I’ve been having trouble explaining to liberal co-workers that there isn’t really an “Upper” or “Lower” working class. They insist that class as a relation to means of production is outdated and it makes more sense to measure it by income. What’s the most effective way to explain to them why this doesn’t work?
This might sound like a hot take, but I 100% agree with the dependency theorists, that income does have a near-direct correlation to class. Lets look at international income differences, inflation-adjusted, between the super-exploited global south proletariat, and the labor aristocracies of the imperial core.
Just how much more are imperial core workers (a minority by total numbers) making than their global south counterparts? 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. You are being paid more than the average necessary global price of labor for many reasons.
Also keep in mind that capitalists aren’t paying PPP-adjusted dollars, they’re paying with USD or GBP or EUR for labor, but in local un-adjusted currencies, so the numbers below are drastically understating the difference.
source: ILO labor statistics.
Am i missing something with the labour aristocracy? I get that the global south is super exploited, but aren’t domestic prices in the imperial core proportionally high as well? Like compared to the global south they make 11x more, but aren’t most Americans living pay check to paycheck?
PPP adjusted takes into account the “domestic basket of goods”. Consumer goods, housing, and food are extremely cheap in the US compared to the global south. Example:
In his study of Walmart, Nelson Lichtenstein reports: “Wal-Mart argues that the company’s downward squeeze on prices raises the standard of living of the entire U.S. population, saving consumers upwards of $100bn each year, perhaps as much as $600 a year at the checkout counter for the average [US] family…. ‘These savings are a lifeline for millions of middle- and lower-income families who live from payday to payday,’ argues Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott. ‘In effect, it gives them a raise every time they shop with us.’” Lichtenstein, 2005, Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism (New York: New Press).
In other words, cost savings resulting from outsourcing are shared with workers in imperialist countries. This is both an economic imperative and a conscious strategy of the employing class and their political representatives that is crucial to maintaining domestic class peace. Wage repression at home, rather than abroad, would reduce demand and unleash latent recessionary forces. Competition in markets for workers’ consumer goods forces some of the cost reductions resulting from greater use of low-wage labor to be passed on to them.
Perhaps the most in-depth research into this effect was conducted by two Chicago professors, Christian Broda and John Romalis, who established a “concordance” between two giant databases, one tracking the quantities and price movements between 1994 and 2005 of hundreds of thousands of different goods consumed by 55,000 U.S. households, the other of imports classified into 16,800 different product categories. Their central conclusion: “While the expansion of trade with low wage countries triggers a fall in relative wages for the unskilled in the United States, it also leads to a fall in the price of goods that are heavily consumed by the poor. We show that this beneficial price effect can potentially more than offset the standard negative relative wage effect.” They calculate that China by itself accounted for four-fifths of the total inflation-lowering effect of cheap imports, its share of total U.S. imports having risen during the decade from 6 to 17 percent, and that “the rise of Chinese trade … alone can offset around a third of the rise in official [US] inequality we have seen over this period.”
Higher rent, higher mortgage, doesn’t own anything, dependent on availability of wage labor. In debt.
Still workers. Sure they match income with petite bourgeois types, but there have always been laborers like that. They can transition into petit bourgeois given the right circumstances, mostly through suburban speculation, rarely through productive means. The land contradiction is exploited by the High Bourgeoisie to make allies of a minority of workers. Unstable, however.
Yeah i never understood the point of “labor aristocracy” for those reasons. Is it mainly to show the wealth distribution in Imperialism?
Labor aristocracy has a simple and precise definition: capital is highly mobile, so if you make more than the average globally necessary price of labor, then you are technically in a minority of the world’s workers, and are part of the labor aristocracy.
From Zak Cope - Divided world divided class:
Labour Aristocracy
The labour aristocracy is that section of the international working class whose privileged position in the lucrative job markets opened up by imperialism guarantees its receipt of wages approaching or exceeding the per capita value created by the working class as a whole. The class interests of the labour aristocracy are bound up with those of the capitalist class, such that if the latter is unable to accumulate superprofits then the super-wages of the labour aristocracy must be reduced. Today, the working class of the imperialist countries, what we may refer to as metropolitan labour, is entirely labour aristocratic.
The labour aristocracy provides the major vehicle for bourgeois ideological and political influence within the working class. For Lenin, “opportunism” in the labour movement is conditioned by the preponderance of two major economic factors, namely, either “vast colonial possessions or a monopolist position in world markets.” These allow for ever-greater sections of the metropolitan working class to be granted super-wages so that it is not merely the haute bourgeoisie which subsists on profits. Thus, according to Lenin, it is not simply capitalists who benefit from imperialism:
For Lenin, superprofits derived from imperialism allow the globally predominant bourgeoisie to pay inflated wages to sections of the (international) proletariat, who thus derive a material stake in preserving the capitalist system:
There are several pressing reasons why the haute bourgeoisie in command of the heights of the global capitalist economy pays its domestic working class super-wages, even where it is not forced to by militant trade-union struggle within the metropolis.
In receiving a share of superprofits, a sometimes fraught alliance is forged between workers and capitalists in the advanced nations. As far back as 1919, the First Congress of the Communist International (COMINTERN) adopted a resolution, agreed on by all of the major leaders of the world Communist movement of the time, which read:
Advocates of imperialism understood very early on that imperialism would and could provide substantial and socially pacifying benefits to the working classes in imperialist countries. Cecil Rhodes, arch-racist mining magnate, industrialist and founder of the white-settler state of Rhodesia, famously understood British democracy as equaling imperialism plus social reform:
OH, I THINK I GET IT NOW!
So it’s that the imperial core workers have a Stake in imperialist ventures; Those in the middle to lower strata need them to survive pay check to paycheck whilst the middle to upper strata need it to sustain their comfort levels. Not that the domestic population is inherently reactionary when it comes to their own revolution but when it comes in solidarity with the global and overexploited proletariat! And even with the domestic population, there’s the over exploited almost always POC prisoner population.
Wow I feel so smart now.
Yes, and it’s relative.
relative as in the relation of proletariat between different zones of the imperial core to periphery or relative as in its important and should be studied?
Edit: im dumb the second ones relevent lol i think now that im not mixing up words the question answers itself.