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?
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.