Dear Maoist-Third Worldist… LRNA

(monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com)

Dear MTWist,

I had a peculiar thought randomly. You must be familiar with the LRNA, a post-Maoist grouping. They have this conception of the “New Class”, basically, a class which is permanently unemployed due to the introduction of automation within the U$A. I don’t see any actual statistical evidence that this new class exists and certainly I don’t imagine a particular grouping can be a class if it has no actual relation to production. Certainly, they would still be considered ‘parasites’, but, I was wondering if this class does exist, and I haven’t really researched this particular idea, would they be a reserve of the Third World in the fight against the First World or would they still be a reserve of the labor aristocracy and the bourgeois?

?

Thank you for writing,

Background on LRNA

The League of Revolutionaries for a New Amerika (LRNA) (with Nelson Peery at its head) has “Stalinist” and Black national roots, but it embraces an extreme reductionist version of the TOPF. They have their roots in the remnants of the old Communist Labor Party (CLP). It was never Maoist. LRNA was “anti-revisionist,” claiming the Communist Party U$A (CPU$A) fell from its proletarian roots. LRNA did support the Chinese CP in the Sino-Soviet split against Khruscheviite revisionism, which is to their credit. They still uphold Comrade Stalin, but in name only. They wanted to be a version of the 1930’s CPU$A. They had a printing press called “Proletarian Publishers.” They printed some old Stalin and Comintern classics, which is one of their positive accomplishments. Like the New Communist Movement, they did their stint in the factories organizing the workers, leading to predictable results. LRNA sees no progressiveness in national liberation struggles (except in places like Puerto Rico which are still formally colonized). Their published works are intentionally dumbed down, as they say, to appeal to the average amerikan, unfortunately ensuring that there’s little interesting in them for any level.

Like the PLP, LRNA argues that communist, not socialist, revolution is now on the immediate historical agenda, because the development of electronic and robotic production has rendered the law of value inoperative. Under capitalism, this means that a large group of “permanently unemployed” has been created, people whose labor can no longer create surplus value because of the gigantic productivity of microchips and robots. Their analysis holds that technology is replacing “workers,” many of them permanently. This is the reason for the supposed rise of homelessness, temp work, and the like. So they have spent their time organizing homeless and other nominally poor people in Amerika. They’re involved in the Kensington Welfare Rights organization too. Basically they think that this “new class” of permanently unemployed will be a revolutionary class that will sieze the means of production so that everyone can benefit off the great technology that has produced such plenty. People in LRNA have been known to refer to this group of people as the “communist class.” 

LRNA’s analysis is very Amerika-centric. There are major flaws in their analysis:

1. Like most so-called Marxist groups in Amerika, they don’t concern themselves with the other 95% of the world’s population. LRNA likes to harp on supposed Amerikan poverty (actually, only *relative* poverty in exclusively Amerikan terms). When confronted on global inequality, LRNA members simply allege that any such comparison is meaningless and not relevant to the experiences of “impoverished” Amerikans.

2. Capitalism finds it cheaper to send production to the Third World with cheap labor than to build expensive robots and machines. 

3. When Amerikan “workers” do get displaced by changes in technology and economy, it’s not like they don’t get jobs elsewhere. 

4. LRNA openly argues for high incomes to Amerikans regardless of the work that they do (it advocates this, precisely because it claims that many Amerikans displaced by robots cannot survive without a wage income), and is thus most definitely on the side of the First World against the Third World.

5. LRNA completely ignores the extraction of surplus value from Third World labor. LRNA completely ignores the fact that as long as superprofits keep rolling in from the Third World, there will always be profit enough to hire a massive unproductive and parasitic workforce to realise, distribute and protect said profits. Long before Amerika became “postindustrial” (sic) its industrial “working” class was eating up superprofits: with the scrapping of Amerika’s blue-collar bourgeoisie, this has not changed. LRNA do not see how Amerika’s technologically advanced forces of production are used, through mechanisms of unequal exchange, to superexploit Third World labor. 

6. LRNA tends to see the Amerikan working class *now* (if not before now) as a “multi-racial” one. Supposedly, labor displacement due to automation affects all “races” equally. 

7. LRNA, like the old Communist Labor Party, see the entire (Black Belt) South as an internal colony of Amerika.  Southern Whites and southern Blacks constitute a “Negro nation.” Norther Blacks are not part of this nation according to LRNA. LRNA argues that Northern Blacks have a higher standard of living than southern Whites.  Even if that’s true, it completely ignores the issue of Black national oppression and the police state. It ignores the historic injustice of the Hayes-Tilden agreement and the post-reconstruction “Jim Crow” genocide era, when Black national aspirations were crushed under the feet of monopoly capitalism. It places southern Blacks in the unenviable position of abandoning their northern brethren and having to forge an alliance with the southern settler crackers.

Their politics leads to reformist goals like welfare rights and electoralism. Many LRNA people were heavily involved in the Democratic Party. LRNA hitched themselves to the Labor Party effort back in the 90’s, seeing it as the big hope of Amerikan worker revolution. Of course it went nowhere except back to the trade union bureaucrats. LRNA hardly talks about the Third World, except in an opportunistic way to appeal to their non-white constituents. But no, this new class would be chauvanistic and hostile to the Third World. Today, some LRNA members advocated supporting Obama because he supposedly represents a rise in “communist consciousness.” 

Answer to your question

Like you stated, there is no evidence that there is a significant increase in the permanently unemployed. Whether such a hypothetical class would be revolutionary would depend on various things. 

If there was a sizable group of people who were so cut out of the system that they had absolute no life opportunities and had the standard of living of those who are exploited, then perhaps such a class would be a social base for revolution. However, the Amerikan “underclass,” the lumpen petty-bourgeoisie, or those who live off of welfare don’t currently fit this description. 

One line that came out of Huey Newton’s Black Panther Party was that the lumpen were the revolutionary class in the First World. Others have seen youth as a social basis. Of course people will try to organize that where they are. They will target those demographics that they think they will have the most luck with. It is always a mistake to target Whites by appealing to their class and national interests. Insofar as they are appealed to, they should be appealed to as class and nation traitors. People should not be fooled into thinking that such groups form a real social basis. With First World nations that are oppressed (i.e. captive nations), appealing to their national interests can be helpful. Captive nations vary. Some captive nations, for example, occupied Mexico, have exploited groups, even if they are a minority within the nation. Other captive nations, for example, the Black nation, have no significant exploited groups. Analysis of all the captive nations in North America is beyond the scope of this letter though.