He seems to be one of the most hated figures on the online left. From my view, he does have a lot of questionable takes, but also does bring up some good points when it comes to fighting imperialism from a leftist perspective, so I’d like to know what people in this community think about him.
He doesn’t deny the labor aristocracy. The labor aristocracy is a tendency of the working class in the imperial core who are bribed by imperialists with super profits. Bribing striking workers to keep the machine going. But unions and the labor movement are completely dead in this country. There is no need to bribe anyone. It would just be a waste of money, because no movement in the US poses any threat to power. So why would the labor aristocracy continue to be the prevailing tendency?
It’s just defeatism. Living standards are falling. You can see signs of a revolutionary moment everywhere. Occupy wall street. BLM. The trucker convoy. But they are disorganized and confused. It is the failure of communists to lead them. Because western communists are excusing their own failures to make headway with the working class they just dismiss them as labor aristocrats.
Labor Aristocracy has a very technical definition.
Labor in the global north goes further in buying food, fuel and other needs. Labor aristocracy isn’t limited to just unions. It is by definition part of the imperialist system that labor is stratified.
I don’t deny any of that. I’m just skeptical of “Today, the working class of the imperialist countries … is entirely labour aristocratic.” from Zak Cope, what @muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml linked
Labor aristocracy has a really simple, technical ( let me stress not moral ) definition. There is a global price of labor power, what we call the cost of social reproduction. Right now ˜ $1.50 / hour.
ILO statistics
Just how much more are imperial core workers making? As of 2007, according to the ILO, 11x more.
If you make more than PPP $1.50 / hour, or ~$250 / month, then you are in the minority of the world’s workers.
Also, remember that western finance capitalists aren’t paying for southern labor in PPP dollars, they’re paying unadjusted wages, so the surplus value extracted is much higher. Southern workers are working using highly mobile, 21st century capital equipment, while being paid wage levels from the 1800s.
Believe me, I get it. You have to admit though, for some people on Lemmy, it is a moral issue.
Jeff Bezos has what, 200 billion dollars? Does that make a capitalist with $10M not a capitalist because they own 0.005% of what Jeff Bezos owns? No one would make a categorical distinction between them.
There has to be more to our understanding of political economy. I think there is, I agree there is super exploitation, but income doesn’t give you the whole story.
Edit: By the way, an interesting statistic I saw, as long as this is our standard of evidence. If you redistributed all wealth in the world, the average American would be 20% RICHER. Consider that the cost of living in the US is also way higher.
No they are not, that’s just silly. As an example, look at gold mining in Africa. Many of these people work with their hands. They don’t even have proper tools. And it’s incredibly dangerous too. But this explains part of the income disparity. They are simply doing less productive labor.
Marxists make distinctions between haute, middle, and petit bourgeoisie. How they react differently during different situations, and the conflicts between them are a focus for many.
Only because you haven’t read them. Read the book I mentioned, or imperialism in the 21st century. This recent wave of capital export, has happened within the last 35 years or so. They do not tear down production in the imperial core only to build less productive facilities elsewhere.
This is a very common talking point made by western chauvinist marxists, that income disparities are the result of “less productive” workers or facilities. Its thoroughly debunked in both the books I mentioned, as well as other works made by dependency theory writers.
If there was no labor aristocracy, there would be no imperialism.
“American unipolarity and the petro dollar is collapsing.”
And? Gas prices went up so now the labor aristocracy is no more and whiteness itself has shattered? I don’t think so. Even under the present pressures Imperialism has plenty going for it. I would concede that the labor aristocracy has less political and economic power than it did before the neoliberal era but that is a detail that is often overblown.
" How have you made that conclusion from anything I have said? "
I didn’t mean to say you deny the labor aristocracy altogether, but you don’t seem to acknowledge its importance to the imperialist system, the prevalence it still retains in the North, or the sensibilities is fosters there.
" How do you think imperialism began in the first place? "
Alongside whiteness and labor aristocracy.
This is exactly the point I am trying to make.
By whom?
No, but this is the process that has been set in motion.
If you look at the failures of US imperialism lately, there was so much to be gained in Afghanistan. It could have been an obstacle for the belt and road initiative. There was trillions in rare earth metals. The opium trade was lucrative. This was all lost. And now China offers an alternative in Africa and Asia to the debt trap diplomacy that imperialism relies on. Of course imperialism is still the dominant force, but it is contracting clearly.
It is also not necessary for imperialism to be wiped out fully before people who previously tended to align themselves with the ruling class to become class conscious. People in the west are used to a higher standard of living. There are some commodities people will not live without. So when George Takei and Stephen Colbert pretend to speak for everyone when they say we can spend a “couple bucks” more for gas for Ukraine, it tends to get a large backlash now. There is a large body of Americans who reject the mainstream narrative about Ukraine. They know it’s about NATO, and they want us to leave NATO. This is your average “right winger”. These people are not aligned with imperialist interests anymore. That’s worth paying attention to and not dismissing.
Well by yourself
Its not clear to me that this is quite the blow you are making it out to be but I do agree with your point that the US is losing its grip.
What class consciousness is there to be gained in the Imperial core if not the petit-bourgeoisie consciousness that is rising?
Its worth paying attention to because it is the harbinger of fascism and war. The revolution may be coming, but these people you are lauding are not on the proletarian side. They have their own class consciousness. If we are to be proactive and get out in front of this, I would not suggest telling people who live off of the labor of the South or the generational wealth from stolen lands that they are entitled to something more.
Do you think the working class simply does not exist in the imperial core? This is the mistake third worldists always make. The labor aristocracy is a tendency of the working class. It is not a separate class.
Yes, there is a rise in fascism. You see it in anarchists and libertarian socialists like Vaush who calls himself an “anarcho-NATOist.” They want a no fly zone in Ukraine, which will trigger WW3. Fascism is coming but it is coming from the synthetic left who “support the uyghurs” want to “free taiwan and hong kong.” They will align themselves with neo cons like Bolton and Pompeo to do this.
Fascism arrives when the capitalism system is already on its last legs. Fascism is capitalism in decay. So it is the failure of communists if this moment cannot be seized, and the discontent can’t be channeled into something productive. What you are saying, that we should be against proletarian class conciousness in the west is completely counterproductive and the opposite of what should be done. You are admitting to intentionally antagonizing these people. Which will lead to the fascism you are so afraid of. Seeing things teleologically, it is clear why your ideology exists. It is a psyop
You can see mini labor aristocracies arise in any factory, store, or office that pads out its labor force with disposable temps and seasonal workers (ie. pretty much every business bigger than your local bookstore). The temps gut the permanent workers’ ability to halt or slow production, while the permanent workers usually have a bit of an adversarial social relationship with temps as a group. Permanent workers build up a kind of chauvinism that’s actively working against their own interests. This doesn’t even go into the friction between desk workers and floor workers in the same building (but appears invisible when offices are in a separate building despite being very real), nor the conflicts of interest between highly paid specialists and the low-wage departments that support them. And managers are often ghoulish in temperament despite being exploited themselves with working long hours on a salary.
Even going back to the classic Leninist interpretation, companies in the global north bully their suppliers in the global south all the time. Not just verbally, but in offloading costs or refusing payment for defects that are inevitable at their negotiated pricepoints and engineering specs.
I’d argue quite a lot of the more vocal western leftists are unwittingly labor aristocrats themselves and fail to see why their privileged perspective doesn’t mesh with the experiences of workers who experience the most drudgery. I’ve personally been around quite a lot of people working shit jobs and they don’t think like western socialists at all, including Maupin.
The difference is I don’t pretend to be working class. Maupin doesn’t claim to be working class for all I know. Many of the bolsheviks were not working class. Marx and Engels were not working class. So why try to smear someone for not being working class? Also, the labor aristocracy is a tendency of the working class, not a separate class. A labor aristocrat is still working class.
The objective of communists is not to think like people working shit jobs. The objective is leadership. I wouldn’t expect communist leaders to think like someone who works 60 hours a week. I would expect them to think within the framework of dialectical materialism.
I think I’ll just let this post speak for itself.
There is a recording of Divided World, Divided Class on youtube by dessalines, I do highly encourage you to read it.
To give a simple analogy, lets compare house and field slaves, and see how they correlate to imperial core (largely service economy) workers and global south proletarians.
House slaves: Do not produce commodities for the market. Produce use values (meals, clothes, clean house, etc) that are immediately consumed. Lives off the Surplus value created by the field slaves, that the slave master apportions for them. Very small numbers compared to field slaves. While still being slaves, live an undeniably easier life than field slaves. Cannot really be a revolutionary group, since they do not control production. Many of them actively fight to maintain field slavery, since their lives are supported by field surplus.
Imperial core workers: Do not produce commodities, mainly just put final touches, branding, or do maintenance and services for the commodities produced by global south proletarians (GSP) . Much fewer of them than GSPs ( I think there are 5x more GSPs) , so its easily possible to pay them superwages out of the surplus value / superprofits created by GSPs. Undeniably live a better life than the average GSP. Many fight to preserve imperialism, knowing that they derive existing benefits from it. Revolutionary potential very debatable, since they do not control production, or produce commodities ( what imperial core country has had a revolution so far? Imperialism exports revolution and quells it at home).
by who? ;)
I will check it out
To say this categorically is too much. There is a great number of service sector workers in the US. And I agree wholeheartedly that there is something fundamentally different about this type of workers you describe. The analogy you make is a good one. But there are still a great number of workers who do produce commodities.
About 22 million actually according to the US bureau of labor. Not a lot, but keep in mind that not even half of Americans have a job in the first place. And being official statistics, I believe this does not include undocumented workers. These are coal miners, construction workers, foresters, farmers.
I agree that right now, there is no revolutionary potential in America. But can you say for certain this will not be the case in 20 years? Isn’t there still work to be done today?