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?
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.