A Sense of Urgency

A comrade, and I use this word only when it is warranted, has remarked elsewhere that he has rarely seen me so engaged as I am with the issues raised by events in Greece.  Indeed, he's right-- to the extent that all my other engagements, posts, analyses, are and are supposed to be preparation, practice for the "real thing"... the real thing being class struggle, the point when "economics" is exposed as a social relation of production, and the social relation of production is exposed as...temporary, destructive, and self-destructive. 

If Marx's Capital was itself not an elaboration of, and not itself elaborated by The Class Struggle In France 1848-1850 and the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte then Marx's critique of capital would have no practical significance.  If value were not simultaneously the origin and goal of capital and its obstacle, then there would be no conflict between means and relations of production, and no historical necessity for proletarian revolution.

But it, Capital,is and was. Value is, and the conflict inherent in value production, the conflict between means and relations of production is embodied in the actions of living, breathing, classes.

The comrade, and I use the word only when it is warranted, is right.  I am engaged precisely as I was in 1972, 1973  when I was arguing that the UP government in Chile was leading the working class into a death trap.  I am engaged precisely as I was in 1974 when the Portuguese revolution was pre-empted by the military,  all those "in the know," just knew that proletarian revolution was never on the agenda and to advocate such a course was pure "sectarianism."

1973 marks the onset of the bourgeoisie's great offensive against the working class worldwide.  The onset of the offensive was punctuated by two critical assaults by the bourgeoisie-- 1) the OPEC price spike, attacking living standards of the working class, and inaugurating the great asset-liquidation jamboree of capital  2)the military assault by the armed forces of Chile against the working class.

The working class in Greece is nowhere near as organized, as forthright, as militant as the workers in Chile.  The self-organization of the working class in Greece does not have the "luxury" of two years to manifest its ability, its strength, its need to organize the economy, the conditions of labor and the conditions of society, as socialist.  More urgent, more critical, more imperative then is the appeal to the workers of Greece to appeal to the workers of France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy to repudiate immediately and entirely the inter-sovereign debts, the economics of austerity, and the institutions of capitalist union. 

The European Union is not Europe.  A workers struggle against the European Union is the last best hope for "Europe."

Greece is to the first quarter of the 21st century what Chile was to the last 30 years of the 20th century.

Make or break. 

SA

February 22, 2015