, he analyzed the possible revolutionary agents by analyzing how the economy would influence their development. And economic considerations led him to conclude that the peasants could not play a leading revolutionary role. For example, they do not constitute a cohesive class. Some are large landowners and hire other peasants to work for them while the latter are often landless and destitute. Moreover, the desire for land by a majority of the peasants could serve as an anchor, holding them back from a truly revolutionary perspective. Rather than rallying for a thoroughgoing, socialist revolution where private ownership of land is abolished, they often veer in the direction of seeking to augment their own modest, private property land holdings at the expense of the large landowners. But aside from these economic considerations, Marx also believed that the situation of the peasants, not only prohibited them from attaining class consciousness, but from becoming a truly revolutionary class:

“The small holding peasants form a vast mass, the members of which live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with one another. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse.... Their field of production, the small holding, admits of no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science and, therefore, no diversity of development, no variety of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient; it itself directly produces the major part of its consumption and thus acquires its means of life more through exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, a peasant and his family; alongside them another small holding, another peasant and another family.... In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. In so far as there is a merely local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond and no political organization among them, they do not form a class.”

Marx was even less enthusiastic about the lumpenproletariat because it was not directly related to the production process at all, being comprised of the permanently unemployed, criminals, etc.





Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , ,

Ralph on Rae


King Ralph entered the Liberal Leadership race by saying Bob Rae was Dumb in a quote worthy of the high school drop out and academic palagarist....

"education bears no relationship to intelligence" said Ralph. And he should know since he lacks both.

Also See:

Ralph Klein

Alberta

Bob Rae

Liberal Leadership Race





Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , ,, , , , , , , , , ,
, , , ,



Money For Nothing

Is a song by Dire Straits. And it is the way oil companies and their partners in Africa do business. It's called Free Trade. And in Russia it's called Mafia Capitalism. Corruption by any other name....

African minister took cut of oil contracts

In an unusually frank admission about the mechanics of business in oil-rich West Africa, a top Equatorial ­Guinean official has said that companies owned by ministers often bid for ­government contracts with foreign groups and, if successful, receive “a percentage of the total contract the company gets”.

Teodorin Nguema Obiang, the 37-year-old son and likely successor of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, made the statement in a sworn affidavit to Cape Town’s High Court, where his lawyers will today oppose the seizure of two luxury houses he owns in the city. Equatorial Guinea is sub-Saharan Africa’s third-largest oil producer.

However, in an extraordinary admission in his affidavit, the president’s son ­testified that ministers and public servants in Equatorial Guinea were allowed to own companies bidding for ­government contracts with foreign groups which, if ­successful, would receive “a percentage of the total contract the company gets”.

This, he told the court, “means that a cabinet minister ends up with a sizeable part of the contract price in his bank account”.

Non-governmental groups campaigning against corruption in the oil industry have long contended that officials in Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Congo-Brazzaville, and other oil-rich West African states have made untold sums by profiting from foreign business contracts, often in contravention of local laws.

However, statements to that effect by African officials themselves are rare.


And of course its not limited to just Guinea...

Nigeria’s Faltering Federal Experiment


Nigeria’s federal system and politics are deeply flawed, contributing to rising violence that threatens to destabilise one of Africa’s leading countries. Failing to encourage genuine power sharing, they have sparked dangerous rivalries between the centre and the 36 states over revenue from the country’s oil and other natural resources; promoted no-holds-barred struggles between interests groups to capture the state and its attendant wealth; and facilitated the emergence of violent ethnic militias, while politicians play on and exacerbate inter-communal tensions to cover up their corruption. The government has been quick to brand many of the symptoms, especially the rise of militancy, as simple criminality to be dealt with by more police and more troops. But unless it engages with the underlying issues of resource control, equal rights, power sharing and accountability, Nigeria will face an internal crisis of increasing proportions.


See:

Africa

Oil






Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , ,