[sudo-discuss] Proletariat & lumpenproletariat: 2: Where the power is and isn't.

[aestetix]

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You've opened a can of worms here :)

Since elucidated discussion seems to be the modus operandi lately, I
have a few thoughts on this matter that are worth contributing. Feel
free to ignore at your pleasure (free listening is just as important
as free speech).

I think that the two key elements of your essays, food and power, are
rather interchangeable depending on the contexts. It's (hopefully)
obvious why we need food. Power in a more abstract sense is
fascinating to me, though. Other words that come to mind are drive,
charisma, persuasion, but also intellect, and most important, control.

IMHO, one of the most fundamental elements of control is language, as
shared patterns are effectively a way to communicate and attain
various levels of self-mastery. An easy way to experience this is to
try to understand a foreign language: there might be some hints of
familiarity within the chaos, and as we find them, it's a bit like
setting markers around, and using the markers to control the direction
of your ultimate understanding. You can extend that to vocabulary and
concepts as well. One of the hallmarks of a good education is the
ability to curse someone out without using the generic "fuck shit
damn" slurs.

Language is composed of words, symbols which point to meanings, and
one of the most interesting set of words is our names. And you all can
guess where I'm going with this one ;)

Hail Eris,
aestetix

PS: it might be worth doing another cryptoparty soon.

On 5/3/13 7:58 PM, GtwoG PublicOhOne wrote:
> 
> 
> 2)  Where the power is, and where it isn't.
> 
> Now we come to the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat.
> 
> For this, credit also goes to a good friend of mine who I won't
> name here, but who's welcome to name him/herself if s/he so
> chooses: s/he got me thinking down this trail a few months ago.
> 
> The proletariat is the working class: basically defined as people
> who have full-time jobs or at least jobs that provide sufficient
> income for the core necessities (shelter, clothing, food,
> transportation, sanitation, communication), but who have little or
> no ownership stake. This includes people who are in business for
> themselves, but earning a working class income: they own their
> employment, but their economic wellbeing is at the same level as
> that of a wage-worker.
> 
> The lumpenproletariat is the level below that: basically defined
> as people whose employment is marginal at best, and whose access to
> the basic necessities is frequently interrupted in some way.  The 
> unemployed, homeless, couch-surfers (another form of
> homelessness), people who live at the margins of the law in order
> to survive, and people who earn their livings on criminal activity.
> This also includes wage-workers whose wage income is not sufficient
> to provide their basic necessities from month to month: they have
> jobs, but their economic wellbeing is at the same level as that of
> someone who's marginally employed at best.
> 
> Decades ago, the Bay Area left/radical community made the deadly 
> strategic error of embracing the (essentially Maoist) analysis that
> the lumpenproletariat is the revolutionary class.  This error
> continues to this day, in the ideology of Black Block tactics,
> which are founded on the idea that expressing rage and provoking
> police over-reaction will somehow spark The Revolution.
> 
> The very same tactic in more obviously violent form pops up in the 
> ideology of the extreme right: such as the Hutaree, a group that
> was busted by the FBI for planning to shoot a bunch of cops and
> then set off bombs at their funerals, in the attempt to provoke
> martial law and thereby set off a "revolution" from the extreme
> right.
> 
> But here's the nexus of the problem:
> 
> To the oligarchy, the lumpenproletariat is disposable: their roles
> in production and consumption are so minimal that they can be
> totally disregarded.  They have NO power.  N-O power.  As
> individuals or as any kind of collectivity or class.
> 
> When a social movement identifies with the lumpenproletariat
> and/or attempts to organize the lumpenproletariat, the movement
> effectively short-circuits its efforts into something that is
> inherently doomed to failure.  They may as well be trying to
> organize the squirrels on the Cal Berkeley campus to strike for
> better teaching-assistant salaries. How seriously do you think the
> UC Regents would take the threat of a squirrel strike?
> 
> The proletariat is where the power is: the power to produce and
> consume at the level that drives the engine of oligarchy, is also
> the power to refuse consent in a meaningful way.
> 
> The power of the proletariat takes two forms:
> 
> One, the power to remove themselves from the oligarch's engines of 
> production: by going on strike (which translates to the power of 
> collective bargaining), by going into business for themselves, and
> by developing alternatives to conventional capitalism such as
> cooperatives and other forms of production that subordinate capital
> to labor.
> 
> Two, the power to remove themselves from the oligarch's
> consumption matrix: by boycotts (consumer strikes), by
> anti-materialist or "simple living" principles that reduce
> consumption levels (the equivalent of consumer general strikes), by
> shifting their consumption to alternative institutions such as
> coops, credit unions, and small local producers (e.g. buying
> veggies at the farmers' market rather than Safeway), and very
> importantly for _us_ as hackers/makers/etc., the power to build
> for our own use.
> 
> This is real power.  It's the power that makes the oligarchs quake
> in their boots and have nightmares.  And it's the power that gives
> the oligarchs strong incentive to keep us distracted, digressed,
> and disempowered by wasting our time trying to organize a squirrel
> strike.
> 
> -G.
> 
> _______________________________________________ sudo-discuss
> mailing list sudo-discuss at lists.sudoroom.org 
> http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
> 

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