supporting occupy wall street

8/3/2019 Supporting Occupy Wall Street

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Workforce:A Resource! With Programmatic Power!

Booklet on

roots of crisis

and

Resources forLiberated Future

https://www.createspace.com/3561249
https://www.createspace.com/3561249https://www.createspace.com/3561249


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Labor supervised by global finance capital?

When has/will labor supervise itself?


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Capital's theory of work:Free versus slave; Wage-labor only one factor in production

a cost to be minimized....

Profit accrues from entrepreneurial skill,

technological innovation and risk-taking.

Capitalists as job creators!

Labor needs its own theory of work: the creative force...

Thesis #1: Everything depends on labor.

Sociallabor is source ofsocialwealth

Employees fund incomes to employersCritical Theory of Work/ Critical Work

challenges business-utopian model

that market forces will accomplish widespread prosperity


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labor as the key activity

by which humanity exteriorizes and expresses itself

and also humanizes the world.

an alternativeVision for Labor!

A Labor Theory of Humanism

-- A Humanist Theory ofLabor


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What is the future for labor?What is labor's vision?

What makes critical theory critical?

What makes radical pedagogy radical?

Thesis #2:No critical theory or radical pedagogy without

labor theory of social action and social ownership!

Social Labor,

Social Wealth:

Only labor forceas a group

has legitimate

ownership

Just because

they stole it

doesn't mean

they own it!


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Powerless?

Driven to its knees?

Loss of revolutionary subject?

Repressive integration.

forces and tendencies

exist which may

break this containment

and explode the society.--Herbert Marcuse,

One Dimensional Man

What forces, tendencies?

Future of Labor?


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Economic polarization: intensifying inequalities

From Revolts to Revolution?


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When Labor Stands up,

Wall Street and its minions:

shout How Dare You!Its Class Warfare!

Power ofstrike/

general strike:

withhold payments

to capital.

Power of laborGoverning itself:

reduce/eliminate

payments to capital.


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Class War: Transferring Wealth Upwards, 1984-2007Prelude to 2008 crash


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1986


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1991


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2007


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2007


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Distribution of Wealth in Quintiles

(page 11 in booklet)

Nation 1

Perfect equality

Nation 4

is

USA Today

84%

11%

Each 20%

4%1%

-1%

2008


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Wealth inequalities impact

all institutions: educ; criminal

justice; politics; health, etc.

Not unforeseen: capital glut.

Failure of world's strongest

financial system to manage assets

without disaster: crisis of

over-appropriation.


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Thesis #3: Inequality is not simply

a matter of the gapbetween rich and poor;

but of the structural relationships

between propertied and non-propertiedclasses of the population.

Critical Work:

What is the social mechanism that generates inequality?


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Labor and Value:This relationship well-known to critical Marxists,

but let's go over it with simple hypothetical

Input

Costs

$50

For

Quilt

kit

Output

Value

$350.

Value Added through Labor$300

Wage = commodifiedlabor


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Critical Work:(Page 14 in booklet)


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Manufacturing sector produced $2,274,367 million in value added.

Workforce income: $607,447 m. Income to capital: $1,666,920 m.

(36.4%) (63.6%)

Financial and Insurance sector (2005) produced $1,029 billion

Workforce Income (2007): $494.5 b. Remainder income to capital

(roughly 50%) estimated proportions (roughly 50%)http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/11statab/banking.pdf

(Discontinuing

publication2013)


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Critical Work: Analyzing data from

Statistical Abstract of the United States 2011

>>


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U.S. cut and sew apparel workers:

Added value produced $7,385 million

Workforce income: $3,075 m.

Income to capital: $4,310 m.

California garment factory


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Occupy Wall Street is challenging the right to the 1% to own

and control society's wealth distribution.

This is dramatic, yet just the beginning.By raising fundamental questions about wealth distribution

and challenging the intensifying inequalities,

people can start to rethink

the shape of human society.

What are the minimal social changes needed

to begin liberation of workforce? Jobs? End poverty?


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Charter 2000 discusses elements of a common ground

political platform that can enableprogressive forces to unify and go on offensive.

It asks: What are we for? What kind of world do we want to live in,

and its response is a coherent draft program.

http://progressiveplatform2000.org/Charter-2000-Platform.htm

Critical Work and Radical Pedagogy

and

Charter 2000

are bothchieflypedagogical tools that may serve as

helpful discussion documents for Occupy Wall Street.
http://progressiveplatform2000.org/Charter-2000-Platform.htmhttp://progressiveplatform2000.org/Charter-2000-Platform.htm


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David Brodsky will present Charter 2000 as a

Transitional Program for Labor to go on offensive:

*A positive plan for democratic renewal

*A highly detailed program

*A long-term project.

The core of Charter 2000 is

human rightspolitical,

social, economic, and cultural.

We have added the need to challenge

the wealthproduction

and commodification processes.


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Once people understand that wealth is a social product

and that system of power and privilege

of capital appropriators and Wall Street is

socially deforming and self destructive, we can begin to act

In accordance with Marcuse's militant principle:

The inner dynamic of capitalism . . .necessitates the revival of the

radical rather than the minimal goals of socialism.

--Counterrevolution and Revolt Herbert Marcuse, 1972


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Commodity-dependency is contrived, not natural or necessary.

Market system is: incapable of liberating humanitybecause it requires artificial scarcity, profitable waste,

pollution/destruction of planet.

Commodity- dependency: No escape

except through de-commodification.

http://www.youtube.com/storyofstuffproject#p/u/22/9GorqroigqM
http://www.youtube.com/storyofstuffproject#p/u/22/9GorqroigqMhttp://www.youtube.com/storyofstuffproject#p/u/22/9GorqroigqMhttp://www.youtube.com/storyofstuffproject#p/u/22/9GorqroigqM


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Decommodify certain minimums:

Health careEducation

Food

Transportation

Guaranteed minimum income

Housing

Eliminate contrived (irrational) market scarcity

Decommmodification

reduces dependency on markets.

Social labor is repurposed for social needs, not profit;

limits effects of commercialism.

Decommmodification ISliberation from market scarcity.


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To create the subjective conditions for a free society

. . . [we must] . . . educate men and women who are

incapable of tolerating what is going on,

who have really learned what is going on,

has always been going on, and why,and who are educated to resist and

to fight for a new way of life.-- Brooklyn College Lecture, Marcuse 1968

Refusing

the Counterrevolution's

Intensifying Inequalities / Terror War


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Radical pedagogy rearms people with toolkit

forLiving Labor's Promise.

Features and developments in labor movement's past need to be recalled:Labor theory of wealth

Social Labor creates social wealth.

Stealing it doesn't make it theirs.

Labor as human mode of being in the world;

Commodifican of labor means commodification of human existence:

labor deformed into a instrument of production;

social life de-humanized.

When will labor reclaim its right to supervise itself?

grasp intellectually and politically that which is its own?

From wage labor to Public Work:

Public sector, public sphere, public interest, public domain:

Public Work and Commonwealth!


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Minimal goals (social democracy)Liberal perspective = help poor, jobless, argued on basis of fairness

It's understandable that we seek these; but as transitional goalsnot ends in themselves.


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Marcuse's re-humanizedVision of Labor, Liberation, and Learning:

Revolutionary perspective =

liberation and flourishing of human species.

Alternative Social Vision:

Living labor's promise.

Not a theory of government;

A theory of human freedomand fulfillment.

Sublation of classical

philosophical sources:

Aristotle: actualization of

human species potential;

Buddhism/Acquinas:

Good Works;

Kant: Cosmopolitan

Humanism;

Marx:Gattungswesen;

Species-being.

Radical

Goals:

Marcuse: multicultural solidarity for the human species peace liberation (p ix x )

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