Welcome"All power to the workers' soviets!" (Source irrelevant; watch Sergei Eisenstein's film "The Battleship Potemkin")
"First of all, I'm Debbie the person!" (possibly apocryphal quote from young lady who as a toddler was the poster girl for her father's donut business)
"You are the difference" (IBM internal motivational slogan)
There are 7.94 * 10 ** 9 warm squirming living human bodies currently overpopulating the earth. The hope for a world where there are a few classical Greek poleis in which each person is a citizen who knows every on a first name basis as friends who share all things in common in a life of leisured study is not going to happen by "Black lives matter" unless that really means: Each individual person is an irreplaceable treasure who must not be sacrificed to Shakespeare's Falstaff's "food for powder" and that all the petty politicians, nationalist militarists and other demagogues and Leaders need to be consigned to ethnographic archives.
What is required is the universal fulfillment of the old Pogo(?) cartoon:
Two ranks of soldiers from the opposing sides of some war or other (any war will do...) face each other, rifles raised, at point blank range. The Officer on each side, bravely leading from the rear, commands his men to fire on the enemy. The soldiers do exactly what their officers have commanded: All the soldiers pivot 180 degrees, and discharge their bullets into the body of their respective Officer. All the soldiers live happily ever after.
End of troublemakers. End of History (ref.: Elsa Morante's "History: A novel"). And all the now ex-combatants can get on with building a fully human lifeworld where political social formations exist only for the sake of from each according to his (her or other's) needs, to each according to their abilities, and, at last:
"Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid...." (Micah 4:4)
Anything less does not deserve to exist. Amen.
We know that from little acorns mighty oaks grow (or from little seeds big weeds). A rocket sending a probe to Jupiter that needs a course correction will need a small engine burn early in its flight, but late enough and there may not be enough time to fix the problem. So let's imagine that, at the start of the Industrial Revolution, instead of a few self-satisfied bullies with monopoly power over the work force getting all the money and subjecting nany to involuntary servitude (aka: wage-labor) to extract surplus value from them, their had been, ab ovo, worker self management with the inventors of machinery being white-collar workers in the organizations.
This would have been easy since they were starting from nothing so that the social organization of the production process could have been dialectically elaborated to nurture the workers instead of crushing their souls always and their bodies often, machinery innovations could ever more effectively have leveraged the workers' hand and mind skills, instead of the workers being homologized to force fit them into new machinery that the bullies got off on for whatever their selfish motivations. Progress could and surely would still have been made with technological advances, just along different vectors than happened in the jack boot regime that oppressed the people who made the machines run. Nor would there be today any question about dispossesssing the owners of ithe means of production, because there never would have been any of them to dispossess.
I am not interested here in why the bullies were allowed to get away with it. They could have been stopped from abusing workers by the police and military, instead of the police and military stopping workers from organizing to fight their abuse. The innovators could have focused on mechanical engineering to earn their daily bread. They could have just been another specialization of the labor force, or, better: universal civil society. If they did not like being mortals like everybody else, they could have gone to some uninhabited island to build and run the machines they wanted to make by and for themselves. No problema.[5]
Who can say what the contemporary world would look like if the bullies had been prevented from bullying people? Who can say what J.P. Morgan would have looked like at a drafting table, i or, if he did not have any engineering ability, or maybe as a floor sweeper in a worker self-managed factory. He would have had an aliquote voice in the running of the place, just like every other person. John D, Rockefeller might have enjoyed being a "roughneck" producing oil, not just consuming profits from other people producing oil for him. If he was a first-rank geologist with a knack for finding productive spots for drilling new wells, he would have been one of the most valued workers in the Worker-Self-Managed Oil Company, because great talents would always be welcomed to contribute to production, not to just play destroy-the-competition games. If he was really Cracker-Jack, he could even have a car with a driver, because the workers would know that a great mind is a shame to waste on driving a vehicle when that mind could be more productive in the back seat thinking up ways to make the enterprise more productive for all the other workers. All he would have to do is to earn his perks.
To go back to Eisenstein's film: Does anybody really think the workers would have thrown overboard a physician who busted his ass 6 hours a day providing them with world class medical treatment instead of placing his stamp of approval on maggot infested beef for the sailors to eat? I don't think they would have made him wear a hair shirt and flagelate himself to try to generate stigmata in his effete body. I don't think they would have made him climb rough ropes to get callouses on his hands to prevent him from precisely handling surgical instruments, or would they? The sailors knew which side their bread was buttered on, and he just didn't cut the mustard, so they sent him in a Newtonian parabolic trajectory to the bottom of the briny deep and if he could have swam away with his fancy officer's uniform still on, so much the better for him. The sailors had better things to do than to waste their time and energy harpooning human waste at sea.[2][3]
It is awfully late now. The probe is nearing Jupiter. Capitalism may be going to crash. Isn't it such a tragedy that a little change maybe around 1800 could have saved so many lives in the interim and make a conversion to worker self-management so hard now? But, as Donald J. Trump said about something or other: It is what it is. And to make things even worse than they already have to be, the masses have been distracted by chaff like "Black lives matter" instead of focusing on: "Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains", from which by logical deduction from class inclusion, since each life would matter, then, inter alia, black lives would matter. Rap claptrap music instead of The Internationale. And what real workers would have thought Robert Venturi's mockery of retirees (Guild House) was the greatest thing since Girolamo Parmiginiano?
Large numbers demand hierarchy. Even if world population were to be reduced twenty-fold to 3.9 * 10 ** 8 (the 2021 population of the United States), there would still be need for coordination and institutional structures larger than a single polis, so we have the problem of upward hierarchy. And wherever somebody gets in a position above anybody else there is the temptation to domination. Let us hope that Bolschevism, the Leninist Party, was only a function of the backwardness of the Russian Empire, that the masses needed to be organized because they were not self-organized. Higher-level organization, which seemingly has to be representative, must be controlled from the bottom up, not the lower-level structures shaped from the top-down.
The people at the top must indeed be civil servants: servants of the persons in civil society. There needs to be a perpetual dynamic tension between the workers soviets and the higher level structures that work for them, just as the workers' soviets must be in perpetual tension with each individual worker. There needs to be both horizontal and vertical perpetual revolution: the workers' soviets ever again renewing themselves and also the relations between and the structure of the workers' soviets and both the workers and he superstructure.
Why would anyone want to work at the higher levels under such conditions? Even in United States today there are many civil servants who want to do the right thing, like Colonel Alexander Vindman in the Trump regime. Let a thousand Alexander Vindmans blossom! Maybe it would also be "twenty years and you're out, Thank you and here's your well deserved pension, If you want more, go back and be welcomed to contribute to your home workers' soviet. In time of need, we will call you for your good advice." No Caesars; Lenins only as teachers. All power to the workers' (which, in schools, are: the students' and teachers') soviets!
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 Unfortunate for themself, the person who lacks one; unfortunate for others, the person that is one. Don't be an a**hole! |
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