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Tuesday, May 31, 2016

May, 2016

It's May 1st. What we do know is that the ecological clock is ticking and we are no closer to common ownership and democratic control over the collective product of our labour than we were in 1905. Time has been compared to a wheel in the ideological myths of many cultures. "They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn." Ralph Chaplin penned those lines in 1914. We turn the wheels of history for our ruling class. We do not discuss the possibility of equal political power between all men and women democratically controlling the wealth they produce socially within the vast division of labour we call industrial democracy. Some bourgeois intellectuals claim we've entered a post-industrial age of democracy. However you paint class rule people who don't produce own and sell the product of our labour aka goods and services and the natural resources from which that wealth is created. That's why they rule us. That's why they ended up ruling the people who lived in Australia before 1788. They owned the wealth to be sure an ownership based on the implied violence necessary to keep it as one's own private stash. Wealth is based both on natural resources and human resources. Combine the two and you get one real gross domestic product of labour. When the product does not belong to the producer you get alienation and political powerlessness. We must learn our sums for only we can turn the wheels of history forward and save our ecosphere from the corrosive effects which attend the commodification of wealth. "Der Reichtum der Gesellschaften, in welchen kapitalistische Produktionsweise herrscht, erscheint als eine 'ungeheure Warensammlung', die einzelne Ware als seine Elementarform. Unsere Untersuchung beginnt daher mit der Analyse der Ware." "Eine Ware scheint auf den ersten Blick ein selbstverständliches, triviales Ding. Ihre Analyse ergibt, daß sie ein sehr vertracktes Ding ist, voll metaphysischer Spitzfindigkeit und theologischer Mucken. Soweit sie Gebrauchswert, ist nichts Mysteriöses an ihr, ob ich sie nun unter dem Gesichtspunkt betrachte, daß sie durch ihre Eigenschaften menschliche Bedürfnisse befriedigt oder diese Eigenschaften erst als Produkt menschlicher Arbeit erhält. Es ist sinnenklar, daß der Mensch durch seine Tätigkeit die Formen der Naturstoffe in einer ihm nützliche Weise verändert. Die Form des Holzes z.B. wird verändert, wenn man aus ihm einen Tisch macht. Nichtsdestoweniger bleibt der Tisch Holz, ein ordinäres sinnliches Ding. Aber sobald er als Ware auftritt, verwandelt er sich in ein sinnlich übersinnliches Ding. Er steht nicht nur mit seinen Füßen auf dem Boden, sondern er stellt sich allen anderen Waren gegenüber auf den Kopf und entwickelt aus seinem Holzkopf Grillen, viel wunderlicher, als wenn er aus freien Stücken zu tanzen begänne." We remain mystified. Wealth is not ours to have and keep. The stars have it in spades. Meanwhile 90% of us are not stars. We produce and get back what we can afford depending on the price we can sell our skills for. That and our social wage brought to us courtesy of those amongst us smart enough to see the utter abomination our lives would be under the rule of a totally free marketplace of commodities. Here I speak of the left. The left keep the free market fettered with what the right calls red tape. And a good thing it is too. Otherwise we'd be consumed by the rapacious power mongers who now legally own the right to our labour. Do you see why abolishing the wage system makes sense. It is not outlandish. It is a practical measure for changing the mode of producing and distributing the wealth we create. Meanwhile the ship which once carried the left along is slowly sinking. What's left now is a Potemkin village. The content Karl Marx attempted to enlighten workers with is out the window with the stillborn change in the mode of production which Morris Marx Engels Bakunin Kropotkin and the readers who comprehended what they were writing about called socialism or communism. Some alte Genossen carried on in class conscious ways up until 1914 and even after for awhile through 20s and 30s until most of them died. I met a few of them who survived into the 70s. They were very very old by then. But they still had that spark that motivation to go after what they had produced what they had been robbed of via the wage system. Sadly none of them realised the dialectic was a method a key for unlocking materialist logic which is why they were called dogmatic and sectarian at various times mostly by left ideologists who knew less they did about dogma and practising sectarianism. At other times they were just dismissed as being outdated. They're all gone now. Only a few who they taught are left. I count myself amongst them. Such a shame really. They could all see the forest. The trees were a seen as well. They hoped the trees would make themselves visible. That was an Idealism of sorts a belief in the efficacy of pure reason. As I wrote earlier the forest tended to be shrouded in mystery or absent from daily thought. Only the tree or a few trees could be seen. Family and a few if any real friends. We live in cities of tiny lives because we don't see the power we could exert as a class knowing it has designed the forest itself with the help of what the Ancients dubbed Nature. Our time is more filled with the minute than the totality within which we live. Thus the totality remains an abstraction alienated from the individuals who live within its social relations. It remains an abstraction in their mind but a concrete reality to deal with at the same time. One can see how mind body dualism can pretty easily arise. The social psychology which comes to fruition under the rule of Capital is nearly always perceived as an eternal recurrence of human nature. That's why human nature is used to describe the sadistic actions of some and the masochistic responses of most. From tough love to prohibition laws all are grounded in the notion that class dominated social relations are rooted in genetics when the anthropological truth of it all is that we related to each other quite differently during our evolution within classless societies. Societies without private property commodity production for sale with a view to profit or official papers claiming a politically defined territory as owned have been the human norm for most of our existence on this our planet Earth. People related differently to each other than they do today. Nobody owned anybody else's time. That's big. I think the personal sovereignty this level of freedom begat made for a much different set of social norms and power relations than those extant today. Probably produced a braver subject. My most favourable reading of Nietzsche corresponds to the aforementioned notion. I would guess that apathy is based on our feeling that we have no power to change reality. And that's true. As long as the useful producers people now working for wages stay unorganised as a class they/we will remain powerless to do anything which would require political muscle. Wage labour is largely a waste of time in terms of what our time is used to produce. I mean for most of us. I don't mean for neurosurgeons or garbage collectors you know useful producers. And I don't mean useful in the pro-capitalist sense i.e. the production of more saleable goods and services most of which are a total waste of our time. Marketing desire is packed into our minds through the relentless advertising which assaults our ears and eyes entering our brains on a daily basis. If we don't have whatever it is we will feel deprived. Wants are manufactured through admen. We are bewitched within the modern marketplace of commodities. We find 100,000 homeless Australia wide every night. At the same time there are investors making bucks via negative gearing from leaving 90,000 homes in Sydney and 80,000 homes in Melbourne vacant. I don't know what the figure is in Perth but I'm sure it is as disgusting. Labor's plan to increase the supply of housing by making negative gearing limited to investing in new housing as opposed to the old housing 90% of the negative gearing investors are now buying will make a fair dent in this travesty over the long term. And so I plug along. Sometimes the absurdity of it all gets to me. Angry words flow out into conversations. This is especially so after three ales. I only drink real ale these days. I didn't know what real ale was. In the early 70s I drank Ballantine Ale. IPA. I was searching. Now I've found. Amazing ale I once was lost but now I have been found. Coopers Mild Ale with a toke when I can find one is the way to go. Took me long enough. All of which is not to say that I was miserable. No. I had as good a time as I could find. I highly recommend it. Better than wasting your time in the pursuit of that ever illusive satisfaction associated with bargain shopping or squinting at your phone to see whether anyone has noticed you. You're noticeable. I see you gawking at your screens in every public place. On the train. On the bus. On the street. In the art museum. In the pub. On the plane. At the airport. Must happen in private as well. The modern couple's coitus interruptus. Sounds and vibrations coming from the ubiquitous phone. Alienation through communication. Only the commodified world could bring us to this nadir. We buy into our lifestyles as they are sold to us. Satisfaction still eludes us. Anomie present and accounted for. Lack reigns as we passively watch or consume the next spectacular sale. We will not survive in this state of emptiness. As we realise the nothingness we will begin being the social revolution from class society to a classless one. One in which we can live as sovereign individuals. That notion has stuck with me since the 60s. I was reading Salinger then. I was searching then as now. "It has been objected, that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us. According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work." Harmless pleasure. Why not. Is it really irresponsible by definition. It is to the puritanical sadists and their masochistic followers. Ah hell. I'd let them prey on each other if it wasn't for the fact that their power games get in the way of my pursuit of pleasure. Their all powerful god allows all sorts of pain to prevail. We must submit. We must accept. Our masters love it when we do. "Dieu et mon droit". Why give the power you are to them. That is the question. Force of circumstance enmeshed in the social relations of our time place limits our vision. Greenhouse gas emissions continue to climb even though you may have solar panels on your roof. I don't have solar panels because I rent. I don't get to make decisions like that--you know class domination and all that silly stuff. Anyway in spite of all the nice green policies being marketed within the marketplace of commodities greenhouse gas emissions continue their steady rise. Why is that. Oh you can blame nationalist abstractions like "China" or whichever one you wish say "evil greedy people" "human nature" etc. After doing so you can peddle off on your bicycles to your place of employment where you will produce more wealth as a class than you receive for selling your skills to the employing class who will in turn market the wealth you produce and scarf up a tidy profit. You see the problem of increasing CO 2 in the atmosphere is SYSTEMIC. It is the wage system itself which allows the capitalist class to control the politics involved with curbing greenhouse gas emissions. The capitalist class is failing as this report so ably demonstrates. The human race must become conscious of the systemic threat to its very existence. Once that threat is comprehended and is felt if you will in the increasing fires floods and droughts a systemic solution must be found to ensure our survival. I think that systemic solution involves the useful producers who now sell their labour power to capitalists for a wage getting together politically and industrially as a class for the purpose of abolishing the wage system and establishing common ownership with democratic control of the collective product of labour. That political power over what we produce now rests with the capitalist class and the politicians who are beholden to them. Only we the overwhelming majority the 90% can change that. But we will not have the power to make that change if we do not unite politically and industrially as a class to as Captain Picard might say "Make it so". The LNP has a plan. Labor saying that the LNP doesn't have a plan is ridiculous. "Jobs and Growth" will come from lower wages and eviscerating working conditions of the wage-slaves of the employing class. Lower wages can be achieved in many ways. The LNP's push for the union busting ABCC is just one example of their plan. Another example is their echoing the Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI) plea to eliminate penalty rates that the employing class are now legally required to pay workers for workers' labour time on the weekends. Who will work for lower wages and get these jobs. Workers desperate for a market to sell the only commodity they have competing with other workers under inflated mortgage price stress to sell their labour power. Where will growth come from. Growth will come from buying labour power to produce more and more saleable wealth. Productivity is measured as output per hour of labour time. Productivity increases about 2-3% every year due mainly to the introduction of labour time saving machinery. And where does this machinery come from. It comes from the workers who exchange ownership over the product of their labour for "a hand full of dimes". Jim Morrison was so spot on with that quip. Trading your hours indeed. As for the rest of the LNP's Budget 2016 it is one attack after another on the standard of living of the Australian working class. The LNP makes noises about taxing the multinationals. I predict they will do nothing to divert the wealth of the upper 10% and the companies they own back to the useful producers. Their policy announcement to reduce the company tax to 25% is all part and parcel of the bourgeoisie's long march away from those terrible Whitlam times when the company tax was set at 49%. We in Labor can thank Comrade Hawke for setting us on that path back in 1988 when his government lowered the company tax to 39%. In short the LNP does have a plan. It is their constant plan to serve the class interests of the upper 10% and the companies that they own. If one is still living within the marketplace of commodities and one does not pay the price of the commodity in order to use it one is getting it free. I understand perfectly that wealth is commodified and put on the market for sale with a view to profit under the rule of Capital. But when you take wealth out of the ownership of the capitalist class and put it into the social wage e.g. healthcare you make it free to the producers. In America the producers must climb a paywall in order access healthcare. In the UK the bourgeoisie must part with some of the wealth they have courtesy of the wage system to pay for public health public education and public welfare e.g. the age pension. The bourgeoisie don't like this which is why they barrack for privatisation and commodification of public services. The class struggle is over the social product of labour. When workers win these battles they get bits and pieces of the product of their labour back via the social wage. These bits and pieces are called 'reforms'. T'ain't necessarily so Comrade. You're assuming the class conscious worker can be satisfied co-opted channeled or whatever into accepting the robbery inherent in the wage system. In my political opinion a class conscious worker wants total control and common ownership of the collective product of labour but until the 90% becomes class conscious struggles with the capitalist class over his/her needs for healthcare education and welfare which can be had free as a part of their social wage. This is what you're assuming Comrade: It is still no advantage to support reformist political parties which was my main point as the struggle for reform becomes an end in itself in perpetuity with little or no progress made in developing revolutionary consciousness. However I think that if one is still living within the marketplace of commodities and one does not pay the price of the commodity in order to use it one is getting it free. I understand perfectly that wealth is commodified and put on the market for sale with a view to profit under the rule of Capital. But when you take wealth out of the ownership of the capitalist class and put it into the social wage e.g. healthcare you make it free to the producers. In America the producers must climb a paywall in order access healthcare. In the UK the bourgeoisie must part with some of the wealth they have courtesy of the wage system to pay for public health public education and public welfare for example the age pension. The bourgeoisie don't like this which is why they barrack for privatisation and commodification of public services. To those who say: It is still no advantage to support reform parties.That is not an assumption it is a fact. Welfare provision is an essential part of capitalism.They need educated reserve armies of labour for the cyclical upturn.It is a collective burden upon profits via tax hence the screams. If it were not so it would still be a burden upon profits via waged negotiated settlements where provision had to be made for insurance cover etc. Free at the point of use is still not free as funding has been overwritten by productivity gains to the parasite class and an increase in productive capacity overall as well as GDP. I saide: The bourgeoisie don't like this which is why they barrack for privatisation and commodification of public services. To which you replied... well some don't and some do, hence the main bourgeois 'business friendly' parties Labour, Liberal and Conservative oscillation between different applications of it. Reformism is still an argument for the retention of capitalism. To which I say: You can support the diversion of the wealth we produce as a class away from the possession of the capitalist class and towards the needs of the working class. I agree with you about the factional stances taken by the conservative and liberal bourgeoisie vis a vis accepting leftist reform. My position is that those workers who do not get free medical care are worse off under the domination of conservative bourgeois who would rather hire more police than the liberal bourgeois who are amenable to minimal sharing hoping that this will keep the working class from looking more deeply into the question of social relations. Your argument assumes that class conscious workers can be bought off and that the worse things get for workers the more likely they are to see the logic in the socialist position about abolishing wage labour. I disagree. If this were so the most miserable amongst the world's working class would be clamouring for an end to wage labour. They are not. Capitalism exists all over the planet now. Granted some nation States have less wealth as measured by the total sales of commodities within their borders. Still real wealth as measured by world GDP is growing. The point is that the workers already know how to produce the wealth that exists and if that wealth were shared equally amongst the world's population it would amount to something like $50,000 per person. If we changed the mode of producing wealth we could produce just as much wealth as we do now. The capitalists and landlords don't produce wealth. That's what the workers are employed to do. The means of producing wealth would not change other than by democratic classless society's direction. The argument for changing the mode of producing wealth to socialism should not be considered too advanced for any part of the planet now as long as communism is understood by those establishing it that it actually means changing the mode of production from exchange-value dominated commodity production to use-value dominated production of what is needed. Facing budget cuts every year a few more are laid off and the work load for the remaining staff is increased. Productivity gains are proudly presented to the capitalist class by their hired managers their wage-slave drivers. All is well on the Western Front. The workers don't know which way is up. So confused in America that many are thinking of voting for Donald Trump.  I imagine workers in Germany and Italy were similarly being blind sided by political ignorance in the 1920s and1930s. Workers in Japan were still tied to their feudalism as it morphed economically into capitalism while retaining the divine Emperor. The Europeans had to fake it in a way. Hitler and Mussolini were demi-gods. Stalin's cult of personality was similar in many ways appealing to a populace who were full of Orthodox Christianity and the divine right of a Czar. Fascism was essentially a form of industrial feudalism. There's a certain safety in feudalism. Unemployment disappears in a series of State employment initiatives. FDR's New Deal was and still is seen by many right libertarians as an example of fascism. Under Stalinism unemployment disappears with the death of private enterprise. Under fascism privatisation of publicly owned enterprises was the norm. Under both fascism and Stalinism the reserve army of the unemployed was partially absorbed in the military.  Call it a government jobs program or make work program if you will. No skin off my commie back.  The military plays a similar role in bourgeois democracies defense forces increasingly populated with workers who would otherwise swell the ranks of the unemployed. They are called a volunteer army because they freely undertake to risk their lives and take endless bullshit from sadistic sergeants and captains. Before we had the draft. The draft was like fascism or communism because people who weren't freely volunteering to take part were forced to risk their lives and take endless bullshit from sadistic sergeants and captains. The thing is though with the draft everyone had to take responsibility for risking their lives in any war. The thing is that there would be fewer wars if the draft actually made it so that everyone had to serve in the military. No exemptions would spur interest in political democracy because it wouldn't just be the unemployed surplus population volunteering to go off to fight the nation's battles. So I support the draft as long as workers aren't chomping at the bit to abolish the wage system just as I support compulsory voting as long as the overwhelming majority remain politically nationalist.  Where voting and military service are optional the conservatives tend to clean up because of the a-political apathy which is engendered amongst the citizenry. The USA today is a prime example.  Of course the capitalists and landlords rule. The question is how much are we allowing them absolute political power over us.  Remember absolutism is what feudalism is all about. The monarch is sovereign. The rest of the population is ruled absolutely by a king queen duke prince. count and so on. No you don't remember. Remember and do something to stop these small minded people from dominating 90% of us. Thus am I helping Labor and the unions. To keep what's moving against the absolutist tyranny we would face if we were all totally apathetic about politics and strikes. Get on board. The freedom train's here.  We drive it for them or we engineer it for ourselves. Meanwhile door-knocking in the big bad burb called Saint James last weekend. Lots of empty homes. Why are so many homes rented to bands of foreign students. Why are so many homes empty. Why are rents so high. Why is there a 20,000 long waiting list for public housing. Why are public housing rents doubling.  Why are some folks homeless. Why is voting LNP sounding the deathknell for the Great Barrier Reef. What can we do about the 60 million displaced people in the world today. Why war. I still remember Ed taking off from East Lansing to the Emergency March in Washington D.C. in May of '72 with those SLP leaflets titled "Why War?" for passing out to the multitudes. Ed was a long hair. Ed was a fun loving commie freak who loved music. Worked in a record store. Ed was a free spirit and an artist in his own right. Class rule means war. Just read a Herodotus's histories. Endless conflict between the armies and navies of class rule States. That's essentially what the leaflet said plus the fact that the capitalist class rule today through the wage system. There are a lot of people in the world who would like to get you to believe that war is inevitable between human beings. The notion makes commonsense to the current dogmas about human nature.  I think the anthropological evidence demonstrates that war did not exist amongst tribes of hunter gatherers. The occasional jealous murder did. But organised war no. War begins with private property which begins with agricultural surpluses and class rule by the owners of the lion's share of the surplus wealth produced by others. That's private property folks. They have. You don't. Haves versus have nots. It's not pleasant to be without and about with nothing. The comfortably satisfied will feed you homilies about how your thoughts are making you unsuccessful in life. They may quote Confucius to you to prove to you that your misery is a product of your attitude. Even fallen Catholics can believe in the authoritative aphorisms of a great non-Catholic intellect. You think therefore you are what you think. Right reason enmeshed in Idealist dogmas concerning mysteries about soul an entity cohabiting with you until your body dies. Some believe this lightness of this being can be weighed. Dualism is ubiquitous within the dominant ideas of our time. Mind cannot exist without its opposite. The body cannot exist without its head. Murderers have known this for thousands of years. States are built on acceptance of this knowledge. Yet people believe in life after beheading. I suppose it's hope that drives us all. Fear of nothing also instinctively steers the animal mind bent on survival. Someplace in the world there is somebody smoking a big fat joint now. Think about how many pleasurable activities are going on right here in the now. Maybe not around you but somewhere. Think of all the sexual delight happening within this very instant all over the planet. There's a place for you outside the place and time of the wretchedness you endure. Woe is a normal condition as is joy. Boredom is one consequence of a castrated imagination. Libido exists. Needs exercise. Use it or lose it. Important. Why do humans deny their passions so often. They know from experience that it feels good. But they deny themselves pleasures which will do them no harm. In the end most of them go along to get along. Conservative inertia. Like old man river we just keep rolling along. Smiling sufferance. Grimacing while one's face remains turned away from peers and those more powerful alike. When I read Paul Davies' COSMIC JACKPOT I became even more skeptical about the existence of scientific-technologically advanced intelligent alien beings existing within our reach within the galaxy we inhabit and surely within any other galaxy. Wasn't it Einstein himself who theorized that the speed of light could not be exceeded. I'm still very ignorant about all that jazz as I read the theory of inflation has the universe expanding at a speed which exceeds that of light. I'm still lost in space. What Davies calls "The Goldilocks zone" would probably pretty rare for a planet to be positioned in no matter how rocky or watery. Another factor which he gobsmacked me with was the inability of scientists to be able to create life in the lab. We still cannot do this no matter the composition of the organic soup we use thus doubt about the existence of life elsewhere can still legitimately be put forward. Of course time is a factor. We just don't have the possibility of a billion year lab experiment. After all homo homo sapiens have only been around for a 100,000 years and right now they're on a path to destroying their own ecosphere. I can imagine this happening time and again to ape like species. Maybe intelligence needs to be coupled with another species on some other planet of the 500 million possibly in a Goldilocks zone. I well remember being intrigued with UFOs as a ten year old. One book I fell upon and consumed was by an ex-U.S. Air Force major named Keyhoe In the spirit of a modern major general he speculated that UFOs were probably piloted by an advanced species of bees. Or maybe an intelligence as has evolved on Earth is the same or very similar as one which might evolve elsewhere and we all commit the same mistake destroying our biospheres because of some system of wealth production which doesn't prioritise life over enduring class rule becoming extinct before we could develop the science and technology necessary to at least communicate over large distances of space-time. Stephen Hawking  is quoted by my very good friend Bud : “I believe that human beings cannot be the singular advanced species in our galaxy, though I think it quite likely that we are the only civilization at our stage of development within several hundred light-years. I wouldn’t lose too much sleep worrying about being affected by aliens.” I agree. One never knows what we will discover or invent in the coming years. Maybe when we discover how to use gravitational force as a power source we'll somehow or another travel the space-time continuum in way in which the speed of light will not form the barriers it does at our present state of knowledge. That's just one possibility in a range of many which none of us can yet see just as we could not see how to solve the problem of human flight in 1492 AD or BC take your pick. In any case we'll need time to get to that point in our history and right now we're running out of time caught up in a system of class ruled wealth production which makes our long term future impossible. The end of history on Earth would occur when the human race ceases to exist for history is the social product of the human race. To be sure space and time would continue without us and perhaps some alien race of intelligent beings would continue to shape their own destiny somewhere off light years away. It's why I'm political. I don't want to see an end to our being. We have to gain control of what we produce in order to continue to make history and discover the wonders of the Universe. Using our reason we can. There is always an alternative to self-destruction. The left/right struggle for political power is all most of us can cope with at the moment. It is after all the expression of the class struggle as it concerns the political decisions about how the wealth we produce should be used and distributed. I'd rather workers were more class conscious surging with righteous indignation about the lack of power they have to control their lives and knowing that was because they traded their "hours for a handful of dimes". Still working toward that. Some maintain that reforms only dampen the class struggle and the development of class consciousness. The worse it gets the better it gets. After all we have to worry about becoming assimilated by the Borg-joie-Sie. All this probably has to do with the notion that the class struggle is about militant action on the picket line or in the streets which in turn develops class consciousness. However I don't think Marx would have spend all those hours reading and writing if he didn't think that reading deeply was profoundly important as an aspect of praxis. The fetishisation of physical activity is not what Marx was getting at when he critiqued Idealism by proposing: "The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice." The radical subjectivity necessary to win more freedom through the abolition of the wage system is not going to pop out like some child of the hurled paving stone or angry taunt at the bosses. Communism will not be sparked by a series of pranks. Tweaking the noses of the Borg-joie-Sie is fun a kind of psychic pleasure can be had from it. Sneering at the shopaholics of commodified consumer culture advances knowledge about the power dynamics of the wage system as much as any put-down of perceived weaklings. What worked for me wasn't anger or rebelling against  socially imposed freedom fetters although they were not to be discarded for some stoic resignation. My lights were tuned on by carefully reading and digesting observations made by communists like Marx Engels DeLeon Lukacs and Debord amongst others. Putting them altogether in my mind involved an integration of my own life experience which included many demonstrations against war and fascism along with many picket lines and involvement within the political process including elections. Many citizens today take the franchise for granted. A-historical views abound even amongst the most rrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeevolutionary amongst us. There is a reason why so many people moved for themselves to establish some power to choose who would govern them.  Voting does not stop citizens from getting a grasp of class rule. The information is there.  It's not being promoted by the commodified amplified voices of Capital. But it's there. Distribution has always been a problem for the producers of wealth not for the appropriators of wealth. Those who do not consume their Marx with slow reflection are probably missing the genius of his work. Yes work.  It took a whole lot of socially necessary labour time to produce the wealth of critical observation embedded in Karl's writings and speeches. What's the use of spending the time necessary to know what he was getting at when you've got a thousand public intellectuals and a million hirelings of the capitalists who own and control the media telling you not to bother. Dear reader most of them would not use their time to listen to the song of Magpies on this final day of May. They would be too busy with the work their bosses have them do. Are we not wage-slaves. Are they not as well.

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