Wobbly times number 175

Only Lovers Left Alive

In "Only Lovers Left Alive" Jarmusch puts John Hurt in the role of Christopher Marlowe, nowadays a reclusive writer living in Tangier. Seems Chris was the real writer of HAMLET and other works attributed to William Shakespeare. The script goes differently, according to Jarmusch in his latest flick. Jim is both the script writer and director. As we learn in "Only Lovers Left Alive", Marlowe faked his reported early bar room fight to the death to conceal his real being as vampire and, the literary genius feeding Shakespeare his plays. This is an old theory (not the vampire part) surrounding the true authorship of the great Shake's plays and poems. To be sure, there are other theories in with regard to the authorship of RICHARD III along with the others; but this is Jim playing with that notion.

According to Jim Jarmusch, it is now 450 or so years on and Marlowe is still alive in Tangier. He is still writing, still in a kind of self-imposed exile, much like Paul Bowles was in the Tangier of his time. And like Bowles, Marlowe the vamp has mentored a local Moroccan writer trying to make his way up into the world of recognised writers.

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to."

[MovieMaker Magazine #53 - Winter, January 22, 2004 ]”
― Jim Jarmusch

And then we have the two main protagonists: the lovers left alive after centuries have rolled by.  And, spending their time amongst the most imaginative, creative minds of whatever era they happened to have lived through.  Of course, their names are Adam (played by Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton).  

Oh yes, Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden due to their tasting of God's forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.  

No, not quite that pair, but what a pair! These two have been married since the mid 19th century. They are vampires and both know Marlowe.  Eve lives in Tangier and regularly commiserates with Marlowe. Adam's digs are in Detroit. He lives the lone life of the brooding artist. When Adam gets suicidal enough to purchase a special hard wooden bullet he can shoot into his heart, Eve, who does not know about his bullet purchase, senses it after a video phone call.  Eve is not only sensuous, she's a master sensor when it comes to almost anything, including inanimate objects.  Just a touch of say a violin will bring out its history. After a super sonic re-reading of her personal library,she gathers enough books to fit into her two suitcases and takes the first night flight (mai oui) out of Tangier to Paris and from there by red-eye to Detroit. 

The film is sprinkled with wise asides and humour; but at the centre of all the dialogue is the notion that something is awry on the planet. What's rotten in Denmark and across the globe is, to our dear vampires eyes, the utter lack of appreciation amongst the 'zombies' for their own creative geniuses in the arts and sciences.  But this is an old problem, Eve observes as she tries to quiet the suicidal impulses of Adam.  It's just that Adam sees and attempts to demonstrate to Eve, through the empty architecture of Detroit, a metaphor for where the human race is taking the planet now that it has industrialised nature.  In a way, Adam senses the commodification, the cheapening of all that surrounds him as humankind takes itself down the road to environmental collapse.  But Eve won't have it.  She sees the decay, but points to nature's irrepressible life force.  Detroit will come back, she says.  It has water and where there's water life will reappear.  

Adam and Eve are intellectuals.  They observe and create as their very good friends amongst the human community have done: Newton, Galileo, Shelley, Wollstonescraft, Schubert, Byron (although he was a pompous ass, according to Adam).  Their portraits adorn Adam's wall.  According to Adam, imagination is dying in the modern age and he and Eve and one assumes Marlowe are surrounded by 'zombies', meaning most of humanity.  But, in case you thought all vampires are creative, sensitive geniuses, Jarmusch throws in a visit by Eve's little sister, Ava (Mia Wasikowska), a vamp from LA--zombie central, according to Adam.  

Ava may be hundreds of years old; but she acts very much like a spoiled, contemporary teen consumer.  As soon as she arrives in Detroit, she begins appropriating everything which she takes a fancy to: Adam's precious music collection; his stash of disease free O negative blood and even his supplier friend Ian (Anton Yelchin), the one who gets him musical instruments and as mentioned, his customised wooden bullet.   

It might be worth having a toke before seeing "Only Lovers Left Alive". The music in this movie is fantastic and what the heck, Adam, Eve, Ava and Christopher are all indulging in O negative. 

Wobbly times number 165

"Today, a vague mood of “anti-imperialism” is back, led by Venezuela’s Chavez and his Latin American allies (Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia), more or less (with the exception of Stalinist Cuba) classical bourgeois-nationalist regimes. But Chavez in turn is allied, at least verbally and often practically, with the Iran of the ayatollahs, and Hezbollah, and Hamas, as well as newly-emergent China, which no one any longer dares call “socialist”. The British SWP allies with Islamic fundamentalists in local elections in the UK, and participates in mass demonstrations (during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, summer 2007) chanting “We are all Hezbollah”. Somehow Hezbollah, whose statutes affirm the truth of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is now part of the “left”; when will it be “We are all Taliban”? Why not, indeed?"

Loren Goldner

I'm for common ownership of the collective product of labour; the abolition of the wage system and production for use and need,what Marx had called in CAPITAL the "union of free individuals", not State controlled commodity production for sale to producers in bondage to an employing class. Leninists are always on about their 'socialist State'. Marx never wrote about establishing a 'socialist State' because for Marx the State was synonymous with the dictatorship of one class over others. Thus, a 'socialist State' would be a theoretical and material contradiction.  The State, as Marx used the concept, was the governing instrument of class rule.  Socialism was to be a classless society. Perhaps socialism would flow out of a workers' controlled democratic republic in less developed industrial States, a republic in which the workers would see a need to allow capitalists and peasants to continue to function as separate classes until social ownership of the collective product of labour i.e. socialism, could be effectively established.  But such a proletarian democracy was never the reality of Leninist Party political practice.  The absolute dictatorship of the Party was its preferred method of rule.    

To my way of thinking, "Stalinist" means, above all, setting up a Soviet style wage system, including the sort of equality of wages (a measure Proudhon called for in his brand of anarchist socialism) which existed in Cuba for awhile, of course with upper echelon party bureaucrats getting extra shall we say 'perks'. The Soviet style wage system was more or less copied by all the Marxist-Leninist ( M-L) regimes with slight variations. Tito's Communist Party (CP) led Yugoslavia was an exception to the rule when 'self-management' of their wage system was introduced. The lack of civil liberties was/is ubiquitous in M-L States. 

In reality, Lenin's theory failed its own historical test of practice. The apologists for what issued out of the Bolshevik political Revolution are many, varied sects now, some Stalinist, some Trotskyist and all mostly ignored by the working class who see no advantage in changing bosses from one set who allow civil liberties to another who don't. Every M-L State dictatorship has failed to transition to anything but another capitalist system of wage-slavery. Cuban workers only recently were granted the privilege of Internet access. In short, you can't blame Marx for Lenin's theoretical failures.

The Cuban CP has basically ignored Marx's critique of political economy as they believe that the old Leninist dictums concerning the transition to communism via a 'socialist' wage system and CP State controlled commodity production will work. But, as it has become apparent to all that this sort of Idealism only results in a kind of frustrated capitalism, despite the moral suasion of Fidel and his comrades, the whole Leninist ideological edifice of the Cuban political revolution will crash as history has already demonstrated with the USSR and other Leninist States. 

Karl Marx's theory of how to establish socialism via the abolition of the social relation of Capital was probably spot on but, it has yet to have been grasped and established through workers praxis. Workers are the only ones who can establish communism.  The communist social revolution is a class act. For socialism to work, the collective product of labour must be socially owned and democratically managed by the freely associated producers themselves in a classless society where the wage system has been abolished. This is what Marx was talking and writing about: eliminating the alienation of the product from the producer.  The legal, State enforced separation of the product from the producer  defines the character of political-economy in class divided political States. The Leninists maintained that alienation via Marxist-Leninist Party control and effective ownership of the social product of labour using their own brand of wage system. Most workers have seen through this failure for expanding their freedom and have rejected it in one way or another, which is why Leninism is dying on the vine the world over.

Wobbly times number 163

“It is above all necessary to avoid postulating ‘society’ once more as an abstraction confronting the individual."  Karl Marx



MONEY MAKES THE WORLD GO ROUND

Money is a commodity.  The commodity is the seed from which the collective product of labour is turned into private property.  Money is the commodity which allows traders to trade their wares and services for something easy to carry and which can be used to obtain other commodities and pay taxes.  To abolish money, you need to abolish commodity production and institute production of goods and services for use with distribution of natural and human created wealth based on need. Money exemplifies the abstraction of commodification which rules today.  Everything which can be commodified will be turned into a commodity under the rule of the capitalist class, while the actual power relationship between the producers and the collective product of their labour will continue to be mystified.  

"How?" you ask.

How much labour time is embodied in a Euro, a hog, a dollar, a Mercedes Benz, a yen, a can of beer, a house and so on?

This is why Marx would promote 'labour time vouchers' to replace money in a socialist society, as labour time vouchers would make the relation between product and producers' time at wealth production transparent, just after the social revolution from class dominated society to a classless democracy of social ownership of the collective product of labour. 

Commodity production itself would be abolished in a classless association of producers who would democratically plan what they themselves need in the way of goods and services.   Abstractions confronting the individual today are e.g.: 'debt', 'the government', 'corporations', 'bureaucracy' and 'human nature', all of which are used by conservatives ideological justifications for all the social ills which flow from unequal political power between people. 'The economy' which is actually produced by employing commodified human and using private property in nature, is THE ABSTRACTION.  Embodying abstractions with human power is the stuff of reification.  It is the bane of revolutionary subjectivity.

Common ownership of the collective product of labour is socialism, in my book. There is no socialism as such in the world, nor has there ever been more than attempts to establish it, beginning with the Paris Commune of 1871. With wage labour, the producer sells his or her skills on the labour marketplace for a price over an amount of time. In this sense, labour power, just like any other commodity, is sold for a price. The difference is that commodified labour power produces more wealth, when at work, than it is bought for in wages. This social relation of product and its producer is obscured by the vast division of labour necessary for industrial production; still it applies. 

As a class, those who work for wages in order to make a living and their dependents make up 90% of the population and produce 100% of the wealth. The resulting fact is that 10% of the people in the world own and control 71% of the wealth produced. A system of common ownership of the collective product of labour would see 100% of the people owning/enjoying and controlling 100% of the product of their labour.  

Wobbly times number 159

The Soviet Wage System:

a snapshot of changes in average monthly wages and pensions in the U.S.S.R. from 1965-1973

(in rubles)

Group                                1965                                         1973                       %increase

________________________________________________________

state apparatus             106                                            126                            19%

engineer/techno            148                                            185                             25%

education/culture         94                                              121                             29%

service/trade                   75                                               102                             36%

white collar                      86                                               119                              38%

blue collar                       102                                              146                              43%

state farm                          72                                              116                              61%

collective farm                49                                                87                               78%

all workers average       97                                               135                              39%

(excluding collective

   farmers)

Total expenditures      101                                              184                                82%

on pensions

________________________________________________________

sources: most from Narodnoye Khozaystro SSR v. 1973  and "Problems of Communism" March/April 1973, p.13


Putting the Soviet wage system in its best light, what one can discern from looking at this statistical collection is the intent of the CPSU leadership to use their very controlled wage system as a means to bridge the rural/urban producers' wealth divide. Compare the higher the percentage increase in 1973 with the lower the wage in 1965.  NB: collective farmers percentage increase verses pecentage increase for workers in the state apparatus.   

CPSU State controlled commodity production also included controls on the prices of commodities which were to be marketed to the producing wage-labourers.  For example, rents paid to the collective State landord were extremely low.  The price of bread was also kept extremely low as were a whole host of commodities e.g. public transport.  Many services, like education and health care were taken out of commodity production and distributed freely on the basis of need.  At the same time, many luxury commodities like furs were kept at prices higher than their exchange-values.  Of course anomalies occurred with respect to the wages and privileges of more valued members of Soviet society e.g. top scientists and bureaucrats of the politburo.

Production was planned but, not by the rank and file producers.  The producers remained wage-slaves, the social product of their labour remained alienated from their control, from common ownership.  Rather the CPSU appointed bureaucrats to plan production/consumption of both commodified and non-commodified goods and services. This pattern of political power between subaltern wage-slaves and party bureaucrats as  wage-slave drivers and rulers became the time-tested formula for implementing Leninist models of socialism.  Marx and Engels critiqued the wage system as being the foundation of the capitalist mode of production.  Marx and Engels proposed changing the mode of production to one where wealth was not commodified and sold rather, wealth would be produced for use and distributed on the basis of need.  (See Wobbly times number 88-89)

One of the worst things about the Soviet wage system was the lack of freedom and power allowed the working class by the ruling party. This led to the typical dominance and submission social psychological character structure one sees in all class dominated societies.  Dominance and submission is a dialectical tension against which the instinct to remove the collar from one's neck continually batters. For example, unemployment was, for all intents and purposes non-existent, indeed, it was against the law to be unemployed.  As the propaganda of 'actually existing socialism' was experienced in daily life as wage-slavery, the body politic moved increasingly over time toward a favourable view of  the realities of the higher standard of living and civil liberties in what were officially labeled, 'imperialist countries', the industrially developed capitalist States.  Thus, the much touted transition from, the CPSU version of socialism to, the New Jerusalem of the higher stage aka 'communism', came to be seen for what it was, a lie used to maintain the power and wealth privileges of those at the top of the Soviet wage system.  If one was an astute wage-labourer in the USSR, one could readily see in the works of Marx and Engels (works widely available in the USSR) that there was no theoretical distinction made between what they termed 'socialism' and 'communism'--the concepts were used interchangeably to mean a classless society where the collective product of labour was owned in common while production would be engaged in for use with wealth distributed on the basis of need.  In fact, the abolition of the wage system and commodity production were Marx and Engels' theoretical foundation of socialism/communism, viz: "With the seizing of the means of production by society production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer." 

On top of this, the obvious contradiction of maintaining a political State and calling it 'socialist' added insult to injury, as Marx and Engels continually point out in their very own writings.  

"The people’s state has been flung in our teeth ad nauseam by the anarchists, although Marx’s anti-Proudhon piece and after it the Communist Manifesto declare outright that, with the introduction of the socialist order of society, the state will dissolve of itself and disappear. Now, since the state is merely a transitional institution of which use is made in the struggle, in the revolution, to keep down one’s enemies by force, it is utter nonsense to speak of a free people’s state; so long as the proletariat still makes use of the state, it makes use of it, not for the purpose of freedom, but of keeping down its enemies and, as soon as there can be any question of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist. We would therefore suggest that Gemeinwesen ["commonalty"] be universally substituted for state; it is a good old German word that can very well do service for the French “Commune.”"   Engels' letter to Bebel, 1875

In the world at large, the capitalist propaganda about 'socialism' meaning a system of bureaucratic State despotism more and more took on the mantle of  THE TRUTH thus feeding right-wing conservatism both inside and outside the USSR.  At the same time, Soviet anti-capitalist propaganda increasingly came to be seen  as, a BIG LIE both within and without the USSR and other 'actually existing' socialist States.  The result of all this all too obvious attempt to manipulate workers' consciousness was the more or less unanimous embrace by the workers of capitalism in M-L State after M-L State in the historical approach to 1989.

For a more complete analysis of the Soviet wage system see:
Seongjin Jeong's paper:

 https://thenextrecession.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/sovietplanningltc_seongjin_urpe20180928.pdf

Wobbly times number 157

MORE PROLETARIAN PIPE-DREAMING

"If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, etc., there's a chance to contribute to the making of a better world. That's your choice."  - Noam Chomsky

Private property for whom?

Private personal property within a classless, Stateless, democratic society would be a given.  Common ownership would not apply to your socks, your dog, your partners or kids or to the home which you use.  Common ownership would only apply to the things we use collectively like: public transport, clothing outlets, universities, grocery distribution centres, aircraft factories and so on.

In class dominated societies, the producers of wealth remain in thrall, debt and servitude to rulers.  In a free association of producers, men and women enjoy equal political power amongst themselves.   Direct democracy has become a norm. 

Unity for what?

Harmony with what

with whom

For whose strength

do we depend 

One path leads to 

conserving human orders

of top-down power 

all hushed-up inside

so as not to disturb the 

harmonious hierarchy of the dour

for do so 

would be a sin

against human nature

according to some supernatural 

code 

might even lead to 

bad karma

or 

in some other way

be offensive 

to those

who would dominate 

through guilt tripping you

with claims of

moral superiority

with maybe a promise or two 

of pie in the sky 

when you die

or pair a dice 

through submission

to THEM

The other way

of unity is

toward a solidarity 

for more freedom

not the freedom to do 

with your property

what you will

to be family patriarch 

as if humans and 
property objects 
in the same legally defined 
State enforced 
cage

For freedom defined in such a way

is only freedom for one 

to have power over others' wills

and that's greed-dumb

my friend

no freedom at all

Made by humans 

freedom flows from instinct
in history's river of time

ever on 
toward an individual liberty

where the social condition for the freedom of each

is the common condition for the freedom of all

where equal political power

between all men and women

negates the negation of debt

Whereas collectively produced wealth 

as legalised 

private property

makes for

slavery

bondage & disciplines

servile bowing rituals

to the masters of the State

or workplace

or bedroom

of whatever owning class

or caste

or gender

or supposed superior 

'race'  

Authorities who are ever ready to bring the whip on down

or brow beat you to injury and frown

for the sake of some power monger's

adrenal filled sadistic self-esteem

or crown

All that is done for

with common democratic ownership 

of wealth produced socially

and one forever rebellious NO! 
to domination and

YES! to unity 

for liberty and freedom's continuation

Wobbly times number 141

THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE 


PART 1






PART 2



 

Wobbly times number 139

 Commodification is the process whereby our lives become synonymous with the production of cheapness dedicated to achieving market share. The essence of the concept of commodification lies in the process of turning the living into the dead, a 'thing'. A commodified Earth is a thing to be owned and exploited. A commodified worker is appears as a thing whose productive power is to be bought for wages in exchange for the product of work, soon to become a commodity for sale on the market in order to make profit. A commodified world is an upside-down world of bought and sold private property. Overturning the commodification of the world is turning the world right-side up; at the same time, it is the social revolution.


Zappa's vision didn't go beyond the rule of Capital. He was definitely opposed to what he saw as a leitmotif of modernity, 'cheapnis'. His was a kind of sardonic cry for quality in the age of mechanical reproduction.Unfortunately, Frank couldn't see that commodification and capitalism were joined at the hip.




We start with the commodity, this specific social form of the product, as the foundation and prerequisite of capitalist production.  We take individual products and analyse those distinctions of form which they have as commodities, which stamp them as commodities.  In earlier modes of production—preceding the capitalist mode of production—a large part of the output never enters into circulation, is never placed on the market, is not produced as commodities, and does not become commodities.  On the other hand, at that time a large part of the products which enter into production are not commodities and do not enter into the process as commodities.  The transformation of products into commodities only occurs in individual cases, is limited only to the surplus of products, etc., or only to individual spheres of production (manufactured products), etc.  A whole range of products neither enter into the process as articles to be sold, nor arise from it as such.  Nevertheless, the prerequisite, the starting-point, of the formation of capital and of capitalist production is the development of the product into a commodity, commodity circulation and consequently money circulation within certain limits, and consequently trade developed to a certain degree.  It is as such a prerequisite that we treat the commodity, since we proceed from it as the simplest element in capitalist production.  On the other hand, the product, the result of capitalist production, is the commodity.  What appears as its element is later revealed to be its own product.  Only on the basis of capitalist production does the commodity become the general form of the product and the more this production develops, the more do the products in the form of commodities enter into the process as ingredients.  The commodity, as it emerges in capitalist production, is different from the commodity taken as the element, the starting-point of capitalist production.  We are no longer faced with the individual commodity, the individual product.  The individual commodity, the individual product, manifests itself not only as a real product but also as a commodity, as a part both really and conceptually of production as a whole.  Each individual commodity represents a definite portion of capital and of the surplus-value created by it.


Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Marx 1861-3, Chapter 20

"At the origin of industrial society, based on the primacy and autonomy of commodities, of things, we find a contrary impulse to place what is essential - what causes one to tremble with fear and delight- outside the world of activity, the world of things.  But however this is shown it does not controvert the fact that in general a capitalist society reduces what is human to the conditions of a thing (of a commodity)."  

Georges Bataille, ACCURSED SHARE vol.I page 129

The reign of commodities is allowed because the subject becomes mystified as to the origin of the object : Wage-labour is not aware that it creates Capital.  Quite the contrary: it is generally believed that Capital creates wealth and provides jobs to wage-labour.  This is what Marx was writing about in the section in CAPITAL volume I on 'the fetishism of commodities' , the sort of 'camera obscura' world view taken as the norm under the rule of Capital and what Georg Lukacs was referring to when he used the term 'reification' and identified it as the mind trick whereby the subject>object relation was reversed.

Wobbly times number 125

"At the end of the chapter [on primitive accumulation] the historic tendency of [capitalist] production is summed up thus: That it itself begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature; that it has itself created the elements of a new economic order, by giving the greatest impulse at once to the productive forces of social labour and to the integral development of every individual producer; that capitalist property, resting as it actually does already on a form of collective production, cannot do other than transform itself into social property. At this point I have not furnished any proof, for the good reason that this statement is itself nothing else than the short summary of long developments previously given in the chapters on capitalist production."   Karl Marx
*************************************

I think that the 'development of every individual producer' was undermined by the very historical process on which collective production expanded. Through this lens we see the commodification of human relations. With the cheapening of the commodity through industrialisation came the cheapening of social relations of solidarity in both the working class and its masters. The commodity is corrosive to community.  Yes, communities can develop under class rule, even with all their dominance and submission fetishes. Reactionaries seize on the feelings of insecurity which generalsed commodity production induces and push the need to look backwards in time for salvation from moral corruption.  Liberals feel the commodity's alienating powers, describe them and then resign themselves to the absurdities of life and shop on. Use-value (the material core of the commodity, encased in its capitalist shell of exchange-value) is lost in a haze of electronic blips, buying and selling, gaining market share. And always, the relentless cheapening of the commodity mingling with capitalist class society as a whole. And the proletariat calls itself the middle class and thinks of themselves as individual consumers, competing for the lowest prices.  And with less and less labour time in the collective product, the fact that it is a collective product of labour disappears in an immense, constant sale. Wherever you look, you see an advertisement for a commodity. The 'development of every individual producer' is not something to be assumed.  History demonstrates that this development requires education, agitation and organisation by and amongst the workers themselves about who creates the wealth and which class appropriates the lion's share of both wealth and political power through the wages system of slavery.  

"Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage." Karl Marx 


But what also has happened is the commodification of human relations, of social relations. The discipline necessary to maintain the sophisticated division of labour within industrially developed capitalism, to keep it running the show, so to speak, is made easier for our rulers as the commodity invades our everyday lives at every level and even our relation with Nature. Commodification develops cheapness in critical thinking as it destroys Nature in the pursuit of market share. "We had to destroy the Earth in order to save the economy."   The commodity puts a price on everything. Our mind's eyes are fixed firmly on consumer prices. Reification is built into the language as corporations become thought of as subjects creating wealth. "Mercedes produces the best cars."  The legalised separation of the product from the producer is aided and abetted by commonplace notions, embedded in the cultural intercourse which distance concepts like 'expoitation' from 'wage' and hitch words like 'fair' and 'social justice' to more 'humanely' moderated wage-slavery.  

The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialised production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties -- this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here.

With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears.

Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones.

The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature because he has now become master of his own social organisation.

Friedrich Engels, from Anti-Dühring, part 3, chapter 2 (1877)

Wobbly times number 107

Spot the Wobbly

These films were shot at a rally I attended in March, 2011 concerning the death in custody of an aboriginal elder named Mr. Ward. The upshot of the rally was to demand an end to privatisation of the public service in Western Australia. After all, privatisation is just another aspect of imposing neo-liberalist ideology on the working class. In short, it's commodification and just a way for conservatives to distance themselves from their duty of care. Conservatives talk about responsibility; but when it comes to social responsibility, they're all about developing a cost-efficiency democracy to save the 'taxpayers' money. Well, let me tell you right here and now, it's the working class which creates all the wealth not already found in nature. It's the working class which deserves to control ALL the wealth they produce. The taxation issue is a diversion away from this basic fact. 'Tax' is used by conservatives who wish you to continue to believe in the absurdity of being robbed justly of the wealth and by extension, the political power you as a class produce.

Part 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRtTHnfEcU8

Part 3:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIFZhWnINfc

Part 4:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdvV5R2vZaY