Patsocs tend to want to focus on productive labor and suggest working with students, lumpen proletarians and the average service worker is inefficient. I’ve heard the defense of this that blue-collar workers, truckers, etc are the ones who actually have the power to shut stuff down, and are therefore the most powerful for revolution and so on. Is that a valid line of argument? Is it a good strategy to focus on organizing those workers?
Here’s where you start getting into really messy definitions of what a worker, or “working-class” actually means, for imperial-core countries, which is what I assume you’re referring to.
The very introductory and now-unsatisfactory original answer, from Engels:
But even in his lifetime, he could see that britain’s “working-class” was turning into a “bourgeois proletariat / labor aristocracy”, living more-and-more off of the labor and commodities produced by the colonies.
Nowadays, that process is nearly complete: nearly all global production (and class struggle), has been exported to the global south. The imperialist countries don’t actually produce many commodities at all, and most of their population is employed in the service and transportation economy: both necessary, but not quite the same as super-exploited proletarians producing commodities for a world market, who are the main source of surplus value in the modern day. Imperial-core “workers” remain net takers, not creators, of surplus value, their livelihoods and well-being actually coming out of the portion of surplus value captured from global-south proles.
Simply earning a wage is not enough to define one as “working-class”, otherwise drone pilots and hedge fund managers could be considered working class. Transportation workers and service workers could be considered working-class, but whether they actually produce surplus value, or are the net recipients of it, is a more difficult question.
Its comparable to house and field slaves. House slaves don’t produce commodities or surplus value: they create use-values in the form of meals and services for the slave-owner. As such, their livelihood is off the backs of the field slaves, a part of whose surplus-value they must live off of. Are they still slaves? Yes, but not quite the same.
Can there be a revolution of those who produce no surplus value, who don’t actually produce commodities, who don’t hold the reigns of production, but only of moving the products around? IE the house slaves, or in our case, service and transport workers? It remains to be seen, however it is a fact that we haven’t seen a successful revolution in any imperial-core country, and Lenin’s correction to Marx and Engels: that revolution would occur not in Britain, but in the weakest link in the capitalist and imperialist chain, where exploitation remains highest, has been historically borne out.
To get more to your point, transport workers are no different from service-workers in that neither produce surplus value, but both are still necessary components of moving products through global value chains. Focus should be on who actually produces most of the surplus value captured in global value chains, very few of which live in imperial core countries.
I recommend reading Zak Cope, divided world divided class, and John smith - imperialism in the 21st century, for more on how class struggle has been exported to the global south, and how the lives of imperial-core citizens are sustained by the surplus value created in the global south.
Now this is why genzedong on lemmygrad is superior to genzedong on reddit, because a struggle session on labor is exactly the kind of struggle session we should be having. Not the monthly “is Bernie really that bad” or the weekly “hey guys, is porn okay” we always seemed to get on reddit.
Absolutely, and thank you for your excellent contributions in this thread too.
This is the first time I’ve seen the material basis for this distinction written so clearly and succinctly. Thank you for this. I need to find more analysis on this topic now.
This is why I don’t consider programmers working class.
Can those who don’t produce suplus value contribute to the revolution? Yes, because they have in the past.
Should the vanguard mostly consist of labor aristocrats? No because the most exploited have intimate knowledge of the jobs required to run the economy and directly experience society’s contradictions. That kind of knowledge is needed to make decisions that meet the needs of the masses.
Would it be wrong to unionize the transporters of the exploiter nations? No, because they either cut into the profits of the capitalists, or they increase the exploitation of the third world, which can by enhancing the contradictions between the imperial core and periphery make socialism more necessary.
I’ll read those books, but I don’t see how right now how the average imperial core person benefits from the millitary industrial complex, it creates debt and inflation. Even with the exploited labor of the third world, with the profit motive and reduced competition between firms the low production cost does not necessary create cheaper prices for consumers for many products.
This seems contradictory to me. Not necessarily in itself, but in the context of the broader discussion. If most people in the imperial core are labour aristocrats, then we will not find the most exploited people in the imperial core. And that suggests that it doesn’t really matter so much which of the imperial core workers are organised.
At the same time, the opposite also seems true. Considering the types of economies in the imperial core, the labour aristocrats are the ones work intimate knowledge of how the system works and can do a lot – maybe or maybe not the ‘most’, which seems like a red herring – to stop capitalism from working.
But I think this is closer to what you were arguing? That something like the ‘most skillful’ workers are most useful to a revolution. The difference is maybe that you exclude the labour aristocracy and the lumpen proletariat from that category? Is that right? If so, I think our disagreement / my confusion comes from different definitions.
They benefit because it’s the MIC that guarantees huge and unequal flows of wealth from the periphery to the core; and it’s that wealth that makes the labour aristocracy what it is.
The idea of debt needs unpacking a little bit, too. All money is debt, meaning that it’s not necessarily a problem in itself. It’s not as simple as saying all debt is bad just because it is debt.
I can see the point about inflation, but is the MIC the worst or only contender? Plus, inflation is only a problem for the poorer end of the inequality relation. Wealthy people benefit from inflation. And if imperial core workers are labour aristocrats because they are wealthy, then they, too, benefit from inflation.
This seems more like a tragic consequence of, rather than a reason for, unions in the imperial core.
On the inflation, I suspect it is price gouging from lack of competition in many industries in the USA in particular, and a result of energy prices in Europe and the Ukraine war. If the US dollar stops being the currency that all need to buy oil in, I expect further inflation for Americans in particular. For other imperial core nations, I don’t know if de-dollarization will affect them as greatly.
They can contribute of course, but they can’t form the base. The mass base of all revolutionary armies historically, have been super-exploited peasants and proletarians. This was the case in China, USSR, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. There has never been a revolution of those who don’t produce surplus value, so I’d be curious as to where you think this happened.
From John Smith - Imperialism in the 21st century
Outsourcing and the Reproduction of Labor-Power in Imperialist Nations
Neoliberal globalization has transformed the production of all commodities, including labor-power, as more and more of the manufactured consumer goods that reproduce labor-power in imperialist countries are produced by super-exploited workers in low-wage nations. The globalization of production processes impacts workers in imperialist nations in two fundamental ways.
The IMF’s World Economic Outlook 2007 attempted to weigh these two effects, concluding: “Although the labor share [of GDP] went down, globalization of labor as manifested in cheaper imports in advanced economies has increased the ‘size of the pie’ to be shared among all citizens, resulting in a net gain in total workers’ compensation in real terms.”
In his study of Walmart, Nelson Lichtenstein reports: “Wal-Mart argues that the company’s downward squeeze on prices raises the standard of living of the entire U.S. population, saving consumers upwards of $100bn each year, perhaps as much as $600 a year at the checkout counter for the average [US] family…. ‘These savings are a lifeline for millions of middle- and lower-income families who live from payday to payday,’ argues Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott. ‘In effect, it gives them a raise every time they shop with us.’” Lichtenstein, 2005, Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism (New York: New Press).
In other words, cost savings resulting from outsourcing are shared with workers in imperialist countries. This is both an economic imperative and a conscious strategy of the employing class and their political representatives that is crucial to maintaining domestic class peace. Wage repression at home, rather than abroad, would reduce demand and unleash latent recessionary forces. Competition in markets for workers’ consumer goods forces some of the cost reductions resulting from greater use of low-wage labor to be passed on to them.
Perhaps the most in-depth research into this effect was conducted by two Chicago professors, Christian Broda and John Romalis, who established a “concordance” between two giant databases, one tracking the quantities and price movements between 1994 and 2005 of hundreds of thousands of different goods consumed by 55,000 U.S. households, the other of imports classified into 16,800 different product categories. Their central conclusion: “While the expansion of trade with low wage countries triggers a fall in relative wages for the unskilled in the United States, it also leads to a fall in the price of goods that are heavily consumed by the poor. We show that this beneficial price effect can potentially more than offset the standard negative relative wage effect.” They calculate that China by itself accounted for four-fifths of the total inflation-lowering effect of cheap imports, its share of total U.S. imports having risen during the decade from 6 to 17 percent, and that “the rise of Chinese trade … alone can offset around a third of the rise in official [US] inequality we have seen over this period.”
ILO statistics
Just how much more are imperial core workers making? As of 2007, according to the ILO, 11x more.
If you make more than PPP $1.50 / hour, or ~$250 / month, then you are in the minority of the world’s workers.
Also, remember that western finance capitalists aren’t paying for southern labor in PPP dollars, they’re paying unadjusted wages, so the surplus value extracted is much higher. Southern workers are working using highly mobile, 21st century capital equipment, while being paid wage levels from the 1800s.
Was this written before the 2020’s price gouging? Also will not de-dollarization decrease the purchasing power of the dollar, requiring more dollars to be paid to periphery workers? Also will the belt and road initiative’s not requiring neoliberal economic policies of governments that they deal with lead to make it easier to unionize in periphery nations?
Yep, and those statistics are from 2007. De-dollarization, the closing of US military bases, and the increasing share of world trade by the PRC, may eventually result in the “re-proletarianization” of some of euroamerikkka. But IMO revolution will happen in those countries last of all.
Definitely. We can already see some of the US’s soft-power failing in Latin America.