booklet pdf - http://docdro.id/QOE3DbP
pdf for non booklet reading - http://docdro.id/7MoxFui
^_^
edit: I looked into it and yes, the author Appel was one of the founders of KAK, and the very theory espoused in this pamphlet was part of the reason the Danish bank robbers did what they did.
RADICAL!
I'll buy the first Rhizzone poster to rob a bank and give the money to PFLP one (1) beer.
Edited by Belphegor ()
Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:i always enjoy this stuff but its hard for me to 'work out' why USA, the worlds most aggressive imperialist state, has such a weak welfare state when compared to a place like denmark. you'd think the US elite could afford to share their superprofits to better buy off internal dissent. i suppose its because of the larger presence of oppressed nations within the US, while a place like denmark is more straightforwardly parasitic?
settler-colonialism, as you say, has been the way historically super-wages have been paid out. with globalization and hence the loss of previous labor aristocratic jobs, and lumpenization of large numbers of proletarian oppressed nationals, it's obviously changed. so people working in parasitic industries get super-wages by virtue of working in a parasitic industry - thanks to the international division of labor. unproductive occupations have been less prominent in most of europe than in the US - germany was historically, and still largely is, a manufacturing (which is productive labor) powerhouse, with a big agriculture and mining sector, despite having a labor aristocracy. add to that that the labor movement in europe was relatively more successful/militant than the one in the US and that they had traditional labor parties and not the Democrats.
e: leme put it another way to avoid confusion. if you take a look at the danish (or german, as i mentioned above to be clearer) economy, at least when those guys were writing, you'd need to perform unequal exchange calculations to prove the existence of a labor aristocracy. with the US, you don't anymore than you'd need calculations to prove that silicon valley is a parasite on foxconn workers. why? office jobs replaced the factory jobs. and foreign third world labor replaced captive third world labor. and office jobs don't need a social safety net when they got stock options, etc. that's actually the difference between MIM's 1997 Imperialism book & cope's (which is thus similar to their Prospects of Socialism book) - quantitative vs qualitative.
Edited by marlax78 ()
Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:i always enjoy this stuff but its hard for me to 'work out' why USA, the worlds most aggressive imperialist state, has such a weak welfare state when compared to a place like denmark. you'd think the US elite could afford to share their superprofits to better buy off internal dissent. i suppose its because of the larger presence of oppressed nations within the US, while a place like denmark is more straightforwardly parasitic?
it gets said a lot here about 20th century foreign policy but I think it applies here too: don't discount the effect of superior strategic application of violence by agents of the bourgeoisie. the U.S. pioneered the use of private security companies over the often-clumsy methods of state secret police in the 19th century, and by the early 1900s they had violent suppression of labor down to an art
For me, it has helped to clarify the true objective of communists within imperialist nations. I disagree with Appel that calls for social benefits or more leisure time are bourgeois in nature, I think they're still worthwhile objectives overall, but I think he's spot on in saying that these struggles will never lead to unified class struggle in the first world. Therefore, the primary goal of communists in the first world should be to end imperialism. If the source of superprofits can be ended, then the conditions that make practically the whole of the first world working class into labor aristocrats will end also, and not only will the burden be lifted from the peoples of the periphery and they will be free to create socialism, the fight for those social benefits and leisure time in the first world will necessarily become a fight for socialism. It's worth noting that in the USA, there is already revolutionary potential among the most marginalized people, it just gets immediately suppressed by the FBI as soon as it manifests itself in practice.
I've also been thinking a lot lately about the incoming ecological crisis. Maybe the famines will spark a shift in class consciousness?
It is a historical assessment, but looking back 50 years in denmark the duder was pretty spot on. i would be very wary about blanket applying it the the USA actually because of the huge obvious contradictions within the usa that are much more muted in certain western europe countries: uk, scandinavian countries etc etc
anyway, thanks for reading ^_^
Edited by tears ()
https://nycabc.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/nycabc_polprisonerlisting_12-1february2017.pdf