This is a contentious subject. Please keep the discussion respectful. I think this will get more traction, here, but I’ll cross-post it to !Communism, too.

Workers who sell their labour power for a wage are part of the working class, right? They are wage-workers because they work for a wage. Are they wage-labourers?

“They’re proletariat,” I hear some of you shout.

“Not in the imperial core! Those are labour aristocrats,” others reply.

So what are the workers in the imperial core? Are they irredeemable labour aristocrats, the inseparable managers and professionals of the ruling class? Or are they proletarian, the salt of the earth just trying to get by?

It’s an important distinction, even if the workers in any country are not a homogenous bloc. The answer determines whether workers in the global north are natural allies or enemies of the oppressed in the global south.

The problem is as follows.

There is no doubt that people in the global north are, in general, more privileged than people in the global south. In many cases, the difference in privilege is vast, even among the wage-workers. This is not to discount the suffering of oppressed people in the global north. This is not to brush away the privilege of national bourgeois in the global south.

For some workers in the global north, privilege amounts to basic access to water, energy, food, education, healthcare, and shelter, streetlights, paved highways, etc. As much as austerity has eroded access to these basics, they are still the reality for the majority of people in the north even, to my knowledge, in the US.

Are these privileges enough to move someone from the ranks of the proletariat and into the labour aristocracy or the petit-bourgeois?

I’m going to discuss some sources and leave some quotes in comments, below. This may look a bit spammy, but I’m hoping it will help us to work through the several arguments, that make up the whole. The sources:

  • Settlers by J Sakai
  • Corona, Climate, and Chronic Emergency by Andreas Malm
  • The Wealth of Nations by Zac Cope
  • ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’ by Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang.

I have my own views on all this, but I have tried to phrase the points and the questions in a ’neutral’ way because I want us to discuss the issues and see if we can work out where and why we conflict and how to move forwards with our thinking (neutral to Marxists, at least). I am not trying to state my position by stating the questions below, so please do not attack me for the assumptions in the questions. By all means attack the assumptions and the questions.

  • @redteaOP
    9•1 year ago

    Corona, Climate, and Chronic Emergency by Andreas Malm

    Malm explains something we know well: the Anglo-European empire consumes far more than it produces. ‘If one calculates the amount of land … required to grow the commodities, feed them, mine them, process and assemble them …’, something becomes clear (page 51). It is not possible, under current arrangements, for Anglo-Europeans to consume as much as it does without exploiting the global south.

    The numbers are shocking. In 2007, Europe imported goods that require a landmass ‘as large as the entire surface area of India’. This is in addition to whatever is produced within Europe.

    And, of course, India has people in it, which means the whole area cannot be used for Europe, which is why Europe also exploits land and people throughout the rest of the world – including land that would otherwise be rainforest, etc. And wherever Europe decides to grow crops, etc, for Europeans, the biodiversity plummets. This includes Indonesia, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, and elsewhere. I cannot see Europeans being too keen on destroying every green space in Europe to maintain its levels of consumption.

    Now to get personal. How much labour does it take to support the life of one worker? All things being equal, one worker, right? Not quite. Some quotes (from pages 79–80):

    [M]easured in full-time person-years of employment embodied in commodities, hundreds of millions of lives’ worth of labour are shifted across the global marketplace.

    One resident in Hong Kong relies on seven workers – or ‘servants’ – from the rest of the world, in addition to the rest of the workforce, to purchase the goods … [they consume]; in absolute numbers of hours, the United States is, of course, the top importer. At the opposite end of the scale is Madagascar. It needs less than one third of its own workforce to make what it consumes, while more than two thirds toil producing things enjoyed elsewhere.

    It’s unclear from the text how the imports to the US or the EU are shared. It seems logical that not everyone will benefit from exploiting workers outside the US and the EU by the same proportions. But see the comment on Cope, below.

    Do these facts mean solidarity between Europeans and the proletariat in the global south is impossible?

    • @Lemmy_Mouse
      9•1 year ago

      Well we really must break it down further than just nationality. Proletarian interests are universal, what we must really look at is the economic conditions of these nations, the class content of them, and the trajectory of class shifts (1 class to another) to answer that question. All of any capitalist nation will never have solidarity with the south, but some always will. When will the majority or enough to do something meaningful is the real question which comes down to class content and trajectory which is based on the economic conditions.