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.
I believe so yes.
Firstly, 40-2-12=26 not 36.
Secondly, exploit means: transitive verb 1 : to make productive use of : utilize exploiting your talents exploit your opponent’s weakness 2 : to make use of meanly or unfairly for one’s own advantage
In economics it means to subject one to the extraction of surplus labor value via imbalanced power dynamics in relations over the means of production. How does worker A have control to manipulate worker B? They don’t. They have control over their labor and by extension their oppressor to a certain degree which is proportionate to their labor’s value, which is increased by joining a union (good job worker B). I know, you said not literally but I’m a stickler for specifics.
What he is trying to state is that worker A indirectly benefits from the poverty of worker B, which is accurate as it is the relation a labor aristocrat has with a proletarian, however if neither worker A nor worker B can afford luxury (non essential basics of life) and even fight to afford those basic necessities of life (food, water, shelter, clothing, transportation depending on the conditions) then this doesn’t matter as they’re both so exploited that neither are benefiting in any significant material way from the other’s worse situation. Then they are both proletarian, this is the relationship 2 prols have.
I believe you are correct with those numbers. Thanks for pointing that out!
Good points about the power involved in exploitation.
I agree that that A should act in solidarity with B but is that likely? The example above only captures people earning $10 and $2 because it keeps the numbers simple (still apparently too complex for me, but there we are). This isn’t far off the average hourly wage in the US (fluctuating around $11.00).
But what if it’s $37.31 (median hourly wage for nurses, apparently: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm) versus $0.42 (median hourly wage in Rwanda: https://wageindicator.org/about/publications/2013/wages-in-rwanda)?
Just for the sake of argument, imagine the worker in Rwanda makes something used in the nurse’s hospital. The nurse can’t do their job without it. And imagine the nurse’s employer also owns the majority share in the Rwandan factory.
How does one convince the US nurse to fight for the Rwandan worker? Is the nurse more likely to argue for their own pay rise, job security, and benefits, etc, or to argue for an overhaul of the whole system (meaning that, potentially, the nurses wages are lowered while the Rwandan worker’s are increased)? Hope likely is there nurse to say, ‘but everything is cheaper in Rwanda, so they don’t need to earn as much as me living in the expensive US’?
Thanks for the thought-filled reply. I think it’s our perspective on this issue that, once shifted, will provide a better understanding and method of gauging material motivations of workers:
We exchange our labor power for wages to exchange for commodities.
The agreement between worker and owner is the market value of our labor power (what we’re going to be paid for the labor we work. $/hr).
However, what happens when the price of basic commodities (basic necessities) are higher than the agreed upon wage? Poverty occurs. Yes there are more complications to this (debts, stocks, crypto, “side gigs”, meth money, etc…) but it all comes down to can basic commodities be afforded with the financial resources one has. (In the event of poverty, capital is liquidated to obtain these basic necessities)
Marx differentiates the agreed upon exchange rate of one’s labor value and the exchange value one’s wages represent as nominal wages vs real wages (Wage Labour and Capital)
This is what I believe we should focus more on this to understand the proletarianization of the labor aristocracy. On paper, we are rich, but how many of the same commodity can each wage afford each worker? Yes no doubt the number and value of the food, water, shelter, etc… are much lower in the global south, however the commodities afforded by both the worker in the south and the north proletariat worker are both only basic with no luxuries afforded.
I want to specify that this goes beyond inflation. The prices of a commodity are determined first by the cost of production, then minus the wages of the labor force. This is the actual price, the material cost of production, the price they can then charge for said commodity are determined by various market conditions. 2 of which are:
Competition or lack thereof; if demand for a product is high and the supply is rare, the cost of the commodity rises. To put it simply, when there are 5 fishermen all selling fish, they try to outsell one another by deflating the cost of commodity to the floor (it’s production value), minimize their surplus per fish, and aim to sell more fish than the other fishermen to gain more surplus. Why? Why would you choose to pay $5 for a bass when you can pay $1? This is the law of competition.
The rate of profit and it’s tendency to fall. Due to the division of labor, the rate of profitability of a company decreases after it reaches a crescendo. After which more and more capital must be obtained in order to maintain the business. Failure to do so and they will go bankrupt or be bought out or simply out-competed.
This is why we are paid $11/hr but it only covers the same amount as what a basic wage would in the global south. There are other aspects such as predatory debt, indoctrinated financial irresponsibility, lack of beneficial standardized education on the subject, and mass propagandization and a culture around consumerism which also play a role in why this is the case but it predominately revolves around the conditions of the market and the laws of capital.