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.

  • Muad'DibberA
    9•1 year ago

    Relevant section 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:

    The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries and colonies.

    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:

    In all the civilised, advanced countries the bourgeoisie rob—either by colonial oppression or by financially extracting “gain” from formally independent weak countries—they rob a population many times larger than that of “their own” country. This is the economic factor that enables the imperialist bourgeoisie to obtain super-profits, part of which is used to bribe the top section of the proletariat and convert it into a reformist, opportunist petty bourgeoisie that fears revolution.

    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. Economically, the embourgeoisement of First World workers has provided oligopolies with the secure and thriving consumer markets necessary to capital’s expanded reproduction. Politically, the stability of pro-imperialist polities with a working-class majority is of paramount concern to cautious investors and their representatives in government. Militarily, a pliant and/or quiescent workforce furnishes both the national chauvinist personnel required to enforce global hegemony and a secure base from which to launch the subjugation of Third World territories. Finally, ideologically, the lifestyles and cultural mores enjoyed by most First World workers signifies to the Third World not what benefits imperialism brings, but what capitalist industrial development and parliamentary democracy alone can achieve.

    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:

    At the expense of the plundered colonial peoples capital corrupted its wage slaves, created a community of interest between the exploited and the exploiters as against the oppressed colonies—the yellow, black, and red colonial people—and chained the European and American working class to the imperialist “fatherland.”

    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:

    I was in the West End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for “bread!” “bread!” and on the way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism … My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and the mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.

    • @redteaOP
      6•1 year ago

      An apt quote!

      I’ve not read this book yet. Does Cope consider what happens when there is nowhere left to colonise? Is it just a constant process of rejuvenation?

      • Muad'DibberA
        7•1 year ago

        You mean what happens in the imperialist nations, or the colonized ones?

        Cope mainly focuses in this book about the global class differentials that pit imperial-core labor movements against global south proletarians, and make nearly all of them, especially the “eurocommunist” and demsoc movements, class-collaborationist with their own national bourgeoisies, in order to preserve their priviledges. I definitely loved the book, because it refused to tell the same old fairy-tales that reduce class to the baby-level / simplistic definition of working class as “earning a wage”, and frankly answered the question of why imperial-core labor movements have and continue to support imperialism… because it benefits their class interests.

        As for what happens when national bourgeoisie’s fight over a declining surplus and colonies start to dry up, he does get into some historical analysis of WW1 and 2, and the wars of the 19th century in europe, which are excellent.

        He agrees with Lenin that the periphery / 3rd world, where the majority of the super-exploited proletariat live and create surplus value, is where revolution is most likely to happen… but I regret to say that Cope is in the same vein as Parenti in bashing China, and failing to recognize that China’s strategy of multi-polarism, creating 3rd world trade networks, and ending US hegemony so that global south countries are free to build their own socialisms, is doing exactly that: undoing the division between rich and poor countries, and ending US imperialism.

        BTW dessalines has recorded that book as an audiobook, you can find it on youtube or torrents.

        • @redteaOP
          5•1 year ago

          You answered my (poorly worded) question. I was wondering about how Cope synthesises the points in your quote with the problem that arises when imperialist powers have already divided up the colonies (in various forms) between themselves.

          It’s a common feature in modern Marxist literature. ‘China’ could represent the limits of acceptable speech even for radicals and ‘radical publishers’. A kind of self censorship and imposed censorship. Then new writers are brought up in a tradition where earlier radicals have unwaveringly misunderstood China, so it becomes the paradigm.

          Thanks for the tip. I think I’ll listen to that audiobook.

          Edit: typo