Transitional Investment & Working Class Organizations: Use Value to
Exchange Value
to Use Value
Atlanta to Newark, Kiwi Airlines
March 11, 1996
From a feudal use value system to a modern capitalist system then back to another use value system was the trend line laid out by Marx. In fact, all prior economic systems- or modes of production as Marx termed them- had been use value systems, in that production seldom exceeded the absolute or relative needs of the majority of people, masses who toiled most of their lives with little to show for their miserable existence in the end. Only capitalism had the potential to eliminate absolute scarcity. Capitalism would accomplish this is a roundabout fashion, almost despite its own tendency towards excessive greed.
What Marx either could not or would not understand, was that his beloved working class would not have the ability to transform capital at the point of the crisis. Working class organizations have shown a remarkable tendency to deteriorate into mini feudal fiefdoms, often concerned with little except feathering the presidents for life's nests. To speak of union democracy is to speak of an oxymoron. But the lack of democracy is the least of the working class organizations's problems. Their evolution in most western countries has occurred in a such a fashion, that their primary role has been to protect jobs from the ongoing effort by capital to eliminate jobs. Since over the long term, unions only have whatever political influence they possess to protect jobs and since job destruction is an integral component of capital, the unions have been unable to protect most jobs. Worse yet, having focused upon an unattainable goal, a goal as unattainable as that of the king who commanded the tide to stop, working class organizations have never learned the most important part of capital- investment. Thus with jobs being shed daily, the industrial world heads towards the great crisis without the possibility that the working class can have an independent effect upon the outcome.
Much as the only agent capable of bringing the former communist world into the capitalist phase is former communists themselves, as they were the only people who had any thing to do with investing- even in the crude communist sense of the term- so must the agent for change in the great crisis of capital be the capitalist themselves. No one else understands the investment process, certainly not the white working class organizations, certainly not the 1960s 'radical' organizations.