This seems to be a common ML position, but I’m starting to wonder if it still holds true for the USA (but not for Europe), given the whole imperial collapse, decreasing living standards, dying institutions situation.
No better way to solve this than confronting the theory. Is there some comprehensive text on this that I’ve missed or that you’d like to recommend?
It’s part third-worldism, part dialectical materialism, part decolonialism.
Most high margin value creation happens in the periphery (manufacturing, mining, refining, etc). So, a strike in the core doesn’t stop the flow of value for the owning class in the same way or to the same degree.
Residents of the imperial core rely on genocidal colonial base and superstructure. Attempts to dismantle these will be hard to distinguish from genuine attacks on well being, so reaction will be far more widespread than in the periphery.
The imperial core is more highly policed than the periphery. Organizing is much harder, much easier to monitor and disrupt, and much more easily met with violence in a timely fashion. In the periphery, organizing is far harder to police.
In short, the labor aristocracy of the imperial core lives in a dystopian police state and rely heavily on mass murder for their way of life, while the proletariat of the periphery have more to gain, less to lose, more opportunity, more leverage, and less policing.
