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’ve been reading “Decolonial Marxism” by Walter Rodney. In it he talks about how Marxism is often portrayed as a White Mans thing in Africa. The argument is used to discredit socialism as a foreign thing. He goes on to argue the same people have no problem using electricity and so on, and how certain politicals who denied class were later forced to recognize it after falling victim to the conspiracies of their bourgeois.
A lot of this talk falls into two camps. The first is the victim game where the proletariat is subdivided by how bad they have it. The second camp is to reverse the issues Walter Rodney was discussing. Socialism isn’t for the white worker.
Why bother with the divisions? Its already hard enough. A proletarian is someone who must exchange their labor for the means of their survival. Marx was writing to a European audience at the heart of colonialism. If you were making a critique on the professional classes rather than the common worker then you’d have a better argument. Then Lenin would back you up in your criticism of the overpaid and invented offices. If you were criticizing the middle classes Lenin would agree with you that they have a twin prejudices at one time siding with the proletariat and at another siding with the bourgeoisie.
Who’s even being quoted besides rich academics who’s generations work in Western Academia has separated working people from the science which is their birthright?
What did the USSR have to say about the American worker. What does China have to say about the American worker? What does Vietnam have to say about the American worker? The DPRK? So on.
The problem with Western Communism is that they’re getting their queues from so called socialist intellectuals who’ve been sucking too long at the teat of bourgeois institutions.
This is an oversimplification of the stratification of classes. This isnt some game of oppression creating moral qualities or revolutionary virtues. Stratifications are an inherent feature of imperialism and it explains not only class interests that are irreconcilable, but also explains why it is inherent in the system.
You have to see whiteness as class. It is a colonial hierarchy that is defined by your social relations with colonial spoils. White people are by definition part of the global bourgeoisie. They benifit from imperialism, colonialism etc. So if you include white workers who intuitively expect a better deal than the rest of the world’s laborers, why would socialism be “for them.”
Why bother with any distinctions regarding relations to production at all? Because that is a major part of marxist studies.
I mean oftentimes US workers are approached rhetorically by workers in revolutionary movements in good faith. But is this a way to hope a few wont turn into weapons for capital aimed at their revolution, not necessarily because Americans have revolutionary sensibilities that can be appealed to as easily as any proletarian.
So the intellectual is discredited and unusable for revolutary thinking because it’s too associated with the teat of imperialism and bourgeoisie institutions but some how white workers don’t need to embrace and grapple with their history as a weapon of the bourgeoisie. I see.
The problem with Western Communism is white supremacy.
The black panthers found common ground with Vietnam despite having different circumstances. That’s the whole point of internationalism: we find common ground with an international proletariat. You’re right when you say capital stratifies people into a hierarchy of oppression. Class analysis works to break that stratification; whereas, you suggest it should be intensified.
The problem with visualizing race as a class is that you end up seeing the poor white as the oppressor of the black millionaire. Modern colonialism works only because of a traitor class, willing to sell out their country. If race and class are going to be viewed as the same then it muddies the water of modern colonialism. The Black, White, and Mexican on the same shop floor have the same class interests. Those interests are opposed to the interests of the shop owner due to the physical reality of the organization of labor. If one race sells out the others in collusion with the bourgeois they hurt their own class interests along with the interests of the other races. White collusion doesn’t exclude the white worker from the proletariat. Stratification of the working class is harmful to everybody.
Instead of addressing this, you go around telling the white worker that they’re benefited from it and are therefore excluded from socialism. They’re being directly harmed by a system of exploitation and you’re reinforcing the ideas which allow for it.
Marxism is a study of systems. It’s a science which combines the political, economic, and social. Dialectical analysis is a method of identifying interconnectedness between countervailing forces. I don’t know what you’re talking about when you summarize Marxism is a study of divisions. Clearly their is a lack in your fundamental understanding of theory.
So the actual socialist world approaches the Western Working Class in good faith as misguided brothers of the international proletariat, but we should listen to you instead because you actually know better.
Bourgeois institutions have poisoned the well. They should be disregarded as nothing but harmful. There is a labor aristocracy in the West. It is lead by Academic Marxists, Union Reps, Democrats, NGO spokesmen, and the like who speak for the working class without any regard or attachment to the working class.
Two colonized groups with similar ideology and the same enemy finding common ground is not earth shattering.
Its intensified because people treat everyone the same when they aren’t and ignore history and deploy vulgarity as their class analysis. Making pety bourgeoisie more class conscious can make people reactionary, especially when you pretend they are proles.
So it problematizes vulgar understandings of class? Good.
You may need this to be true but it isn’t. It’s important to understand tactical vs strategic interests when we work towards coalition. You cant pretend stratifications don’t exist if you want to move past them and you can’t utilize dialectical thinking unless you actually recognize contradictions.
Of course not. It’s relation to productivity does.
I’m pretty sure racist colonial hierarchies that link white people to colonial spoils and inflated wages and bourgeoisie interests reinforce it more than I do but that doesn’t seem to be a concern.
Probably because I’m not saying that.
You say this as if you’ve never even imagined speaking with an enemy that would slaughter you wholesale in front of the entire world. Of course they want solidarity. The question is why can’t they fucking get it from us. Rhetoric of the south isn’t class analysis.
One of those institutions is whiteness.
I just want to make a quick response in closing. In your opinion the white worker directly benefits from imperial adventurism with no regard to class. You feel that spreading class consciousness among white people would actually spread reactionary views. This is referring to your paragraphs under the second and sixth quote.
You readdress what the actual socialist world says when referring to the topic themselves. You suggest that what they say can’t be taken for what they mean due to their cowardice. I just want to emphasize that all of the countries we’re talking about won their wars. They don’t shy when they’re criticizing capitalism. You’ve got Vietnamese drinking from the skulls of dead North Americans. You’ve got the DPRK shooting missiles over Japan and telling the US to invade whenever they feel froggy. China is China. These are not pathetic countries we’re talking about. These are not people who need you to speak on their behalf because they’re too timid to say what they mean. This to me is the most revealing comment.
Pull whatever you want out of your ass but it won’t make rhetoric into theory. Seriously. Make whatever the fuck you want up about me and then use the global south as a shield like a coward. Then go do a victory dance in the streets. Do it all goddamn night. It won’t change the class conditions in north america.
Just as an aside, there is some great work on the relationship between race and class.
Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (Penguin, 2001) at pages 30–31 (italic and bold emphasis added):
There will be some disagreement as to how ‘rich’ are white people just because they are white in the US today. The crucial point is the final sentence, and that there is a significant tradition of Marxists re-considering class in light of race. If they’re right (they are persuasive and have persuaded me), then we may not be able to solve capitalist contradictions unless we do the same, because we will not be addressing all the facts of capitalism.
In none of this am I denying the relevance of race. Pound for pound a white man will have it a little better than a black man, and that little might end up being a lot the lower down you go. The problem is when it becomes suggested that this is an overall benefit to white people or that white people should be recognized as a labor aristocracy because of this.
I’ve met a fair share of whites who romanticize slavery. Just like when you watch Disney movies you’re supposed to imagine yourself as the royal. The existence of slavery was bad for white people. The white farmer was worse off because of slavery.
NAFTA was, among other things, a plundering of Mexico, but it was also terrible for the US worker.
Its not like the white worker is getting a share of the pie. If you witness someone get trafficked in front of you, you didn’t benefit from that relationship just because you weren’t the one trafficked. There isn’t a privilege associated with not being trafficked. There is an excess of harm being done to the victim. There isn’t an inherent wealth associated with not being murdered or abducted by the police. For me that is a sort of monstrous inversion of reality.
Does it really sound like a “labor aristocracy” that the cops will kill you, but not as much; the cops will still abduct you, but not as much; you will still be extorted in cruel fashion, but not as much? That is your white privilege. That is white dignity over black.
The sentence before the bold font more interests me, because it is not simply the inclusion of race in the analysis but the subversion of class as the dominant mode of analysis.
The structure and superstructure have a dialectical relationship. They both cause each other, but structure is still primary. You can’t replace bread with the idea of bread. There are plenty of people who believe their whiteness makes them rich. There are plenty of people who believe themselves to be middle class because they’re making a couple dollars over minimum. This is important. It should be acknowledged for whatever effects it has, but it shouldn’t be taken at face value.
If we’re going to accept the first clause; “you rich because you are white,” then let’s also address the second; “you are white because you are rich.” Whiteness is a superstructural element, and nothing will bleach your skin as quick as money nor darken it as quick as hunger.
For me, addressing “the facts of capitalism” so far as race is concerned involves a reconciliation of race.
You’re right that there cannot be a successful revolutionary movement that does not adequately address race. There will never be a successful whites only movement, nor can there ever be a successful movement that excludes the white worker.
That isn’t a very complicated thing to get. Look down below and see the sort of rhetoric that suicides socialism in the North. You can’t be on the same side as people who are grounding their socialism in the idea of shipping all the white people to Europe. The CIA couldn’t have done a better job. We are a deeply unserious group of people.