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.

  • @redteaOP
    3•1 year ago

    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):

    This world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by two different species. The originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality and the immense difference of ways of life never come to mask the human realities. When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.

    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.

    • @lxvi
      1•1 year ago

      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.