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.
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?
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.
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
No probs comrade.