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 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.