This electoral shift in the suburbs, of course, mirrors even more fundamental changes in the American voting universe. In 1976 when Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford, the active electorate was 90 per cent white non-Hispanic. Last November, the white share was down to 74 per cent; a transition toward voter diversity whose future is assured by demographic momentum. Nearly half the babies, for instance, born in the United States during the last few years had Spanish surnames, and American ‘minorities’ separately counted would constitute the twelfth most populous nation on earth (100.7 million). [35] Over the course of the Bush administration, the Latino voting-age population in Virginia increased 5 times faster than the population as a whole, 11 times faster in Ohio, and almost 15 times faster in Pennsylvania. [36] As Karl Rove and other nervous Republican strategists well understand, the gop has probably already harvested its maximum crop of white evangelical votes and will be culturally and politically marginalized unless it sinks new roots amongst immigrants and the coming ‘minority-majority’.

introduction to marxism and politics, with vivek chibber
lecture 1 -- class

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why is class important? synonymous with "marxism," of course--but made so by the degeneracy of "left" culture (used to be the way any self-respecting marxist thought about capitalism, vivek is arguing)

part of the reason class has been so singularly associated with "marxism" has to do with the history of the Stalinization of the workers' movement.

vivek is stressing, though, that Marxists don't have a monopoly on the concept of class. nothing here is specific to Marx, himself--almost any 19th and 20th century socialist would recognize its importance.

nonetheless, why do we give class this importance? we still have to justify this.

it has to do with the issues that the Left is animated around--all those things which afflict vast numbers of people (poverty, disease, inequality, etc.)--all these things are maintained by people in power.

what the Left found, was when it tried to organize for better wages, etc., it found that it met with resistance. social justice is not going to be something that the well-endowed will agree to.

so, (a) the Left had to understand why the powerful resist / (b) what is the source of their power?

this is what leads, ultimately, to the recognition of class. the view on the marxist left has been that the central arbiter of power is class. and the reason that this is the case is because wielding power requires resources; and class is the chief distributor of resources in a capitalist society (indeed, in any society).

resources include: money, time, space, etc. -- again, the unequal distribution of resources translated into an unequal distribution of power, which facilitates the perpetuation of the status quo.

it's surprising, vivek is saying, how few people can justify the importance of class--it should never be a doctrinal commitment. we need to justify our attentiveness to class.

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we come, then, to the question of how class appears and reproduces itself--and how does it bring about these inequalities.

surplus

class is not just any old social relation. class is associated with inequalities. what vivek wants to argue, though, is that not all inequalities are class inequalities. only certain kinds give you class relations of inequality.

inequalities that come about through exploitation.

most of human history has lacked "social surplus," don't forget. for exploitation to occur, surplus is a precondition.

imagine an agrarian society--everybody owns a small plot of land, big enough to grow enough food for the family unit. if they live in a village, then there's some common land, as well. after each agrarian cycle, there may be enough surplus to be stored in case of disaster. but basically they consume what they produce.

in a society like that, we can say that there's nothing left after people's needs are met. and thus: a group exercising structural and systematic power will not emerge.

maybe a priesthood will emerge--these priests won't work, will appropriate some of the surplus in the name of the ancestors, etc.

the difficulty, however, will be this, of course--where will the crops/produce come from in order to enshrine these classes. the only way in which such a group can emerge, is if the producers make enough to satisfy their own needs and the desires of an extractive class.

here, historically, in the emergence of this parasitic class, we see the birth of armies, retainers, etc. you will invariably meet a lot of resistance when you ask people to give things up.

therefore, this is also a question of technology--the state of the productive sources has to allow such a situation.

for classes to exist, there must be a social surplus. this is what the surplus does.

already we know two things:
(1) classes that are in power, do so by extracting a surplus produced by others
(2) they maintain that power via other institutions, armies and the State.

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let us think, a bit, about how class worked during feudalism, in order to understand better the emergence of capitalism.

imagine a society in which there is a bit left over in the form of a surplus. a group of people arise to lay claim to that surplus. the feudal lords, who live of the labor of their peasants. the question, here, is how this happens.

a lord says to the peasants--"it's a bad, rough, mean world. all these other lords will come around with their retainers and seize your produce. i will protect you, at a price."

the basis, then, for taking some of the crop is a direct threat to the peasant. feudalism was simply "organized violence--knights as the guys that busted kneecaps." distinct from what your landlord will do if you don't pay rents to, today--violence was much more direct, overt. the threat of bodily harm underlay this system, always and constantly.

what are the ways in which lords actually obtain this surplus?

serfdom: how did serfs produce the surplus? the month is divided into days you work on your own land (which the lord is indirectly laying claim to), and days that you work on the lord's. it looks like a "rental" payment, but "rent" is more obviously a fiction in feudalism. (obviously, productivity has to be high enough in order to produce his necessities in the three or four days that he's working on his own land). there is absolutely no hiding the fact that the lord is getting fat off of the labor of the peasant. how can it be justified? (god made it this way? not coincidental that the ruling ideology was religious--it is very helpful that the church, itself, was a gigantic feudal lord. the priests, the pope, none of them did any labor, don't forget.)

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the question then, arises: how in capitalism does exploitation arise? how is it reproduced? (remember: the key in feudalism is that plots of land were, nominally, in the posession of the peasant; the village unit is intact, as well. a fundamental fact, here, is that peasants don't need their lords; lords enforce their right to appropriate surplus through coercion.)

it seems, in capitalism, that there's nothing unfair going on. the serf is told to work on the lord's land, "or else." in capitalism the oppression is more subtle, hidden. in feudalism, the lord seeks out the peasant; in capitalism, the worker has to continuously seek out the capitalist. there doesn't seem to be the same kind of coercion. moreover, workers are free to quit. and thirdly, when workers come in, they agree on a wage.

nobody is being forced to work for any particular employer. they negotiate over their conditions of work, etc. so what's the problem? where's the exploitation? these are the foundations of the ruling ideology, don't forget. so we must be prepared to define exploitation in spite of this.

so we need to ask: is there a surplus in capitalism? where and how is it appropriated?

how does a factory work? how does the capitalist run his factory?

he sells a product for $100. out of that, wages account for 60$. means of production would be, say, $15. rent and overhead account for $10. his profits, then, are $15.

you might say to yourself--alright, you call call the profit a surplus, but so what? the worker is getting his wages, and the capitalist his. where is the devious plot? the capitalist gave them a job, for god's sake. he used his assets to give workers jobs. and they all go home. why would you call that exploitation?

what do economists say about the labor supply curve? what's the fiction about this relationship that we have to expose?

it's true that workers go looking for the capitalist, in a sense. it's absolutely true that he was not ordered to go to Wal-Mart, etc. BUT: the worker is not free to extricate himself from the production process, in toto. and when they negotiate with the capitalists, their independence is not of equal weight. the worker will last days without the capitalists; the capitalist will last for months. the capitalist has assets, that he can alienate to survive, if forced. workers have nothing to fall back on--they depend on selling their labor-power.

so workers need not work for any particular capitalist, but he still needs to work for Capital.

mainstream counter-argument--(1) capitalist has got the skills, (2) he's in possession of the assets (and that took money).

but let's look at it from a systemic level. a class of people with the assets are putting the workers to work. those assets have not been given to you through free exchange--how can it be simply the fact of ownership that entitles you to those profits? that ownership did not fall from the heavens. (political philosophy in the 20th century has failed to justify the unequal distribution of assets, absent the fiction of free exchange).

and the first defense? what are the skills that the capitalist possesses? most of these skills are acquired, and how? you do so by buying them, from business schools, or whatever. that means that the unequal distribution of skills simply reflects the unequal distribution of wealth.

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capitalism is unlike feudalism in one very crucial respect--peasants have some control over the means of production (their own land). capitalism is different--the first time in human history where the private possession of the means of production is generalized. (and here, of course, we can tell also the story of "primitive accumulation")

the monopolization of the means of productions means that capitalists no longer need to coerce the workers--and, what's more, capitalists set the terms because of their superior structural position.

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mainstream notions of class associate the concept with income, absolutely -- if someone is making x thousands of dollars, they are assigned to a specific class.

but here, we have defined class such that it precedes the concept of income. we are relating it to the process of production--your place in the class structure, in this sense, determines your income. and you will not fight poverty without fighting the class structure.

you're not a capitalist because you're rich. you're rich because you're a capitalist. it's not because you're poor that you're working class. it's because you're working-class that you're poor. moreover, there's a causal connection between one's wealth and the other's poverty. (and all this, of course, is maintained, in the final analysis, by force).

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so, there is exploitation transpiring in capitalism. and this appropriation is rooted in domination and coercion, in the final analysis. (workers have to show up to work--they are not free to not work. the capitalist, moreover, can imposes these conditions because he owns the assets).

we've shown that class exists, then, and that it depends on exploitation.

exploitation is not simply a moral problem, it is a material fact. as long as these classes exist, you will have inequality (and conflict).

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vivek is here making a further distinction between the not-exploited (permanent unemployed, lumpen elements, etc.) and the exploited (in whom the capitalist class still has a stake, don't forget--it needs Labor, and it can never forget this fact)

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what differentiates classes, fundamentally, is their relation to the means of production, and the powers that flow from that fact.

The autonomists did not grasp that the oppressors took advantage of the limitations of a rebellion that took militant action, but lacked organization, leadership, and ideological coherence. Moreover, they celebrate these features as a sign of the uprising’s novelty (“a festival without programs, nor objectives”). The assemblies emerged when the collapse of government institutions turned neoliberal propaganda against politicians and the “government” into a radicalized mobilization against the entire regime. The assemblies focused popular participation in the key moments of the uprising, but they declined when the ruling class regained the reigns of power. Many autonomists refuse to see this, forgetting that the oppressed cannot liberate themselves if they do not develop their own political project. They do not consider this to be an obstacle because they think that the social movements will construct a new society from the spontaneous act of rebellion.
(...) The autonomists refuse to grasp the fact that the representatives of the ruling classes co-opt many popular movements. They do not recognize the importance of the challenges that confront the Ecuadorian indigenous movement, the landless of Brazil, or the cocaleros of Bolivia in the face of betrayals, neoliberal policies, and right-wing repression from the governments that emerged from their struggles. They promote an idyllic image of the social movements, acting as if these groups advance from strength to strength.
(...) The autonomists trust in the sufficiency of the social struggle and dismiss the necessity of a socialist political project of the oppressed. They think that the accumulated experience in popular action leads to the spontaneous development of anti-capitalist sentiments within the population. But if it were so simple, the MST of Brazil would not be forced to fight the disillusionment created by Lula and the piqueteros would not be fragmented in the face of Kirchner’s machinery of cooptation. Nor would the Zapatistas feel compelled to participate in the crisis unleashed by the attempt to drive López Obrador out of office.
(...) Actions of this type would permit the development of an emancipatory political practice in the face of the alienation of capitalism. Holloway11 correctly emphasizes that the fetishism created by this system not only conceals exploitation, but it also unleashes liberating responses from the oppressed. But he reduces these acts of resistance to spontaneous anti-commercial acts (“the child that forgets to pay”) or to basic expressions of rebellion (“the worker who resists”). He disregards the fact that these acts alone can only lead to experiments with fleeting forms of liberation. In order to do away with capitalist domination, the exploited need to go further than Holloway’s “constant anti-fetishization” to embrace a socialist political program and action.
(...) These characterizations adequately take account of the brutal changes that have been created by the opening of local markets to imports, the corporatization of agriculture, the shuttering of numerous industries, and the recession in the world market. But from the recognition of these transformations it does not follow that there has been a radical change in the protagonists of social struggle. The autonomists do not see that the map of resistance in Latin America is very diverse and differentiated. The weight of rural sectors in the Andean region coexists with the preeminence of urban workers in the Southern Cone and the notable presence of public employees in all countries. The most significant feature of this process is the mixture of traditions between social subjects who share methods of struggle. To emphasize the role of the excluded at the expense of formal workers is to downplay this multiplicity and convergence.
(...) The autonomists magnify the role of the excluded at the expense of traditional workers, because they place more weight on the relations of domination than on the forms of exploitation. They have lost sight of the neurological center of capitalist reproduction located in the extraction of surplus value. For this reason, they tend to take up certain notions of post-industrialism and interpret the retreat of the traditional workers’ movement as a symptom of the structural decline of work. They forget that, whatever the dislocations or changes in the labor process there have been, capitalism would cease to exist without workers’ labor. Understood this way, the arguments of the autonomists lose all meaning.
(...) The operation of the contemporary economy and the complexity of the political choices that confront society today demand that we delegate authority and use legislative tools. The different forms of direct democracy proposed by autonomists could only contribute in a complementary way to the organization of society in the process of constructing a socialist society.
(...) Other critics of the radical Left question the Leninist conception of constructing firm political organizations dedicated to promoting socialist consciousness. They think that this strategy disdains the self-emancipatory capacity of workers and leads to Stalinist totalitarianism. This appraisal distorts Lenin’s advocacy of building of stable organizations in order to transform the social struggle into conscious workers’ political action. The Bolshevik leader also emphasized the role of organization in confronting powerful enemies. In the conditions of clandestine struggle against Tsarism he argued for rigorous organization, but he never claimed this was a universal model of revolutionary action. He always encouraged the adaptation of forms of organization to changing political realities (for example, emphasizing professionalism in some periods and flexibility in others). To present Lenin as a precursor to Stalinist massacres is a liberal caricature. To interpret any political discipline as inexorably leading to terror would mean that we would have to object to all forms of collective structure, including those adopted by social movements that the autonomists support!
(...) “Changing the world without taking power” is the strategic project of many autonomists. But how can one avoid the state? How can the target of every popular demand be ignored? The state can be combated or reformed, but it cannot be ignored. All demands made by social movements are directed towards the state. The Zapatistas demand pro-indigenous legislation from the Mexican congress, the piqueteros demand unemployment benefits from the Argentine Ministry of Labor, and the MST raises the demand of expropriation of land and the legalization of landless peasants’ encampments to the Brazilian parliament. In “developed” countries, “illegal” immigrants demand citizenship rights (France) and public housing residents ask for social legislation. The last of these are particularly “statist” demands.
(...) Holloway counsels against any form of power because he concludes that any exercise of power will reproduce oppression. But he doesn’t take into account the fact that refusing to take over the state leads to the preservation of the status quo and the consolidation of the impoverishment of the dispossessed. If we want to change the world, it is not enough to reject the state. We have to look for strategies to extinguish it progressively until the end of a process of socialist transition. This transformation would necessarily begin with the establishment of a new state administered by the popular majority. The proposal to change the world without taking power disqualifies one road without suggesting another. Thus, it leaves us with a bitter sensation of impotence. It demands insubordination and rebelliousness, but it never suggests how to triumph in the difficult battle against oppression.

So if Zubaydah had already yielded all the information he had, why was there a need to turn to torture? The answer: There was a ticking clock, but not one attached to a bomb. The Bush administration wanted its war against Iraq and thought that the perfect justification would be a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq--a link that the Bush and Cheney White House had asserted, but couldn't prove because no such link existed.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53 million American hogs on more than 1 million farms; today, 65 million hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities, with half of the hogs kept in giant facilities with 5,000 animals or more.
(...) But what matters more (especially given the continued threat of H5N1) is the larger configuration: the WHO's failed pandemic strategy, the further decline of world public health, the stranglehold of Big Pharma over lifeline medicines, and the planetary catastrophe of industrialized and ecologically unhinged livestock production.

Before he started interrogating insurgent prisoners in Iraq, he had been told that they were highly ideological and committed to establishing an Islamic caliphate in Iraq, Major Alexander says. In the course of the hundreds of interrogations carried out by himself, as well as more than 1,000 that he supervised, he found that the motives of both foreign fighters joining al-Qa'ida in Iraq and Iraqi-born members were very different from the official stereotype. In the case of foreign fighters – recruited mostly from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and North Africa – the reason cited by the great majority for coming to Iraq was what they had heard of the torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. These abuses, not fundamentalist Islam, had provoked so many of the foreign fighters volunteering to become suicide bombers.

I repeat; there is no excuse today for babbling nonsense about Leninism, the Vanguard Party and the totalitarian state. In 1917 the Bolshevik Party consisted, I believe, of 78,000 members. And the majority of them were not very good Bolsheviks, not even good proletarians. In a population of over 150 million what else could they be but a vanguard ? Lenin saw that and drew the conclusions. In 1945 in Italy the Communist Party had over three million members. It completely controlled the organised trade union movement, In France the situation was not too different, and for a time the French Communist newspaper, L’Humanité, was the most widely sold daily newspaper in France.
(...) To believe that Bolshevism, or to be more precise, Leninism, would under the circumstances advocate or preach the theory of the vanguard party is to continue slander of Leninism, but not to his theory of the party (that is no longer viable) but to his central doctrine – the role o| the proletariat in the preservation of society from barbarism. To interpret Leninism as the advocacy of a vanguard party of three million is nearly as bad as the doctrine of Goebbels that Christ was not a Jew.