Imperialism, “Anti-Imperialism,” and the Continuing Relevance of Rosa Luxemburg
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Most of the world's population have to sell their skills and time to members of the employing class in order to make a living. These people are part of the working class. They are dependent on their wages as a means of making a living. The employing class is made up of capitalists and State bureaucrats who hire members of the working class for wages which are the price of labour power on the market. They sell the product of their wage-slave's labour (goods and or services) in the marketplace for commodities and thus make their living this way, from the profits from sale. The employing class is quite small, averaging about 5%-10% of the population. Most of the big capital owners in this class hire managers for wages to manage their enterprises. Some of the small fry employers actually work in the enterprises which they own. The landlord class makes up another chunk of humanity. These people make their living mostly from renting land and buildings which they own to workers and employers. They also speculate on land, they own, driving up the price and selling for fiancial gain. |
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There are only two sources of wealth: Nature and human labour. Human labour is now bought and sold in the marketplace for wages. The bulk of the wealth of the society is piled up in commodities which are not owned by their creators as Nature 'owns' nothing and workers own only their own skills and time which they are obliged to sell for wages, if they want to make a living. |
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An interesting argument coming from U.S. based anarchists:
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This message from Karl Marx back in 1845 seems relevant for today's market turmoil and our general sense of being tossed around because bankers and speculators have gambled with the wealth we've created. At the same time, it is a message to those who still hold onto the notion that Marx's position had much do to with Lenin's position vis a vis the communist revolution.
************* Finally, from the conception of history we have sketched we obtain these further conclusions: |
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From an interview with Moishe Postone: |
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Fictitious Capital for Beginners |
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Want to get a grip on analysing the current economic slump?Take this course!About the Course |
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Ideas and objects which have been invested with human power are reified. Reified thinking projects the social world, camera obscura, upside down. It is the leitmotif of modern day language construction which affects the way we see how the world works, as opposed to how it actually works. Examples of reified thinking abound: Ford makes good cars; but Mercedes does a better job. It was God's will. Channel no.5 makes me sexy. You can trust Bank of America with your details. What's really going on is that the subject-object relationship has been turned upside-down in one's head. Ford and even Mercedes is actually the product of many workers' labour. God is an idea, created by humans. Ideas do not have will outside of the humans who create them. Channel no. 5 is the product of many peoples' labour which is sold. A commodity has no sexuality. The brand name, Bank of America, is really just the work of many people working within a financial division of labour. It is also a company which is owned by a few people. Can you trust an abstraction? |
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"Any person who has participated in a non-hierarchical kind of organization, even a small one, knows that, in the absence of mechanisms that protect plurality and foster participation, "horizontality" soon becomes a fertile soil for the survival of the fittest. Any such person also knows how frustrating and limited it is to have organizations in which each and everyone are always forced to gather in assemblies to make decisions on every single issue of a movement -from general political strategy to fixing a leaking roof. The "tyranny of structurelessness", as Jo Freeman used to say, exhausts our movements, subvert their |
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( T h e B u l l e t ))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
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