I was recently in a conversation with a self-described MagaCommunist who held the position that the primary contradiction in the USA was that the financial owning class owned all of the means of production and that the contradictions of settler colonialism were secondary and could only be resolved through a workers’ state.
I realized that I hold the position that settler colonialism is the primary contradiction in the USA, but I also found that I struggled to articulate it effectively. I’m looking for your own thoughts or writings that I can study to learn more on this topic.
Any Western “”“communist”“” that wants to dismiss the settler-colonial question needs to grapple with the fact that there’s a bourgeoisified portion of the working class within the imperial core that owns property, investments, savings, and has class mobility.
So let us imagine a hypothetical worker. They went to college on the GI Bill and have clear path of advancement in their career, they have retirement savings in the stock market and savings in the bank, they have a home which is accruing value in the real estate market, and they keep up with their credit and debts and bills because of that well paying job. Their kids can grow up to be real estate agents, investment bankers, and corporate executives.
What interest would this worker have in a revolution?
To me this seems like the equivalent of saying “imagine a perfectly spherical ball rolling across a smooth frictionless surface” in terms of picking a member of the “bourgeouified portion of the working class”. Note that, I’m going to refer to the “bourgeouified portion of the working class” as being members of the “labor aristocracy” for this reply. That may lead to some disagreement, but from my understanding both of what labor aristocracy means and of your post, this is essentially what we are talking about.
Above all of that, climate change affecting them or their children, decreasing standard of living and lowering life expectancy all still seem like plausible reasons for even this hypothetical worker to adopt socialist politics, even if it’s unlikely.
However, I don’t dispute the existence of a labor-aristocracy and it being the difficult obstacle to overcome still, especially when we consider the direct relationship members of the labor aristocracy have with settler-colonialism and imperialism in the US. I just think that as the contradictions inherent in capitalism continue to progress into their terminal phase, we’re going to see less and less of this type of worker because the US capitalist system is being forced to liquidate this exact kind of worker at the moment in order to stay alive. Consequently, I think that this type of analysis is becoming increasingly outdated at the moment.
Okay, maybe I need a more extreme example.
Do you think that the white Jewish workers in “Israel” and the workers in Palestine have the same class interests?
I don’t think you needed a more extreme example and I’m not really sure what this question is aiming to achieve. This is like asking “did Frontiersmen in the United States have the same class interests as the Native Americans that they were slaughtering for sport?” To which the answer is clearly no.
Your reply reads as combative to me, by the way, due to the way you’ve instantly decided to purity test me on the issue of Israel-Palestine. I’ve been a vocal critic of the apartheid state of Israel in real life for over 12 years. So can you please explain to me why you’ve decided to pursue this question?
I made my reply to say that doing the mind game of “pick a hypothetical worker” isn’t a very good form of analysis in the United States because this hypothetical worker increasingly doesn’t exist and more than that, is incomplete when we are talking about settler colonialism. I mean, this hypothetical example could’ve actually applied to a Native American person, who, even if they are in a compradore relationship with settler-colonialism, has a fundamentally different relationship to it than an actual descendant of settlers.
The point I’m trying to make is that there are workers who are not revolutionary subjects because of their material conditions under settler-colonialism. That’s it. The settler-colonial question is real and has to be grappled with. Bourgeoisified workers are not frictionless spheres in a vacuum on a perfectly flat plane, they’re like, probably at least 20% of the US workforce.
A MAGAcommunist like the one in the OPs question basically rejects settler-colonialism as a factor entirely, and the OP asked how to deal with that. So, I pointed out the obvious material reality: bourgeoisified workers materially benefit from settler-colonialism and imperialism, which means they are not revolutionary subjects.
What, exactly, did you disagree with? Cuz it sounded like you were saying the settler-colonial question has been settled and doesn’t matter anymore, because people who go to college don’t always get guaranteed career paths. Not to be combative, but that basically sides you with the MAGAcommunist.
I don’t really know how you read that in my reply when I even said “…I don’t dispute the existence of a labor-aristocracy and it being the difficult obstacle to overcome still…” in the last paragraph of the original reply.
Okay, well I’m glad that you’ve jumped to this conclusion as a result of not fully reading what I wrote, but yeah, I don’t think Jackson Hinkle and his ilk are very smart people with a lot of interesting things to say. I believe that Settlerism is a fundamental contradiction and needs to be reckoned with if we want to have any serious discussion of discussing revolution and capitalism in particular in the United States. I really know what else to say to that.
I think this is the misunderstanding though. I didn’t disagree with you. Like, I don’t intend to be lecturing here, but when high school/freshman college students consider the “perfect sphere rolling across a frictionless surface” the point of doing so is because they haven’t developed enough knowledge of physics to be able to analyze more complex physical dynamics, in other words, because the discussion of physics of such a scenario is incredibly theoretical and simple. But everything said about such a hypothetical is entirely correct and applies downstream when considering perfect spheres rolling across surfaces with friction, and imperfect spheres rolling across frictionless surfaces, and then what needs to be developed for these students to be able to analyze this is a more complicated understanding of physics. Apologies for the analogy but I hope we can see where I’m going here?
I want to now keep in mind this part of the reply:
as I respond to what we might disagree with (and more specifically, to say what I’m trying to say more in a more plane fashion).
I think that, as United States hegemony, and respectively, the capitalist system of the United States dies, that members of the labor aristocracy will continue to become proletarianized and ergo have the potential to become revolutionary anti-capitalists. Granted, this is like classic Marx and Engels levels of analysis, but this is alluded to in the Manifesto and then later developed further in developed a bit in Das Kapital.
Okay great, so if you agree with me on that, then, while at the moment, as you say probably 20% of the population exists as members of the labor aristocracy, then, your analysis is correct, right now and the nature of settler colonialism makes it the primary obstacle of concern in developing revolutionary socialism in a settler colonial state.
But I think that it is increasingly become less and less correct; as I allude to in my original reply, financial capital is consuming the wealth of the labor aristocracy in an effort to stay alive at the moment. In which case, given, I don’t know, say 10 - 15 years, I think that the present situation will develop in an entirely new and unexpected direction with the potential for this fundamental contradiction to not be able to be fully explained by Sakai-style-capital-S Settlerism anymore at the level of just principally the class of US Laborers.
So now, as a reply to the original post, and a point made by a few other replies, my argument is that settler colonialism is going to continue to erode as the primary contradiction and become simply one of the many primary contradictions, and I hope that clears up what I was and am trying to say.
Okay, so how else am I supposed to read this than; “Your analysis is oversimplified because you haven’t developed enough knowledge of class stratification to be able to analyze more complex class dynamics.” It read to me as a direct attack against the settler-colonial question. Also, kinda against me, basically calling me a highschooler.
Also, regardless of whether or not the settler-colonial situation is destabilizing as settlers are debourgeousified, it’s currently the primary contradiction. Which is what the OP was about?
For what it’s worth I agree, I think the limits to growth and the tendency for the rate of profit to decline mean that there won’t always be superprofits to redistribute to the settlers. Eventually they get cut off.
I don’t think we’re there yet.
So I took the position that the MAGA movement has a massive petite bourgeois element to it, and that many of them play a role that is strongly correlated with the kulaks, but that was rebuffed with an equally well supported position as neither of have any data to back it up.
But the point about people having to give up their interest in the stock market is answered by “that’s why we’re fighting against the bourgeois financial class”. Which makes sense because you don’t need money to survive retirement once the DotP arises.
His point was also that the number of people who voted for Trump is far larger than the number of people that own Air BnBs or other forms of rental income, which I think is probably accurate.
I think what you’re getting at is the point made by Tuck and Yang in Decolonization is not a Metaphor about incommensurate interests between the settlers and the indigenous and ADOS.
I am looking for more analysis along that line, something I can read and analyze.
Interestingly, his focus on finance capital isn’t in contradiction with an understanding of imperialism. The World Bank, IMF, and WTO are agents of the empire that use financial tools (debt and credit and currency exchange and bonds and shares etc etc) to enforce austerity and dismantle the sovereignty of indigenous governments in the periphery, transfer superprofits from them to the imperial core, and redistribute the superprofits among a specially elevated core of bourgeoisified workers through their investments.
The workers who are invested in real-estate and the stock market are invested in imperialism. We have to fight against the bourgeois financial class, but we also have to recognize which workers have become entangled and enriched by superprofits - and we can’t ally with them, because their interests only align with empire.
I think that’s entirely true for what we could consider petite bourgeois in the early 1900s - small time landlords and small business owners. I think the fact that USA workers are invested in the financial sector (ignoring their own personal businesses or Air BnBs) makes them resist the liberation of OTHER nations, but I don’t actually think it creates resistance for their OWN liberation. Yes, if they abolished securities overnight their net worth would drop but most of that securitized worth is intended as retirement savings. A revolution that abolished the bourgeoisie would immediately solve the retirement problem and no one would need a savings to make that happen. So I don’t think the retirement investments, which makes up the bulk of what you’re talking about, creates material conditions that would cause reaction.
Land reform would absolute create reaction among landlords, and abolishing the financial sector would absolutely create reaction among independent financial planners, independent tax accountants, day traders, etc. But I’m fairly certain they make a minority even of the MAGA contingent.
Yes, but these things are directly connected. Our liberation is contingent on their liberation. As long as our class enemies have an army of surplus labor to superexploit around the world, we can never challenge them at home.
I’m not so sure. Someone who saved for 45 years suddenly seeing their savings evaporate and be replaced by a government pension would feel resentment towards people who didn’t have retirement savings that now get to enjoy the same government pension. They materially sacrificed all their life, and now it’s all worthless. I don’t think investors will accept that.
Not just landlords, but anyone who owns property - including all home owners. Homes are investments, not just places to live.
Is it not easier and neater to describe this worker as being part of a class of lifetime net creditors, as opposed to lifetime net debtors?
Wouldn’t a “lifetime net creditor” be someone who lends money? I really don’t know what you’re describing tbh
Put together all of the rent, interest payments, insurance (minus payouts), mortgage (minus home value), etc. that a given person pays throughout their life.
Put together all the capital gains (stock dividends and appreciation, real estate appreciation, bank interest, etc.) that the same person pays throughout their life.
Now compare the two. On average, do they have more passive income, or more passive expenses? This concertely quantifies the relationship of how participating in the financial capitalist world benefits or hurts each individual. This unavoidably needs to be done, because the line between capitalist and proletarian has been blurred: you can have a worker making 80k a year who’s never been in control of the means of production yet invests a large chunk of income in the stock market, and thus ends up owning more financial capital than many business owners. It is very common for a person to skim surplus off people they can’t even identify, and also have their own surplus skimmed off by people they’ve never met. 37% of people in this country rent, 52% pay a mortgage, only 11% own outright. Some disturbingly large fraction of people are permanent debt slaves. A large supermajority are lifetime net debtors. A small fraction (maybe 10%) are pretty close to breaking even, and a tiny stratum is made up of unambiguous beneficiaries.
With colonialism, once you colonize all the land you then run into a barrier where you can’t squeeze any higher returns out of the land, and with classic capitalism, you reach a point where there’s not much more that people can use. With financial capitalism, though, you can create limitless things that you charge people for, thus removing the cap on local/national land or labor productivity, and also it ties right in to global imperial power. Plus it can sustain many of the illusions and narratives of affluence.
Remember, about 40% of US GDP is remuneration for labor, and 60% is capital gains. There are people who get almost all their earnings through labor, there are people who get almost all their earnings through capital, and there are people who have a mix.
Ah! I see what you mean now. Yes yes that definitely aligns with how I understand bourgeoisification. By becoming invested in stocks and properties and businesses the worker gains a mixed class status, the so-called “middle-class”, which enables a pseudo-bourgeois lifestyle and entanglement with the health and wealth of the capitalist economy.
This is also how we can understand the proletarianization of highly educated professionals, like tech workers and doctors. They have mountains of debt and are worked to the bone, even if they can afford luxuries we’re also seeing them form unions and gain a class consciousness of themselves as part of the larger working class. They’re being debourgeoisified/proletarianized in real time as the ever present reach for yield forces these high paying industries to stretch workers thinner and thinner to achieve the same amount of growth. And the amount of debt heaped onto them increases with every new doctor or engineer, because the cost of their education continues to skyrocket out of that same reach for yield and tendency for the rate of profit to fall.
This process is coming for everyone. Maybe not finance, but anyone who performs socially necessary labor will be proletarianized.
But more importantly, it’s simple and intuitive and very easy to define. You don’t need to establish the entirety of what “proletarian” or “bourgeois” (let alone “middle-class”) really means, you just need to ask “are you stealing more money from others through the system, or are others stealing more money from you”. It only requires a base level of recognizing that the economic/legal scaffolding allows some to clearly benefit at the expense of others.
Doctors and engineers are not “debourgeois-ified” just because they temporarily have a networth below zero. They can still expect to earn several million over the course of their careers, and they will likely have plenty of opportunity to buy stocks. There’s a reason why the metric is “lifetime total credit received” minus “lifetime total debt paid”. If the lifetime earning prospects ever stopped becoming attractive, you’d see a sharp drop in these professions.
Doctors are being debourgeoisified, I didn’t say the process was complete. Their conditions are often deplorable: massively long weeks in health threatening conditions doing highly self-destructive emotional labor, with massive amounts of debt. They’re highly compensated, of course, but healthcare has gotten so much worse as staff levels are slashed to nothing and doctors are forced to work outside their training to cover the needs of their patients. There’s a reason doctors are going on strike with nurses, physicians, and midwives now. The material conditions are changing. They’re not some revolutionary vanguard, but doctors taking strike actions is extremely rare for a reason - and if that’s changing, we need to be paying attention.
Also… are you advocating we drop proletarian and bourgeois from our vocabulary?
The manager/administrator class is certainly taking over hospitals as much as other institutions, but I don’t think doctors can be fully proletarianized for as long as they remain scarce, and carrying a certain prestige, and able to have their own firms individually.
I’m not saying the classic terms of proletariat and bourgeoisie aren’t useful anymore, but it’s more and more difficult to see pure manifestations of them like you could a century or two ago. This is part of why if you talk about these classes to anyone who’s not already a socialist, you get a blank stare at best and an eye roll at worst, because without an extensive explanation it seems foreign or scholarly and then people won’t apply it to their worldviews.
With so much production being obscured across national borders, it’s harder for people to identify themselves exclusively in relation to production. Consumption, especially powered by debt, is a huge part of how people today identify. Having a quantifier for the relative monetary relationship is something that applies to consumption of products and especially strongly to interactions with financial institutions, while still being applicable to employment. And crucially, it can take into account the opposition* between core countries and peripheral countries.
*using this word instead of “contradiction”, for accuracy and versatility
I will say I agree that proletariat and bourgeoisie, as terms, are mostly useful for discussing theory. If I’m talking to a normal person I’ll just say working class and ruling class, and I’ll even use terms like “middle class” like I’ve done here in this discussion.
But I don’t think we need to throw out the concepts to capture the “consumer” as a social class, because the revolution will not be fought by consumers. Consumers are inherently reactionary; a direct result of the redistribution of superprofits to workers within the imperial core. That’s a settler class. They have disposable income from high salaries and investments, the ability to retire, their own homes, the ability to start their own business, and that is all bourgeoisification. They’re workers who exist in a stratum above the workers of the rest of the world in their own special “middle class.” They are bourgeoisified - or like you said, creditors more than debtors.
The debourgeoisified proletariat, without the superprofits from imperialism, can buy what they need to live and that’s it. They aren’t “consumers” and they certainly wouldn’t identify that way. They buy whatever is cheapest and will get them to their next paycheck, they make do with whatever knockoff garbage they can afford, and they pirate whatever they can’t buy. I don’t think the “consumer” identity is an important one for building class consciousness, and it will decline as conditions worsen and the contradictions sharpen.
Now if we bring this back to doctors, I agree that they will probably never be in these dire straits. Same with any other highly compensated profession. But! Their ability to consume whatever they want will decline, and as a result, being able to identify as a consumer will decline as well. There’s also a difference between doctors in their own private practices and doctors in hospitals. One is petite bourgeois with ownership of their own business, the other performs socialized labor in an industrialized setting alongside much less well compensated fellow workers. That’s like saying mechanics can’t be proletarianized because there are private mechanics. It’s the industrial labor that makes the prole.
I think these recent strikes, with doctors striking right alongside other healthcare workers, are a sign that doctors are being proletarianized and losing their bourgeoisified status.