He seems to be one of the most hated figures on the online left. From my view, he does have a lot of questionable takes, but also does bring up some good points when it comes to fighting imperialism from a leftist perspective, so I’d like to know what people in this community think about him.
You can see mini labor aristocracies arise in any factory, store, or office that pads out its labor force with disposable temps and seasonal workers (ie. pretty much every business bigger than your local bookstore). The temps gut the permanent workers’ ability to halt or slow production, while the permanent workers usually have a bit of an adversarial social relationship with temps as a group. Permanent workers build up a kind of chauvinism that’s actively working against their own interests. This doesn’t even go into the friction between desk workers and floor workers in the same building (but appears invisible when offices are in a separate building despite being very real), nor the conflicts of interest between highly paid specialists and the low-wage departments that support them. And managers are often ghoulish in temperament despite being exploited themselves with working long hours on a salary.
Even going back to the classic Leninist interpretation, companies in the global north bully their suppliers in the global south all the time. Not just verbally, but in offloading costs or refusing payment for defects that are inevitable at their negotiated pricepoints and engineering specs.
I’d argue quite a lot of the more vocal western leftists are unwittingly labor aristocrats themselves and fail to see why their privileged perspective doesn’t mesh with the experiences of workers who experience the most drudgery. I’ve personally been around quite a lot of people working shit jobs and they don’t think like western socialists at all, including Maupin.
The difference is I don’t pretend to be working class. Maupin doesn’t claim to be working class for all I know. Many of the bolsheviks were not working class. Marx and Engels were not working class. So why try to smear someone for not being working class? Also, the labor aristocracy is a tendency of the working class, not a separate class. A labor aristocrat is still working class.
The objective of communists is not to think like people working shit jobs. The objective is leadership. I wouldn’t expect communist leaders to think like someone who works 60 hours a week. I would expect them to think within the framework of dialectical materialism.
I think I’ll just let this post speak for itself.
There is a recording of Divided World, Divided Class on youtube by dessalines, I do highly encourage you to read it.
To give a simple analogy, lets compare house and field slaves, and see how they correlate to imperial core (largely service economy) workers and global south proletarians.
House slaves: Do not produce commodities for the market. Produce use values (meals, clothes, clean house, etc) that are immediately consumed. Lives off the Surplus value created by the field slaves, that the slave master apportions for them. Very small numbers compared to field slaves. While still being slaves, live an undeniably easier life than field slaves. Cannot really be a revolutionary group, since they do not control production. Many of them actively fight to maintain field slavery, since their lives are supported by field surplus.
Imperial core workers: Do not produce commodities, mainly just put final touches, branding, or do maintenance and services for the commodities produced by global south proletarians (GSP) . Much fewer of them than GSPs ( I think there are 5x more GSPs) , so its easily possible to pay them superwages out of the surplus value / superprofits created by GSPs. Undeniably live a better life than the average GSP. Many fight to preserve imperialism, knowing that they derive existing benefits from it. Revolutionary potential very debatable, since they do not control production, or produce commodities ( what imperial core country has had a revolution so far? Imperialism exports revolution and quells it at home).
by who? ;)
I will check it out
To say this categorically is too much. There is a great number of service sector workers in the US. And I agree wholeheartedly that there is something fundamentally different about this type of workers you describe. The analogy you make is a good one. But there are still a great number of workers who do produce commodities.
About 22 million actually according to the US bureau of labor. Not a lot, but keep in mind that not even half of Americans have a job in the first place. And being official statistics, I believe this does not include undocumented workers. These are coal miners, construction workers, foresters, farmers.
I agree that right now, there is no revolutionary potential in America. But can you say for certain this will not be the case in 20 years? Isn’t there still work to be done today?