Those who are interested can access the text on Google Docs here: “Getting beyond “radical political change”. Comments and suggestions on the text are appreciated.
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The Real Movement 
This kinda makes me sad that Gene Sharp died this year. Did you ever try to reach out to him in any capacity. I wonder what his thoughts were on how commies could use the same strategies or if he believed that they were not adaptable to left wing causes and that is why the government published and funded him.
Would you be interested to know that the current state of communism on Twitter is the podcast wars, where diversely ironic podcasters all try to prove, unironically, whose fart jokes are the least problematic?
One question you have not addressed in your pamphlet except to avoid the question by calling it an unknown unknown, is the amount of popular support out there for wage abolition.
What if society is actually numerically tilted towards maintaining a bourgeois lifestyle, and is growing more conservative? It is certainly more conservative than before, as generation x and millenials embrace a paranoia about immigrants and crime, as we see in election outcomes.
As an example of an incentive to maintain wage labor, to clarify my point:, someone who had purchased a home or apartment in a medium or larger sized American city, 10 years ago, would today have more than doubled their wealth. If they purchased 20 or 30 years ago, they now have triple, or even ten times, what they paid, in their home.
This kind of wealth creation is due only to the desperation of rural citizens flooding into urban centers where jobs are available, yet it creates wealth for them too, if they are hard working enough to get a mortgage and not rent. It is a ponzi scheme of creating demand in cities by decimating the surplus labor in rural areas, yet it works.
This trend shows no sign of slowing, so that however bad a wage worker may start out now, they can only go up.
This creates an incentive for workers to try and maintain surplus labor, even increase it, rather than abolish.
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https://libcom.org/library/abolition-labour-marxs-teachings-uri-zilbersheid
The Abolition of Labour in Marx’s Teachings – Uri Zilbersheid
THE VICISSITUDES OF THE IDEA OF THE ABOLITION OF LABOUR IN MARX’S TEACHINGS – CAN THE IDEA BE REVIVED?
By Uri Zilbersheid
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Yeah, I wrote about this guy a few months ago. I find his work interesting.
https://therealmovement.wordpress.com/2013/06/08/can-we-completely-abolish-labor-right-now-final/
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I’m happy to see that “identity” [“….will find Black people identify with race and women with gender as central to who they are.”, “……capitalist/white person/man….”] was identified as an issue early in the comments, I wasn’t sure how much further I could read on not knowing if SJWs were not keeping a close eye on this.
I think that you can reference the Swiss referendum on basic income with regards to this: “Almost all empirical data on the attitudes of the working class suggest that the working class will not vote for the abolition of wage slavery….”, in voting against basic income, I believe that the Swiss demonstrated a clear believe that sustenance is derived from wage-labour.
I’ve really enjoyed this so far. Keep up the great work.
#SelfEducate #AbolishSurplusLabour
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The problem I raised isn’t identity politics or any fondness for it. The problem is that it is a problem and seems to have much more political currency than it has any political or theoretical coherence. Gender, race, class, sexuality, the whole shebang needs to be abolished if we are ever to live as social individuals, but I don’t see how you can write a political organizing document and simply ignore how it is that that is the shit people are using to grasp the world. I don’t think we can just complain that everybody is tricked by the religious and media pundits or liberal academics.
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Jehu seems to be on vacation and ignoring the blog this weekend so I will self appoint myself as his representative. Others are free to self appoint themselves as well.
I think the issue of misguided ideological approaches is moot in this case because Jehu says that this is a guide for those activists who ALREADY want to abolish labor. It isn’t a guide to persuade the various bourgeois identity politics theorists of the primacy of economic labor over all other concerns. They have already decided that labor is a non issue and the only issue is your ethnic or gender identity. At most, they fake a concern for economics by saying that your particular identity determines your economic prosperity.
They are not open to having their mind changed and so such a guide would be of no interest to them. There is no need to address their mindset. Jehu’s ambitions are much lower towards his audience than his ambitions towards the economy.
I can’t say I totally disapprove. I can’t imagine even one of these bourgeois fetish concern activists becoming anything but strident and accusatory at the mere suggestion that there are any issues of value beyond their pet issue. When they aren’t outright ignoring such voices.
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The issue of the liberal media fooling people also does not apply to self described Marxists. They are very aware of the implications of their particular form of “Marxism” and deploy all manner of dishonesty or dismissal to defend their failed politics.
I will say this. Jehu should include something about veganism in his pamphlet, despite my name.
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The premise of your critique is faulty, Chris Wright.
People are not using identity politics to grasp the world. They are using it for what Mark Fisher termed “call out culture” before his suicide.
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lmao => “….but I don’t see how you can write a political organizing document and simply ignore…..” <= not only should it be ignored, it should be openly dismissed.
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You should add more commentary on how fighting the state is impossible and that if you pick fights with police or fascists you are going to get your jaw broken.
This might drive it home how dangerously stupid current communist activism is. A lot of young men getting their jaws broken by white nationalists thinking that this is how you bring about communism.
And DSA frauds joining the Democrat party and making a career off the violence, without themselves ever taking such risks.
They really just don’t want to admit that violence will only see them on the losing end of it. It remains part of their strategy and the results are horrific.
They don’t even know anything about how to fight so they are natural victims of this bad idea. But even if they did know how to fight, their victory would be very limited and the police would step in to kick their asses if they actually harmed the klansmen.
Because your guide passes through this issue without demonstrating any sympathy for would be 1917 or 1930s revolutionaries, they will not take it as friendly advice but as indifferent mockery. Putting more sympathetic instruction into it might get their attention more effectively.
This would also add some more earthiness to the text and make it more palatable to readers?
These are however issues that address those who do not already think that abolition of labor is the goal of communism. Your guide currently is addressed to those who already believe in abolition. Though you do run through the basic argument as if it were for a novice to the concept.
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@hoopla and arbitrary
This is why Leftists, and you are, are trapped in a their own sound stage.
“It isn’t a guide to persuade the various bourgeois identity politics theorists of the primacy of economic labor over all other concerns.”
Did I say a damn thing about theorists? You make up a straw man and then “debunk” it. I am talking about the people Jehu says we ought to be convincing. And convincing is exactly the issue because the document is calling for us to convince workers that the only way out is the abolition of labor and that our activity amounts to literally teaching the working class Capital. Jehu at least understands there is a tension here between the objective, material possibility of communism (long achieved) and the subjective conditions, that as a strategy of consciousness raising is problemtatic.
My point isn’t simply that “the working class” isn’t already convinced of the centrality of class. In fact, it goes deeper than that as class, race, gender, etc. have become identities stripped of a progressive content because they have become internalized in realpolitik, in market access, in the branding that passes as politics which then seeks to secure markets by cutting other people out, etc. Since we are not class warriors championing the positive aspects of the working class, but champions of the negativity of the proletariat, the abolition of all elements of this society, i.e. class and also gender, race, etc., we should not be counterpoising “a real class analysis” to race, class, etc. as “mere ideology”, but recognizing that each of those is a moment of the way capital has developed in actual society (for gender, for example, I recommend a review of Roswitha Scholz from EXIT!)
Unless you live in the bubble of white manarchy Leftism, then you have had conversations where the abolition of race and gender and class is taken by the very people with whom we want to communicate as a request to self-genocide. The problem then is how to communicate to people for whom class is explicitly less real than race and/or gender and/or sexuality because 1) class issues are experienced within and through those and 2) capitalist society, money, commodity relations, etc, is taken as given and immutable.
If we cannot explain to people how capital 1) not merely structures, but produces gender, race, etc.as much as class, and 2) how the abolition of capital is possible, reasonable and the only way forward, then the strategy of consciousness raising is a bust.
Also, before you speak for Jehu… maybe you missed Jehu’s pieces on Race and on Frank Wilderson III, also, who Jehu reviewed with a certain provisional approval. Jehu clearly pointed out that the abolition of capital doesn’t immediately involve the abolition of race or gender. Shouldn’t you really be calling him a SJW (though why you hate Single Jewish Workers is beyond me)?
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