La Teoría Comunista De Marx

My comrade Parce and I are working on translating a number of pieces from the Unity & Struggle blog into Spanish. We recently finished up the following piece, “The Communist Theory of Marx,” which is part of a longer document engaging with communist theory and revolutionary organization. Read below or visit here for the Spanish version, click here for the original in English.

La Teoría Comunista De Marx

Como siempre, si encuentras un error gramatical o en la traducción te agradeceríamos tu ayuda en corregirlo para mejorar nuestro trabajo.

Traducido por L Boogie y Parce

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La siguiente entrada representa una parte de un proyecto mayor sobre la teoría comunista y organización revolucionaria que se inició el verano pasado. Es un proyecto en curso que no sólo fue diseñado para proporcionar un esquema de referencia para nuestra propia agrupación. En términos más amplios, está destinado a ser una contribución a las discusiones en curso y debates sobre la teoría y práctica comunista, que, en nuestro momento histórico, no puede y no será el producto de cualquier grupo individual.

Notes on Abolish Restaurants

Reading Notes on Abolish Restaurants

I’m reading this pamphlet to help a fellow organizer present a summary of it for a solidarity network we are building in Houston, the Southwest Defense Network. So far, among the potential campaigns we have come across, several have been restaurant workers confronting wage theft or other forms of exploitation in the restaurants they work(ed) for.

Private Property and Communism (Passages)

Passages from Marx’s “Private Property and Communism” from the 1844 Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts. Page numbers correspond to the 1964 McGraw Hill edition but the full text can also be found online here.

“But labour, the subjective essence of private property as the exclusion of property, and capital, objective labour as the exclusion of labour, constitute private property as the developed relation of the contradiction and thus a dynamic relation which drives towards its resolution.” [152]

“Finally, communism is the positive expression of the abolition of private property, and in the first place of universal private property. In taking this relation in its universal aspect communism is, in its first form, only the generalization and fulfillment of the relation.” [152-153]

“in this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is directly his relation to man, and his relation to man is directly his relation to nature, to his own natural function. Thus, in this relation is sensuously revealed, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which human nature has become nature for man and to which nature has become human nature for him. From this relationship man’s whole level of development can be assessed.” [154]

The Class Individual and the Social Individual

Trying to understand the social individual, cuz I’m trying to understand what Marx meant by universality, cuz I’m trying to understand what the hell is communism. What follows are some passages from Part 2 of the American Worker pamphlet (written by Phil Singer and Grace Lee Boggs).

(Page numbers correspond to the Bewick/Ed edition, 1972; emphasis mine unless otherwise noted)

“The American worker today makes in practice the distinction which Marx made nearly a hundred years ago in theory – the distinction between abstract labor for value and concrete labor for human needs. Marx denied that the essence of value production was the search for profits by the individual capitalists…Marx was concerned with the activity of the workers. By value production he meant production which expanded itself through degradation and dehumanization of the worker to a fragment of a man. The essence of capitalist production is that it is a dynamically developing relation by which the dead labor in the machine, created by the workers, oppresses and degrades to abstract labor the living worker which it employs. Abstract labor is alienated labor, labor in which the worker ‘develops no free physical and spiritual energy but mortifies his body and ruins his spirit.’ Concrete labor for needs, on the other hand, is not merely nor even essentially the labor which produces butter rather than guns. It is the labor in which man realizes his basic human need for exercising his natural and acquired powers.” [46]

Ahem.

It’s been a minute. I’m figuring out a new city and a new life, so to speak. While I dust the cobwebs off this blog and start writing again, thought I’d share what I’m listening to.

Six Degrees of Separation, Alienation & Imagination

I recently watched Six Degrees of Separation for the first time. How is it that I’ve slept on that movie for so damn long? What a great film. I’m not sure if this was the director’s intent but the film is a critical and humorous attack on the shallow decadence of the ruling class and how it relates to the working class. It portrays an attempt by a young black proletarian, played by Will Smith, to flee the alienation and mediocrity of day-to-day life by attempting to become part of the elite through imitating them. Needless to say, he is ultimately unsuccessful. By the end of the film he is unable to distinguish what is really his life and what is not, sinking into a new kind of alienation that merely replaces the one he previously lived. Meanwhile, a wealthy woman is seemingly liberated by his psychological self-mutilation. A twisted ending, the meaning of which I’m still mulling over.

Side note: how come every time I’ve ever heard someone mention this movie they always say, “Isn’t that the flick where Will Smith played a gay dude?” Uh, yeah, but that’s a minor element of the story. No one ever mentions I Am Legend and says, “Hey, that’s the movie where Will Smith played a hetero dude!”

Black Migration From Chicago/NYC to the South

Tagging these two articles to save them for an ongoing project on political/economic analysis of the U.S. South

For New Life, Blacks in City Head to South

Chicago’s Great Migration: Blacks Leaving Historic Neighborhoods To Return South