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.
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.