Cobb

Who is Cosby admonishing? The vast majority of black youth (although
influenced by it to some degree) do not exhibit the worse features
of reactionary bourgeois culture. The vast majority of black youth
do go to school, do attempt to learn to read, write and speak the
king's English, do listen to adults around them to get a good
education, and when able, do go to work 9-5. And despite this, black
youth are still the special targets of the repressive state
apparatus, suffer disproportionate incarceration and become ensnared
in the justice system, suffer mad unemployment, suffer bad schools,
housing and health-care. enough to make you wanna holler. Where has
the striving for bourgeois respectability gotten black youth and the
Afro-American people? And dont black youth see the hypocrisy and
lying of the racist-capitalist system? Of course they do. No wonder
they are so rebellious! The problem is they suffer bad political
leadership. Their rebellious spirit is not being channeled into
righteous struggle against the system of oppression.

Here Washington repeats himself for emphasis. But he adds the point about one more horrible bit of suffering - bad political leadership. Meaning what? Bad for whom?

Since Cosby is not admonishing the majority of black youth, and in
effect telling us something that we already know and have been
concerned about, the main effect of Cosbys dissin is to smuggle in
the black bourgeois outlook and program on the direction of the
black liberation movement. Cosbys berates a small segment of black
youth because he knows that the more backward elements in the black
community and those who cannot see through his thoroughly bourgeois
ass will be giving him right-ons. But the class conscious black
worker is not fooled.

First of all, liberation is not an issue. If you are working class then you are already liberated. If you can afford the luxury of a union and a steady paycheck, oppression is not your problem. If you buy clothes that you expect expresses your personality, then you are middle class. Liberation is a matter of concern when there are human rights violations at hand. Enfranchisement is a matter of establishing and maintaining civil rights. Empowerment is what comes next. That means the politics of social power - meaning beneficiaries are already liberated and enfranchised. Affirmative Action is an empowerment strategy. It means you can survive without it, but you want to climb higher.

Because the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie's relationship to the
means of production is individual, they inevitably see their
advancement as an individual struggle, accomplishment and or
failure. Consequently this gives rise to individualism as their
world-outlook. They make it or break it based upon their individual
qualities.

For example, take the small lawyer or any other professional. They
succeed or fail mainly on their own individual effort. If they fail
to become big-time lawyers it's because they were not smart enough,
did not have the right connections, did not study enough, etc. Their
success or failure is viewed as an individual thing. Since their
relationship to the means of production is primarily individual,
their outlook is essentially individualistic. They suffer from what
we call the bourgeois or petty-bourgeois individualistic world
outlook. Success is an individual endeavor.

Contrast them with the working class. Our conditions of life are
such that our relationship to the means of production (how we go
about making our living, earning our subsistence) is social, not
individual. Since our conditions of work are social, that is, we
work collectively with other workers to earn our keep, we develop a
more collective outlook on how to achieve success.

Workers develop whatever outlook suits them. In any case, they are more likely to be indoctrinated directly or indirectly by the actions of management since they voluntarily subject themselves to collectivism. If they would start being more human instead of just being a 'worker' then they would come to understand the reponsibilities of management as well. They might come to appreciate what it means to be on the generating side of payroll than simply on the consuming side. But theirs is a voluntary indenture to the collective which they will never escape until they assume the burdens of enterprise.

So long as people see it in their self-interest to do so, they will. But that doesn't invalidated individualism. We support multiple classes in America. If individuals in the working class choose to renounce their individualism, it's their individual choice. Washington suggests that African Americans don't have that choice.

The days are gone when we as a worker labored in our own homes or
shop to produce our keep. The days of the individual producer are
long gone. There was a time when you worked in your own home or shop
producing shoes. As an independent shoe-maker, or weaver, or
spinner, etc., your success appeared to be based upon your own
individual effort. Capitalism put an end to that state of affairs.
By running the independent producer out of business, gathering them
all under one roof, and implementing a division of labor, the
capitalist system has made production social in character as opposed
to individual. Now the former peasant who used to farm his own plot,
or the former shoe maker, who used to make the whole shoe, now makes
only the tongue, along-side another worker who makes the heel, etc.
Capitalist owners, expropriated the small producer, gathered them
all under one roof, put us an assembly line, and now world-wide
production is social in character. Nothing is produced individually
anymore neither cars, telephones, shoes, furniture, nor computers.
This social character of work, this collective work, forces the
worker to think collectively. The outlook of the working class is
fundamentally collective in nature unlike the conditions of the
petty-bourgeois our life conditions forces us to think collectively.

Obviously Mr. Washington has absolutely no clue about the nature of the software industry, or publishing or the role of the entrepreneur for that matter. Pshaw.

Why is this important? Just like success to the black petty-
bourgeois and black bourgeoisie is determined by their class
position, success to black workers is determined by our class
position. Because our conditions of work, and therefore of life
(since work and how you go about achieving your means to get by is
the most fundamental aspect of your life), are collective and social
in nature, our success can only be collective and social in nature.

Just so long as you qualify that 'we', then 'we' don't have a problem with this.

For example, if a worker wants to increase his or her standard of
living, he must get more wages, more vacation time, more health
benefits, etc. from his employer. Any individual worker who walks
into a bosses�€™ office can either beg for more or demand more.
At
any rate, they will probably be laughed out of the office, because
the bosses have no fear of an individual worker in a workplace of
many. The worker can only advance his own interests by uniting with
other workers and making the struggle a collective or social one.
This eventually gives rise to, necessitates and promotes a more
collective or social world outlook. This is why we say that the
outlook of the working class is collective because we can only
advance our individual interests in a collective manner. This is the
experience of workers the world over. This is the material basis for
the working class to form trade-unions, engage in strikes, and
bargain collectively, for only by collectively confronting our enemy
employers can we advance our individual interests. The workers sink
or swim as a class. Not as individuals. Success for the working
class must be viewed collectively.

This is very likely to be the case for relatively low-skilled positions. And it has been the dominant paradigm for generations. What labor collectivists are having extraordinary difficulty with are several important changes. The first is that management in a number of industries is much more advanced and responsive in every way. And yet there remain some industries where no change has occurred or that no change is possible. I could speak at length about this but I'll summarize it thusly. Nobody who works at Amazon.com wants a union, that's because the management there is loved. Washington's worldview only makes sense in the retarded industries where management is hated. This is a shrinking world, and his inability to see or recognize that all labor that isn't collectivized isn't managed by the same kind of retards he is accustomed to.

Do the workers have petty-bourgeois and bourgeois outlooks and
ideas? Of course they do. But these ideas are alien to our class
interests and needs. And when the workers do act individually and
selfishly they are not acting in their own class interests.

The question is whether Mr. Washington will chain them in place in the working class or let them be free to get uppity.

The workers are bombarded daily by the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois
world outlook. The newspapers, the movies, the television, the
schools and universities, the churches, the music, etc, are of
course owned and controlled by the bourgeoisie and are their sources
to bombard the working class with their backward ideas and
ideology. In addition, the working class is not walled off from the
petty-bourgeois in society. They are all around us. The brother or
aunt who made it; friends and old school-mates; even the worker
right beside you that had a couple of years of college and got
steeped in the petty-bourgeois ideal and now brings that outlook to
the job. The most glaring example of the worker infected with the
petty-bourgeois individualist outlook is the one who doesn't want to
join the union, who will the cross the picket line, and who will
snitch on his co-workers in the hope of currying favor from the
bosses.

Class mobility has always been frightening to people who cannot handle change.

While the black bourgeoisie calls on us to get a good education, act
proper and maybe one day we can make it, the reality is otherwise.
Black youth and the black working class can only rise as a class.
Only by building a revolutionary black youth and black workers
movement aimed at the fight for socialism can we advance the
interests of the vast majority of us. Success for black workers and
black youth is not an individual thing. That kind of thinking and
program would have us still drinking from colored only fountains and
will keep us tied to the Democratic Party and oppressed by the
system of capitalism forever.

And there it is. You are black forever, you are working class forever, you cannot be bourgie unless you were born bourgie and the racist-capitalists won't let you become anything else but part of the black working class masses. Even though Washington admits that Cosby is giving his best advice, the advice that works for Cosby, to blacks down the economic ladder, Washington would have them ignore it. Why? Because it can't work for the masses! He rejects upward mobility through individual initiative and insists that it must take place through collective rebellion.

This is why the black bourgeoisie with the support of their white
capitalist masters keep forcing the respectable bourgeois positive
role model down the throats of the masses. Every time that we turn
around some knee-grow lawyer, entertainer or athlete is being pushed
in our faces as someone to be like. They especially love to promote
black athletes and entertainers to our impressionable youth. As
someone said, we dont need their positive role models, we need
revolutionary role models.

Of course you need them. There are none around. There's a good reason for this.

The capitalist system will always allow for an individual here and
there, to blow up and make it. We are bombarded daily with the
success stories of Colin Powell or Puff Diddy. BET devotes a whole
program to the worship of entertainers who made it How I'm Livin?But
the reality for the vast majority is always different. The interest
of the vast majority can only be advanced in a collective struggle
demanding the strongest unity and organization. Like the lottery,
one winner is always necessary to keep the masses losing. The
masses can only advance by keeping our eye on the prize, not by star-
gazing.

This is babbling. The difference between 38k a year and 75k a year is significant. The difference between 75k a year and 110k a year is significant. The difference between 110k and 160k a year is significant. None of those brackets are rich. Bourgie advice can make the difference, collective action will never make the difference.

Success for black youth and the black working class will only come
as a result of a unified and determined struggle against the system
of exploitation, which in the end, is the only way that our hopes,
dreams and aspirations, for a life made possible by the best that
technology, the human spirit and our labor can produce. The
individualistic, careerist outlook of the black bourgeoisie must be
thoroughly defeated. No one has �€œmade it�€� if the rest
of us are
catching hell.

It is a hell Washington is determined to maintain a padlock on with as many blacks as possible locked in. He conceptualizes the economy in fixed, zero-sum terms and fails to deal with the improvement of management, the birth of new industries and business models, class and geographic mobility, the expansion of the middle class and the role aggregated intelligence plays in the shape of both the labor market and new demands of it. He is dumbing down workers and forcing an ideological divide between employees and their genuine understanding of the rules by which their companies operate.

Worse yet he assigns a permanent working class status to blacks and steers them away from the kinds of advice that could raise their standards of living for the sake of a bogus revolutionary posture. He is leading his masses to devalue themselves as individual actors in a dynamic market by fixing their hopes and values for their families outside of their own families and into the hands of those like himself.

If he doesn't realize what he's doing, it's a disgrace. If he does, it's a crime.