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.
At minimum, the indigenous peoples of the Western hemisphere have a different material understanding of the world that they have not had a chance to develop fully. Doing so would necessarily require challenging the Eurocentric material understanding of the world. Doing this would be difficult, potentially impossible without a period of time wherein the indigenous analysis of the world is given a degree of primacy. Requiring that the indigenous adopt the understanding of the universe of the European order, which explicitly includes a history of excluding indigenous thought, is problematic.
Then we’ll have to contend with the reality of trauma. Trauma research is showing how trauma is embodied and heritable. Resolving that trauma in the indigenous population will likely require, at minimum, reparations and at some level national self direction. National self direction of indigenous people will be assuredly run counter to settler interests.
Even without considering trauma, social necessity includes cultural components, not merely commodities. The development of those socially necessary cultural components will require allocations of resources at minimum, but will likely also require dismantling some of the material components if settler cultural and social reproduction.
Conflicts will arise in some manner, and the settler proletariat must comes to terms with that conflict by deferring to the indigenous population to avoid recreating contradictions inherent in oppression. But this requires the settler proletariat to accept the indigenous position even when it harms the settler economically. This will be very difficult without a framework of decolonization.