Saturday, June 6, 2009

29

bourgeoisie in the factories: political demands obscure the clarity
of self-interest, political compromise in the times of crisis can easily be
reached: it doesn't cost the owners anything, which owner lost out
when the workers got the vote?

It is possible that the dictatorship of the proletariat itself would be
organized (and then left behind as unsatisfactory and self-
contradictory) as a more developed form of interest. This will
develop, perhaps, along a line of the social institution of efficiency
and use value, basically establishing a supplier-interest by getting
needed products to the populace (but then, or course, technology
is not neutral and much of what it produces is not useful and will be
necessarily abandoned - so the dictatorship will temporarily be
over a materially much more basic standard of living).

In short we see no need to marry the proletariat to consciousness
and therefore see no need to theoretically expand the proletariat to
include everyone (that is everyone paid 'a wage' regardless of
social status), which is the traditional means by which pro-
revolutionaries can inject consciousness: industrial workers can
use their revolutionary muscle and teachers and social workers
can bring the ideas (as if!).

For us the revolutionary function of the proletariat is very
mechanical, and only a relatively small number of people will be
significant in the mechanism. On the other hand we think it is
important that other groups also act selfishly (the disabled for
example, or local communities) and so drain energy from the
authorities: these other social and political struggles are marginal
and cannot finish the job (they cannot seize the means of
production) but they are never-ending in that they are concerned
with the articulation of needs which cannot be satisfied. However,
we think the damage caused to capital by the anti-capitalist is
outweighed by their falsification of their own role, that is their false
representation of, and hopes for, consciousness and the political
sphere in general and their neglect of production.

Incidentally, it may seem that our formulations of how a revolution
could take place are rather dystopian, a-human; certainly it gives
us little pleasure to slowly erase our previously held leftist

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