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?
people have some funny definitions of what productive labor is if every barista in the us stopped working tomorrow im pretty sure society would fucking collapse. seriously tho organize whoever you can organize. If you can get a bunch of truckers to strike great, but why disregard any group; if you can get a bunch of students to do anti war protests whats wrong with that, is it not worth your time?
I think as Marxists, we should be more thorough in our analysis of different types of labor. Not all wage labor is equal, and we should question why commodity production, the most labor-intensive and back-breaking work, that’s also the lowest paid, is performed by large numbers of global south proles, while a much smaller population of imperial-core workers are engaged in branding, finishing, and moving those products around.
Relevant section on the labor aristocracy from Zak Cope, divided world divided class:
Labour Aristocracy
The labour aristocracy is that section of the international working class whose privileged position in the lucrative job markets opened up by imperialism guarantees its receipt of wages approaching or exceeding the per capita value created by the working class as a whole. The class interests of the labour aristocracy are bound up with those of the capitalist class, such that if the latter is unable to accumulate superprofits then the super-wages of the labour aristocracy must be reduced. Today, the working class of the imperialist countries, what we may refer to as metropolitan labour, is entirely labour aristocratic.
The labour aristocracy provides the major vehicle for bourgeois ideological and political influence within the working class. For Lenin, “opportunism” in the labour movement is conditioned by the preponderance of two major economic factors, namely, either “vast colonial possessions or a monopolist position in world markets.” These allow for ever-greater sections of the metropolitan working class to be granted super-wages so that it is not merely the haute bourgeoisie which subsists on profits. Thus, according to Lenin, it is not simply capitalists who benefit from imperialism:
For Lenin, superprofits derived from imperialism allow the globally predominant bourgeoisie to pay inflated wages to sections of the (international) proletariat, who thus derive a material stake in preserving the capitalist system:
There are several pressing reasons why the haute bourgeoisie in command of the heights of the global capitalist economy pays its domestic working class super-wages, even where it is not forced to by militant trade-union struggle within the metropolis.
In receiving a share of superprofits, a sometimes fraught alliance is forged between workers and capitalists in the advanced nations. As far back as 1919, the First Congress of the Communist International (COMINTERN) adopted a resolution, agreed on by all of the major leaders of the world Communist movement of the time, which read:
Advocates of imperialism understood very early on that imperialism would and could provide substantial and socially pacifying benefits to the working classes in imperialist countries. Cecil Rhodes, arch-racist mining magnate, industrialist and founder of the white-settler state of Rhodesia, famously understood British democracy as equaling imperialism plus social reform:
that’s a nice tangent but its kinda irrelevant to what i said or the conversation going on here in general it adds nothing and contradicts nothing, infact imma level with u; all that doesnt even say anything about what you stated at the beginning you were interested in examining that being what is productive and unproductive labor. nothing u said is wrong but non of it is relevant either at best u have said that there is a group of people in the imperial core who work and have no revolutionary potential, but that isnt even relevant because that says nothing about whether it is worth it to organize such people, which if you have nothing better to do it is.
The question the OP asked, is if its worth it to organize blue-collar workers. An examination of what a “blue-collar” worker is(in the imperial core), their relation to production, and their revolutionary potential, is absolutely relevant to the discussion.
We don’t do things just because “we have nothing better to do”. People’s time is limited, and there’s no use wasting it on dead ends. You could apply the same argument to voting for the US democratic party.
There’s even some anti-colonialist thinkers, that believe that any imperial-core organizing, especially for wage increases, or more social services, is harmful, since the surplus value that funds it comes off the backs of global south proles. IE, it has nothing to do with class struggle, but simply a “re-allocation” or “renegotiation” between imperial core capitalists and their labor aristocracy, of the surplus already extracted from the global south.
Imperial core people don’t do productive labor.