CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS/CLASS ANALYSIS

"Class consciousness is knowing which side of the fence you're on; class analysis is knowing who is there with you."

IMPERIALISM AND THEN FASCISM

Ever wondered why our country always seems to be at war with the world. Ever wondered why our government and mass media promote the view that the world outside our borders is a corrupt, chaotic, frightening place. Ever shocked to realize that many people in our society think the best thing that can happen to a foreign country is for the U.S. to invade. Can you even think of a time when our country was truly at peace with the world?

IMPERIALISM

Imperialism is capitalism at its most virulent stage, astride the world; exploitation on a global scale. It is the creation of a grotesquely unequal world. The constant wars and its astonishing waste of resources and human lives ultimately weakens imperialism. Workers of the world are driven to rebel against it and replace it with socialism, the last stage of capitalism before its revolutionary transformation. Imperialism is the result of capitalism’s inexorable tendency towards globalization.

Capitalism exists to maximize profit, and capitalists do this by stealing as much surplus value as possible from the working class. Eventually, national capitalism develops to a point where production is concentrated in giant monopolies that are controlled by the huge banks that finance them. The finance capitalists who control these banks take state power as well, and they use their economic, political, and military power to take capitalist exploitation to a whole new level. The dominance of finance capital is the key component of imperialism because finance capital begins to look abroad for even greater returns on investment.

Like any other criminal enterprise, capitalism starts out small. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie [the capitalists—D.P.] over the whole surface of the globe. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls.

Marx and Engels are talking about an earlier stage of capitalism that emphasized the production and export of physical commodities, whereas imperialism focuses on the export of finance capital. Under imperialism, investment capital itself is used to “batter down all Chinese walls” and when this doesn’t work it uses naked political and military aggression to open up a country to capital investment. They want a world in which finance capital based in the powerful developed countries is totally free to move around the globe and make investments that subject workers in the weaker developing countries to forms of super-exploitation even more brutal than “national capitalism. Capitalism is fundamentally a criminal enterprise; it will stop at nothing to extend their global dominance. Resistance against imperialism by the global working class has been a major factor shaping world history since at least the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions were all victories in the struggle against.

At the end of the Second World War, the United States took on the role. Some major defeats have been Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. A tremendous victory was the break-up of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe but the dividends of that victory were squandered on financial scandals and military adventurism.

The U.S has been weakened by the growing economies of China and India, the economic depression of 2008 and the huge costs of and poor performance by the U.S. military in the two imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When imperialists fight for survival they always resort to fascism. Fascism has been defined as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” The movement toward fascism is a sign that imperialism is on its death bed, which in turn opens up opportunities for socialist revolution. This brings us to the subjects of working-class unity and internationalism, the united front against fascism, and the fight for international socialism, all of which will be discussed in later articles.

Gramsci & Hegemony | Peter D Thomas | Counterforum | London | 3 May 2010

A Shift Realized: The Banking Crisis as the First Postmodern Event

the global financial crisis as a 'world historical moment

the first global event that is wholly and uniformly a postmodern crisis

it is ultimately perfectly predicted and consummated in the

• ontological works of Lyotard (The Postmodern Condition),
• the global theories of Baudrillard (The Precession of Simulcra) and
• the mind–politics of Foucault (Discipline and Punish)
  

with the global capitalistic system in greater flux theoretically than ever before we are glimpsing the ultimate death of the last Grand Narrative in modern history. After

• the death of God (Nietzsche),
• the death of dialectic (Fukuyama, Zizek, Baudrillard),
• and now with the possibility of the death of late capitalism
  

we find ourselves at another cultural cross–roads, one that can only find refuge in simulation.

NOAM CHOMSKY

WHAT IS HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

historical materialism can be summed up in a sentence: ""it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness."
the old dog, Wellington wanders down to a pool full of crabs. The crabs speculate about the mysterious divinity, the "eyeballs in the sky," which appears to them
if your universe were a pond. Your consciousness is determined by your being. Thought is limited by the range of experience of the specie
We know very little about how primitive people thought, but we know what they couldn't have been thinking about
what the football results were
Industrial towns
can
emerge
where a part of society can be fed by the rest
extensive division of labour must exist
people must be accustomed to working for money and buying the things they want from others
things
are dependent on the way society makes its daily bread, on people's "social existence
what is mankind?
Hegel said that "man, is a thinking being

slightly more sophisticated form of the usual religious view that man is endowed by his Creator with a brain to admire His handiwork
we are different from dung beetles
But why did humans develop the capacity to think
Engels pointed out, upright posture marked the transition from ape to man, a completely materialist explanation
Upright posture liberated the hands for gripping with an opposable thumb. This enabled tools to be used and developed.
The use of the hands developed the powers of the brain through the medium of the eyes.
Engels was a dialectical materialis
thought
he explained how it aros
Benjamin Franklin
nearer a materialist
defined man as a tool-making animal
Darwin
struggle for existence
species survive through natural selection
Yet humans came to dominate the planet
animals
take external nature
for granted
mankind progressively masters nature
The process
is labour
Engels stated Marx's
great discovery
"mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing
work before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion

In another dialectical formulation, Engels says that "the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour."
primitive human beings
were thinking most of the time—food
The struggle against want has dominated history ever since.
the appropriate social conditions must exist before our ideas and our activity can be effective.
people "make their own history...but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past"
We need to understand how society is developing in order to intervene in the process. That is what we mean when we say Marxism is a science of perspectives
Language, the currency of thought, is itself the creation of labour
hunting animals that rely upon teamwork
barked commands
the beginnings of language
language
result of their co-operative labour
labour distinguishes mankind
mankind progressively changes nature through labour
so changes itself
increasing ability
to master nature
increasing productivity of labour
To each stage in the development

of the productive forces corresponds a certain set of production relations
Production relation means the way people organise themselves to gain their
bread
the skeleton
of society
the conditions of social existence that determine human consciousness
the development of the productive forces brings into existence different production relations, and different forms of class society
By a 'class' we mean a group of people in society with the same relationship to the means of production. The class which owns and controls the means of production rules society. This, at the same time, enables it to force the oppressed or labouring class to toil in the rulers' interests. The labouring class is forced to produce a surplus which the ruling class lives off.

Marx explained:

"The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves; thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers-a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity-which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short the corresponding specific form of the state. (Capital, Vol III.)

http://www.marxist.com/History-old/historicalMaterialism.htm

THE CHINESE REVOLUTION

Marxism
an instrument of analysis and criticism
approaches the revolution as a revolutionist
only a revolutionist
equipped with the scientific method – is capable of laying bare the objective dynamics of the revolution
The element of will is indispensable for penetrating the secrets of nature and society
a revolutionist, if he has a serious attitude toward his task, is obliged with strict conscientiousness to analyse the structure of society, its functions and reflexes.
To understand the present war between Japan and China one must take the Second Chinese Revolution as a point of departure
we meet not only identical social forces
the same personalities
Chiang Kai-Shek occupies the central place
the real task of the second world war
to divide the planet anew in accord with the new relationship of imperialist forces
The principal arena
the basin of the Pacific
most important object
will be China
the world war will not produce the final decision:
it will be followed
by a new series
of revolutions

not only the decisions of the war but all those property conditions which give rise to war.
it is impossible not to see that the laws of revolutions are least understood precisely in the Anglo-Saxon countries
English Revolution
French Revolution
subjecting it to the laws of free competition
seemed to be the laws of “common sense.”
the Puritan revolution draped itself in Biblical dress
incapacity to understand its own significance
French Revolution
influence on progressive thought in the United States
guided by formulas of pure rationalism
Common sense, which
esorts to the mask of Biblical prophets, or secularized common sense, which
as the product of a rational “contract,”
real society of history has not been constructed, following Rousseau, upon a rational “contract,”
nor
Bentham
the “greatest good,” but has unfolded “irrationally
on the basis of contradictions and antagonisms.
For revolution to become inevitable class contradictions have to be strained to the breaking point

“Irrational” does not, however, mean arbitrary
Revolutions
have a logic of their own
not the logic of Aristotle
less the pragmatic demi-logic of “common sense
It is the higher function of thought: the logic of development and its contradictions, i.e., the dialectic.
a well-to-do society, unused to convulsions and habituated to uninterrupted “progress,” is incapable of understanding the dialectic of its own development
History is preparing to give Great Britain as well as the United States serious lessons in the dialectic.
deduce the character of the Chinese Revolution
from the living structure of Chinese society and from the dynamics of its inner forces
the march of events
their social mainsprings
the uncompleted Chinese Revolution is “bourgeois
it is necessary to check it in the light of a concrete sociological analysis
What are the classes which are struggling in China?
Colonial and semi-colonial – and therefore backward – countries
differ extraordinarily
from one another
in their degree

The Eighteenth Brumaire

On December 2 1851, followers of President Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon's nephew) broke up the Legislative Assembly and established a dictatorship. A year later, Louis Bonaparte proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III.

Marx wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon between December 1851 and March 1852. The "Eighteenth Brumaire" refers to November 9, 1799 in the French Revolutionary Calendar — the day the first Napoleon Bonaparte had made himself dictator by a coup d'etat.

In this work Marx traces how the conflict of different social interests manifest themselves in the complex web of political struggles, and in particular the contradictory relationships between the outer form of a struggle and its real social content. The proletariat of Paris was at this time too inexperienced to win power, but the experiences of 1848-51 would prove invaluable for the successful workers' revolution of 1871.

See Chapter 6 for a succinct time line of the

The Paris Commune.Lenin, V.

http://www.marxist.com/18th-brumaire-ahmadinejad.htm