Family size decreased because more households were created (i.e. people moved out sooner, less multi-generational households). USian consumption has never decreased. Women were not forced to work, work became more available to them and then at a certain point it became a necessity for white women to work for white households to stay competitive and maintain segregation, women of other backgrounds were already working wage labor. Also birthrates are declining in Imperialist nations mostly due to policies that cut down teen parenthood (increased bodily autonomy, contraceptives and sex education, more access to higher education, more things to consume as opposed to raising children).
“afford childcare”: More and more USians do not live with family or support systems that assist in child-rearing, this is due to their ability not to. Childcare costs a lot in the US because it costs a lot to hire Americans to do anything (globally high wages!). These economic dynamics in reproductive relations are experienced broadly in all Imperialist societies. It’s a matter of class struggle that some other Imperialist states have subsidized childcare (the US does too, through tax breaks and public education, it just sucks). On a global level, it’s very privileged to pay someone to watch your kids, just because it costs a significant chunk of paychecks doesn’t mean it isn’t historically a bourgeois privilege, and less non-white women are forced to take waged domestic labor up since more jobs are available elsewhere. BTW, inflation for USD is due to a surplus of capital in the country, which is turned into novel industries (Hollywood, Malls, Amazon shopping, Silicon Valley, new cars, new guns), housing speculation, and “sin-taxes” (gambling, drugs, lootboxes). USD inflation is the result of the “Clipping Coupons” part of Imperialism.
No legal US working relationship outside of “customary agriculture” (migrant/child exploitation) is at exploitation level wages. Minimum wage is above Chinese factory wages, you’re going to need to see people getting 2-4 dollars before regular exploitation hits. Super-exploitation is the 60 cent wages seen in Haiti.
White men have been leaving the labor force since the 50s. Black men have been leaving too, but for different reasons, in different directions. This points to an increase in bourgeois white men.
“Cost of living” is an obfuscation. Poor Brazilian workers do not live in Favelas because their cost of living is lower, but that their wages are tiny so they can’t afford a well constructed home:
I’m not saying that bourgeoisification has already been eliminated or that we have reached the end of superprofits and their redistribution to the US working class, I merely contend that it’s begun its decline and is stratifying into even smaller and smaller subsections of the white working class. It would also be some time before we see the effects on things like air conditioning because of the inertia from previous development. The already installed air conditioners don’t just go away - people just stop running them.
US inflation used to be something that could be exported onto the rest of the world, but now the chickens are coming home to roost. The surplus of dollars is a poor explanation (kind of libertarian tbh), it only explains half the problem. The other side of the surplus comes from declining demand for dollars. The US sanctions regime has overreached on Russia and is now bifurcating the global economy into “countries that can trade with the US” and “everyone else” which created a boom in non-dollar trade. The high interest rate environment, too, is hurting demand for loans in US dollars as countries look for other sources of capital and deleverage themselves from US loans and debts.
The US is still superexploiting those workers in Brazil and Mexico; US workers are not going to be living like them in the near future! Yet as worker’s struggle in Latin America brings a new pink tide we are going to see more trade in national currency, more internal development, more investment from outside the US, and ultimately less superexploitation.
Surplus capital is not a “libertarian thing”, it’s a Lenin thing, it’s the reason why capital is exported.
Where is the money going? Police, judicial, and carceral costs are increasing year over year. Capital is coming in from other Imperialist states and neo-Colonial outposts, which is fueling both housing construction and housing cost at the same time. There has never been more homes to workers in the US than right now.
And if you find my other post quoting Lenin, the petty bourgs are constantly being destroyed and refreshed, which is why the workers movement consistently gains new revisionist ideologies.
What I contend: The US middle classes have always been in this cycle, ya know many whites have struggles with drugs and drug incarceration (which has softened, drug use charges are getting lighter and lighter). De-Dollarization is still not affecting US workers, but also it’s greatly over-hyped. Surplus Capital will continue to be sent from all over the world to the US housing market and silicon valley.
Old homes and old appliances are still signs of total wealth growth, but also, new appliances have never been cheaper for USians and more people in the lower income brackets can afford them. Capital exports bring down the prices of goods. Car ownership is a luxury, it’s at 90+%, but also, the bottom 20% of population owns just 1% of cars:
This bottom 20% of USians is 60% Black/Indigenous/Latino. White poverty has been fairly consistent while poverty in other groups has been dropping in approach.
And just because someone is low income, doesn’t mean they have no wealth (housing speculation, owner-farmer).
It’s clear that wealth is increasing even though incomes are stagnating (because surplus money-capital arrives in the form of globally funded mortgages and historically low interest rates). Wages in 2020 are about as good (but way better for more people!) as the last 50 years, USians are not gonna have a lot of economic smoke for the Imperial regime.
Class consciousness is useless if it does not address labor aristocracy, and Communists have been saying “it’s getting worse!” since WW2, but it never has.
You should take a larger study of US economic conditions. We are in a much worse position of Economistic practices than WW1 Germans who Lenin railed against, I have linked the text in my other comment in the thread. These aren’t conditions to wait around for! Don’t wait for shit to get worse! There is revolutionary potential now! You have hundreds of national liberation struggles and 100 million oppressed nationals across Black/Indigenous people and Chicanos/Latinos. These struggles could have been turned into revolution in the 60s but revisionist Communists at that time said “wait we need white workers!”.
Did I mention that over half of the money spent on incarceration and policing (reaching a quarter trillion dollars every year, chart ends in 04, $261B spent in 2018) is wages for cops, guards, and judicial staff?
You say you are noticing a trend, I’m saying there’s always a small amount of losers in a massive petty booj economy, and this accounts for the trend you see, even though it has always been a factor, and adds new petty booj ideologies to workers movements, the state of the movement is evidence as such. The US is “overextended” (with few boots on the ground…), but what will happen when the US needs to ramp up war production to keep global wages low? Another boost in wages and carrot sticks of Opportunism so unions take war contracts (like they are doing right now making bombs that drop in Gaza). The US was able to “defeat Communism” through the height of anti-Imperial consciousness in the 70s, don’t hold your breath that movements that haven’t changed since then will be any different in the future.
It’s important to get across that a worker can go from high income ($150k) to low income ($12k, minimum wage), but actually double down on their bourgeois character because they started a business. From Semi-proletarian to Petty Bourg proper. Their total wealth would not have changed.
Surplus capital is not a “libertarian thing”, it’s a Lenin thing, it’s the reason why capital is exported.
Sorry, we’re miscommunicating I think. Are you conflating “dollars” with “capital” here?
My reading tells me the export of surplus capital refers to the export of productive machines, not the literal national currency. But I am, in fact, talking about the demand for the literal national currency i.e. not surplus capital specifically. Yes, US productive capacity is still high and there’s still a lot of unequal exchange happening between the US and its imperialized holdings as it forces them to use its machines and proprietary software etc etc, but notably interest rates have needed to remain high (so no more historically low interest rates) and this has put incredible downward pressure on the value of loans in USD.
At the same time, the sanctions regime has bifurcated the global economy. There’s now a parallel economy that exists outside of USD and this is adding additional downward pressure. Nations can now get loans from elsewhere (notably China), trade with national currencies for commodities and even resources like oil, and avoid unequal exchange with the declining hegemon because of the large and growing non-USD economy. The value of US dollar and demand for dollars can still decline despite US exports.
So, between nations not wanting loans from the US and being able to trade without USD, literal demand for dollars has fallen. This is, in part, where the inflation is coming from.
Where is the money going? Police, judicial, and carceral costs are increasing year over year.
[…]
Did I mention that over half of the money spent on incarceration and policing (reaching a quarter trillion dollars every year, chart ends in 04, $261B spent in 2018) is wages for cops, guards, and judicial staff?
Is this not a sign of the debourgeoisification of the rest of the working class? The empire needs to spend more and more on policing and incarceration of exploited and superexploited workers at home, to the point that those high costs of control are now eating into quality of life of the rest of the working class due to inflation. At the same time it needs to keep elevating the lifestyles of pigs higher and higher to keep them showing up to work, as the act of policing itself becomes more reviled and more mentally taxing (I’m reminded of Fanon talking about how colonialism dehumanizes the colonizer). This is the other side of where the inflation is coming from.
As the cops, guards, judicial staff, and all the other carceral employees demand more wages they’re acquiring investments and housing and special legally protected status. They’re being further bourgeoisified, developing into their own special class and totally separate from the rest of workers who are beginning to be debourgeoisified (they can’t acquire housing, they can’t build savings, they don’t have investments, they certainly can’t seclude and segregate themselves away from the rest of the working class into white enclaves).
This special class of carceral workers is being elevated at their expense. They’re being turned from national police to colonial police, many white workers are being turned from settlers into… not natives, but something adjacent?
These aren’t conditions to wait around for! Don’t wait for shit to get worse! There is revolutionary potential now! You have hundreds of national liberation struggles and 100 million oppressed nationals across Black/Indigenous people and Chicanos/Latinos. These struggles could have been turned into revolution in the 60s but revisionist Communists at that time said “wait we need white workers!”.
When did I give this impression? I merely contend that shit is getting worse, not that we need to wait for anything!
Yes, the internally colonized people of the US are the most revolutionary force within it. I work in a factory and I can see how all the positions of management are only given to white English speakers, while the production floor is dominated by nonwhite people whose first languages are French, Arabic, or Spanish. I can see what you’re talking about every day.
I guess I’m just optimistic that the white working class has finally entered its own decline, but as you say, the embodied and generational wealth that they’ve accumulated will take quite some time to disappear. This is not a call to wait around, merely an observation that the time those misguided white communists were waiting for might be happening.
All of this is to say that the recent labor upsurge and rise in class consciousness has a material basis and isn’t just a fad.
Am I to understand that your point is nothing has fundamentally changed?
Nothing has fundamentally changed from the 60s, assimilation (which is paid for by Imperial value transfers) of oppressed nations is dual education and incarceration, both have increased over time, in dialectic. Women have been participating in wage labor more and more but that looks to have reached a relative peak.
You seem to think inflation is anything other than more wages than can be spent or reinvested (if in savings banks and credit unions). Inflation in the US is due to super-profits added to wages. An exploited Proletariat literally cannot save money, and globally luxury spending does not mean they are exploited!
My reading tells me the export of surplus capital refers to the export of productive machines, not the literal national currency.
Example: Sterling system. Britain exported capital to its own settlements in Canada and Australia. Britain was practicing “unequal exchange” (violent trade monopoly) with India, paying off their domestic workers with it, and then sending settlers to collect more resources in the colonies. Also, Lenin called French Imperialism “usury Imperialism” because France was exporting literal currency in loans to Russia and other European states. Capital exports of “real machines” are mostly to other Imperialist states or military allies, or Socialist states brought into circumstantial trade deals (same as Lenin’s time with NEP), and not “backward” economic systems of semi-colonial, semi-feudal character as seen in former Spanish colonies, India, and Africa. France still performs “usury Imperialism” (coupon clipping) with French and Euro currencies.
Cops are petty booj, more cops means more petty booj.
The US is a more advanced British Empire + French Empire in one. It’s not a surprise since the US inherited every Imperial relationship the former great powers had!
I guess I’m just optimistic that the white working class has finally entered its own decling.
This is copium and you’re universalizing your position within the Settler economy. In my other post there’s a Polemic Against Settler “Maoism” that criticizes your line (this does not mean you are 100% wrong! It means you have some fundamental misunderstandings but you are in the right direction!). New class consciousness is due to the eugenic nature of settler society where productive, but unexploited economically due to Imperialism, workers were put into the disease gauntlet serving fascistic semi-proles and petty boojies who did not care for their well being.
Outside of Economistic practices focusing on wages and prices, the great thing this new wave has brought through the pandemic is organizing around workers’ health and wellness, as well as property abuses such as AI likenesses for performers. These are still material problems and the pandemic exposed them, but still this unions are hitting Economistic dead ends in organizing energy, still many workers are were permanently injured by the pandemic conditions and many are still getting sick with no protections. Union activity isn’t the end all be all of class consciousness, as seen in AFL’s history of making the bombs that kill people so they can have houses and cushy retirements.
And don’t pray for white conditions to worsen. Lenin railed against German comrades who were preoccupied with wages in Imperialist states. No strong party was developed during and after WW1 and when the “crunch” actually happened to workers obsessed with wages and inflation, they suited up to herd the “undesirables” into camps. My worry is that when whites start feeling real class struggle they’ll turn my people in prison into actual slaves if we don’t have the readiness for a violent opposition ala AIM and the BPP.
You seem to think inflation is anything other than more wages than can be spent or reinvested (if in savings banks and credit unions).
Yes? Inflation, as experienced by the worker, is the cost of goods and services and housing rising faster than wages. Which is happening. Inflation does not automatically equal higher wages. Inflation, again as experienced by the worker, means higher prices. If that comes with higher wages then the worker can keep up with inflation and no one notices much other than the fact that their savings literally lose value over time, but debourgeoisification has disrupted this process. We are now seeing inflation actually outpace workers, they are not just making more to pay their higher bills and it’s lead to the recent labor upsurge.
This is not universal, obviously. The wages of managers, cops, so-called skilled laborers, bureaucrats, etc have risen in pace with inflation. We have seen some workers keep up and other workers fall behind, splitting off those workers and debourgeoisifying them as they fail to save and fail to attain property and fail to get “ahead.” I’m not sure why you’re insisting this isn’t happening.
Do you think there isn’t a labor upsurge and that class consciousness isn’t rising?
An exploited Proletariat literally cannot save money, and globally luxury spending does not mean they are exploited!
You’re right! And would you look at that, the savings rate in the US has been declining since the 60s, supposedly the period when things stopped changing. The savings rate briefly went up after the financial crash and bucked the trend of decline (i.e. when capital destruction created new avenues for investment) and obviously spiked during the period when people cared about COVID, but on the whole there has been a steady decline that coincides with the way real wages have stagnated.
Inflation is not in “luxury spending” it’s in fucking groceries and rent and housing.
The US is a more advanced British Empire + French Empire in one. It’s not a surprise since the US inherited every Imperial relationship the former great powers had!
Okay, so you are speaking literally of currency being exported. But you’re contradicting yourself and I’m confused.
You say “capital exports bring down the prices of goods” yet we are also talking about conditions of strong inflation. Is this not a contradiction? Does this not indicate that capital exports are falling, and that demand for USD is falling? You say nothing has changed, but despite the harshest sanctions regime in history we have seen Russia’s economy continue to grow! We are seeing nations make deals with each other in national currencies, totally bypassing USD. We are seeing alternatives to the World Bank and IMF, which offer loans in currencies other than USD.
The world is changing, and the conditions for white workers will change with it. Maybe it’s too early to say
Cops are petty booj, more cops means more petty booj.
What productive assets do they own? I think they’re a special protected class created by the State, and while their class interests align with business owners and independent farmers they are still distinct and it’s worth recognizing it.
This is copium and you’re universalizing your position within the Settler economy.
Maybe. Some of the trends I’m noticing have only been around for a few years, it could just be a blip and the white working class will go back to feasting on the superprofits of the global South soon enough. But-
Outside of Economistic practices focusing on wages and prices, the great thing this new wave has brought through the pandemic is organizing around workers’ health and wellness, as well as property abuses such as AI likenesses for performers. These are still material problems and the pandemic exposed them, but still this unions are hitting Economistic dead ends in organizing energy.
We’ve also seen the contract fights have not focused on wages. While the companies have been throwing record wages at workers the contracts still get rejected because what they actually want is time away from work and time where they can’t be scheduled and an end to understaffing, or like you say, workers’ health and wellness.
But we are also seeing union locals organizing against the Zionist genocide. That’s huge! The labor upsurge might be gaining a political character and you seem to be ignoring it in favor of pessimism. The union leadership is still in lockstep with the Democrats, and as long as that is the case they will hit those dead ends, but if I’m right and the rank-and-file are being debourgeoisified then we are going to either see the leadership change or we’ll see the NLRB declared unconstitutional and unions will have to go back to illegal strikes.
If that comes with higher wages then the worker can keep up with inflation and no one notices much other than the fact that their savings literally lose value over time
Inflation is mostly due to higher wages, and savings. Savings are reinvested by banks and turned into new constant and variable capital (hiring more workers). It can be turned into new consumption (like video games, social media, more advertising). It can be turned into student loans, and mortgages (if there is a surplus of money-capital all of these things will get more expensive relative the the unit of money), and “gentrification” re-developments or new suburban developments. Your savings become a smaller share of the MOP because they got invested elsewhere and more things were made or labor paid because of it! Simultaneously capital will be exported, mostly to China, where it is used to decrease the prices of expensive goods like video game consoles and microwaves (which is why they have gotten cheaper since the 80s/90s). The increase in the prices of other goods are due to the increases of incomes whether directly or indirectly through cheaper living and therefore savings, this causes the propertied classes to raise prices to capture these excess monies in savings so they can maintain their relative share of ownership. The bourgeoisie does not want dollars sitting around, they want them put into motion so they can be accumulated. This means increased consumption, and consumption remains high. USians consume way more than the global south citizens do.
Though again, buying lots of things and not saving money doesn’t mean your life is actually getting worse! The “60 percent of USians are paycheck to paycheck” talking point in media obfuscates that the median US worker makes hundreds of thousands a year, that 60% must include people doing better than the median worker.
All that said, family incomes have not changed beyond historical levels for the bottom 20%, all other brackets are growing, and there are more families.
We are now seeing inflation actually outpace workers, they are not just making more to pay their higher bills and it’s lead to the recent labor upsurge.
The recent “labor upsurge” was pandemic related, just as inflation was largely pandemic related due to transportation delays and more spending per-worker on minimal safety precautions (with some level of “greed-flation” but again that’s just opportunism on behalf of the bourgs).
You say “capital exports bring down the prices of goods” yet we are also talking about conditions of strong inflation. Is this not a contradiction? Does this not indicate that capital exports are falling, and that demand for USD is falling? You say nothing has changed, but despite the harshest sanctions regime in history we have seen Russia’s economy continue to grow! We are seeing nations make deals with each other in national currencies, totally bypassing USD. We are seeing alternatives to the World Bank and IMF, which offer loans in currencies other than USD.
None of this really effects US workers, besides the tech sector and the housing bubble (this means less workers able to speculate on land) which was being supplied by Counter-revolutionary Russian Bourgs who parked their money in the US for these “industries”. This does explain some of the attention TikTok is getting as US-based companies are losing their technology monopolies. However, conditions for Imperialism are still better than when the USSR existed. Capital exports of specific commodities are decreased when that specific commodity making capital is exported, but it need not be existing machines. GM mostly built new machines in their transition to Mexico and the US factories make largely high end cars and trucks now, while Mexicans make the lower end vehicles which are sold to US GM workers lol. Surplus-Capital either finds new industries or expands elsewhere, but this could easily be to an underdeveloped sector in an Imperialist ally (such as Germany, South Korea). You’re right that if not enough surplus-capital finds a home, that the value of dollars goes down, this is effected by dollar demand but also capital exports can take the form of bombs, ultimately the destruction of capital, which allows for demand to be re-established. New sources of consumption counter-balance inflation, essentially, which is why the US is the least susceptible state to inflation.
This is not universal, obviously. The wages of managers, cops, so-called skilled laborers, bureaucrats, etc have risen in pace with inflation. We have seen some workers keep up and other workers fall behind, splitting off those workers and debourgeoisifying them as they fail to save and fail to attain property and fail to get “ahead.” I’m not sure why you’re insisting this isn’t happening.
This is due to what I said above, that people are saving money, so loans get more expensive because there is a surplus of capital to be turned into loans (they make bigger loans because they can find people to take them). This makes college and housing more expensive. Local landlord regimes (city-government “deep states”) subsidize development to attract higher wage sectors like tech so they can realize more real-estate capital in the form of land-values and rents. So you’re right that wage differentiation has something to do with cost increases, but again 4/5th of USian incomes are increasing yoy, overall the bulk is on the upswing. You must be reading too much Hudson to think that the dollar system itself is the source of inflation, no, it’s actually “unequal exchange” and the increased wages it brings.
What productive assets do they own? I think they’re a special protected class created by the State, and while their class interests align with business owners and independent farmers they are still distinct and it’s worth recognizing it.
The petty-bourgeoisie need not actually own productive assets, this is an overly mechanical analysis of petty bourg classes. Lenin and Mao referred to academics, teachers, doctors, and nurses to be petty-bourgeoisie, see the source in my other comment on the Middle Classes in Britain. The petty-bourgeoisie is simply non-capitalists and non-proletarians converging into a “middle strata”.
We’ve also seen the contract fights have not focused on wages. While the companies have been throwing record wages at workers the contracts still get rejected because what they actually want is time away from work and time where they can’t be scheduled and an end to understaffing, or like you say, workers’ health and wellness.
To a certain extent, working hours struggles are progressive, to another extent, they are simply wage struggles hidden behind math. In an Imperial economy where wages are already built from stolen labor of the global proletariat, cutting hours in Imperialist states comes at the expense of the global proletariat, it’s ultimately reactionary organizing unless it doubles with demands of a shorter working day globally for all workers, i.e. proletarian internationalism.
But we are also seeing union locals organizing against the Zionist genocide. That’s huge! The labor upsurge might be gaining a political character and you seem to be ignoring it in favor of pessimism. The union leadership is still in lockstep with the Democrats, and as long as that is the case they will hit those dead ends, but if I’m right and the rank-and-file are being debourgeoisified then we are going to either see the leadership change or we’ll see the NLRB declared unconstitutional and unions will have to go back to illegal strikes.
Where? Outside of the walk-outs of academics who some happened to be in the UAW, there hasn’t been any anti-Imperialist actions by US unions. They make statements but my dog could make just as valuable of a statement if she could write. Opportunist gonna opportunist, this isn’t a sign of anything lasting, if it was they’d be seizing land and handing them over to the Indigenous peoples as we speak. UAW would divest from weapons manufacturing and Israeli settlements. The academic protesters only jumped in when their students were getting beat up by pigs, again a valiant action, but ultimately has not progressed the struggle. The youth are always worth agitating but it’s important they can’t be lead by Opportunists in the union movement and academic circles. As seen Liberals also protest, doesn’t mean Liberals or union-locals have developed more class consciousness beyond white guilt for being in-Empire.
Nothing novel has occurred between this moment and the anti-Vietnam days besides much less whites caring because they successfully got the draft paused indefinitely. When union workers start destroying weapons manufacturing equipment I’ll have to change my mind, but that seems to be far from where we are, and the “toughest actions” have been climbing (office, not factory) buildings and tagging them with paint.
Inflation is mostly due to higher wages, and savings. Savings are reinvested by banks and turned into new constant and variable capital (hiring more workers). It can be turned into new consumption (like video games, social media, more advertising). It can be turned into student loans, and mortgages (if there is a surplus of money-capital all of these things will get more expensive relative the the unit of money), and “gentrification” re-developments or new suburban developments. Your savings become a smaller share of the MOP because they got invested elsewhere and more things were made or labor paid because of it!
“Savings savings savings” you say, and yet the rate of savings has been declining since the 60s and right now is on par with the period just before the 2008 financial crash. Savings are not an explanation for the inflation we are seeing and this is another contradiction to your claims: if savings are a source of inflation, and savings are down, where is the inflation coming from? Is it only coming from wage increases like is being claimed by bourgeois economists? I’m skeptical, and so I’m hypothesizing that the inflation is geopolitical.
You’re right that if not enough surplus-capital finds a home, that the value of dollars goes down, this is effected by dollar demand but also capital exports can take the form of bombs, ultimately the destruction of capital, which allows for demand to be re-established. New sources of consumption counter-balance inflation, essentially, which is why the US is the least susceptible state to inflation.
And yet, the state is grappling with inflation despite being the least susceptible state to inflation. Does this not indicate a change?
Do you think the bourgeois want a high interest rate environment? Do you think they want the global South to turn to other countries for loans?
In an Imperial economy where wages are already built from stolen labor of the global proletariat, cutting hours in Imperialist states comes at the expense of the global proletariat, it’s ultimately reactionary organizing unless it doubles with demands of a shorter working day globally for all workers, i.e. proletarian internationalism.
One thing that stood out to me was the demands for an end to understaffing, which necessarily means hiring more people. It’s not quite internationalism, no, but it does benefit the internally colonized people who could gain employment instead of being forced to fill the ranks of the gig economy and reserve army of unemployed workers.
I will acknowledge the labor upsurge lacks enough international character. I’ll be watching for who starts to organize migrant temp workers first.
Where? Outside of the walk-outs of academics who some happened to be in the UAW, there hasn’t been any anti-Imperialist actions by US unions.
UAW International is calling for a ceasefire, a full list of unions who have signed on can be found here. I’m not overly impressed by their calls, they only call for Israelis to be released when they should be calling for a hostage exchange and acknowledge that the Zionists have been taking Palestinians hostage by the thousands into detention centers, but they aren’t just silently supporting Israel either.
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union recently shut down the Port of Oakland to prevent ships carrying weapons bound for Israel from leaving the docks. In fact, the ILWU has a long history of being interested in and supportive of Palestinian liberation going back decades because of their internationalist character that was cultivated during the anti-apartheid struggle against South Africa.
It’s not just academics. The labor upsurge is gaining a political character. Something is happening.
When union workers start destroying weapons manufacturing equipment I’ll have to change my mind, but that seems to be far from where we are, and the “toughest actions” have been climbing (office, not factory) buildings and tagging them with paint.
I’ll cheer when that happens, and you’re right to point out the lacking radicalism in US unions. Yet, you’re underestimating the importance of public demonstration and should recognize that even non-destructive acts still act as propaganda for further radical action. Tagging a building with paint can be a precursor to tagging it with… something else.
I don’t share your pessimism for the white US working class. I think we’re on the brink of a change and these are all signs.
“Savings savings savings” you say, and yet the rate of savings has been declining since the 60s and right now is on par with the period just before the 2008 financial crash. Savings are not an explanation for the inflation we are seeing and this is another contradiction to your claims: if savings are a source of inflation, and savings are down, where is the inflation coming from? Is it only coming from wage increases like is being claimed by bourgeois economists? I’m skeptical, and so I’m hypothesizing that the inflation is geopolitical.
I already pointed out that inflation, the value of the dollar, compared to 2019 is due to pandemics slowing shipping down, you literally had to pay for more labor for the same amount of goods shipped --> increased costs of goods. Sanctions also increase shipping costs --> increased costs of goods. The bulk of American workers are getting wealthier, thus inflation for even things like apples and watermelon, because there are more people who will spend that money. The struggle between US workers and US petty bourgs over who gets a bigger share of Imperialism does nothing to advance Communism. Savings rate propaganda induced by bourgeois media promotes Economistic organizing, again 6 figure workers spending their full monthly paycheck, whether to rents, social security and retirement funds (savings but not called savings), student/mortgage/consumer loans (others’ savings), gambling/gatcha/collecting, “investing” in bubbles (housing, crypto, Tesla stock, “retail” investment has been growing ala “roaring 20s”), or doordash for every meal does not mean these workers are going to be any more interested in proletarian revolution.
And yet, the state is grappling with inflation despite being the least susceptible state to inflation. Does this not indicate a change?
Inflation rates in the US have never been more stable than the last 3 decades.
Do you think the bourgeois want a high interest rate environment? Do you think they want the global South to turn to other countries for loans?
Interest rates are still historically low. Many loans were forgiven so the recent rise in interest rates seeks to slow down borrowing that the pandemic induced to absorb stimmy checks. It’s all about inducing circulation or slowing it down when the bourgs want to.
One thing that stood out to me was the demands for an end to understaffing, which necessarily means hiring more people. It’s not quite internationalism, no, but it does benefit the internally colonized people who could gain employment instead of being forced to fill the ranks of the gig economy and reserve army of unemployed workers.
This is not a new demand, it’s consistent with Imperialist union activity historically. This type of reform still works on behalf of Imperialism to delay national liberation, it’s certainly a contradiction we intend to exploit where available to us, though this requires we have an even stronger anti-Colonial line since making more oppressed nation bourgs adds troubling revisionisms to the movement.
they only call for Israelis to be released when they should be calling for a hostage exchange and acknowledge that the Zionists have been taking Palestinians hostage by the thousands into detention centers, but they aren’t just silently supporting Israel either.
So it’s a bourgeois humanist position, without a hint of Marxism, and covering the true nature of Zionism and US labor’s role in occupation and genocide? Color me surprised, this is nothing to celebrate, we’ve seen it before:
In fact, the ILWU has a long history of being interested in and supportive of Palestinian liberation going back decades because of their internationalist character that was cultivated during the anti-apartheid struggle against South Africa.
Don’t downplay the role of conditional solidarity in shaping the demands of a Decolonization struggle. The form of the ANC now can’t be separated from the way in which Apartheid “ended” (who owns the land and bread?). The same goes for these “anti-Zionist”-but-nowhere-anti-Zionist gestures that push blame on the Resistance and deny the reality of settler-Colonialism in Palestine.
Yet, you’re underestimating the importance of public demonstration and should recognize that even non-destructive acts still act as propaganda for further radical action.
This must have been said during every US involved war ever. I think such acts result because such bloodshed exists, before the bloodshed, none of them cared. After the bloodshed, they’ll return to not caring. Until white workers are climbing over each other to commit class-suicide on behalf of revolution, I’ll have little reason to value their solidarity.
[2.10] Combating Common Wishful Thinking on the White Working Class
It is tempting to look for the slightest tinge of proletarian class interest
among that section of the Amerikan nation (the white working class) that
participates in production and in the circulation of commodities, as well
as in the realization of the social surplus value through the purchasing of
commodities for their own consumption.
It is tempting to look for the possibilities of an irreversible, precipitous
decline in the economic status of certain strata in the vast Amerikan settler
formation. The beleaguered, exploited proletariat residing in the internal
colonies of Amerika could benefit from a little help, or at least neutrality, from the middle classes—the petty bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy—during the insurrection/civil war and the preparatory years.
Settler radicals (meaning radicals descended from Europeans settling North
Amerika)—from the Trots to some Maoists—have long refused to face the
fact that the labor aristocracy is not only not a neutral force, but, if class interests rest on economic interests, not even mildly exploited. To paraphrase
Lenin: the petty-bourgeois revolutionaries take the conditions for their own
liberation to be the universal demands of mankind.
In terms of party-building this kind of thinking sometimes boils down to
promoting left-economist notions of immediate gratification, such as, “Nuke
war tomorrow? Oh shit, where do I sign up?” Such an understanding avoids
the international class analysis necessary to best promote revolution.
To truly take the stand of the international proletariat means to put our
analysis in the spot where the oppressed exist: with no choices available
but further oppression—or rebellion. We can strive to do this even during the periods when the masses actually standing in that spot have not yet realized their strength. For a revolutionary hanging by his/her thumbs in a cold Peruvian prison waiting for the flames to hit, Amerika must look like one huge, undifferentiated mass of class enemies.
That’s from the outside of this toilet. Inside it, we must make the differentiation and coldly separate friend from foe. The friends will throw themselves
into the flames to annihilate the flame-throwers. The foes will stand a little
distance apart at the last moment. As groups, this will be decided, in the
final analysis, by the historical group interest.
In the beginning, we decide what groups are worth our efforts building for
those decisive moments. If there is even a faint hope that the Amerikan
“working class” is waiting in the wings for revolution, then it would make
sense to organize for the demands of this group. (MIM seeks to organize
amongst all groups at all times, but it only organizes for the demands of the
oppressed, not the oppressors.)
MIM holds that, at the present, the majority of white workers in
this country—skilled workers, trade unionists, paper-pushers,
etc.—do not represent a revolutionary class. They do not create
surplus value as much as reapportion the surplus which results
from superexploitation of the Third World and oppressed internal nations. They are not prepared to abandon bourgeois
aspirations and mainly high-paying jobs to drop everything for
the good of the international proletariat.(1)
“Ah ha!” exclaims the desperately vacillating nature of the petty-bourgeois
revolutionary. “Just wait until they lose those high-paying jobs and become
prepared to abandon their bourgeois aspirations! Then they shall be friends!”
The cold-hearted Maoist replies, “Dream on, by that point what’s left of
them shall still be white-collar fascists defending a starving fortress Amerika
and firing bullets at Third World Maoist armies, while eating old Spam and
lining up to perish for the ‘right’ of their toxic-mutated children to ‘live free
or die!’”
These settlers are perfectly willing to fight and die for the continued ability
of their group to experience the taste of that rich and famous, completely
corrupted, seemingly immortal lifestyle.
An article by Lenin, who died before neocolonialism really pumped up the
imperialist alliances of the labor aristocracy and expanded the “shift in class
relations,” still says it well:
The greater part of Western Europe might then assume the
appearance and character already exhibited by tracts of country
in the South of England, in the Riviera, and in the tourist-ridden
or residential parts of Italy and Switzerland, little clusters of
wealthy aristocrats drawing dividends and pensions from the
Far East, with a somewhat larger group of professional retainers and tradesmen and a larger body of personal servants and
workers in the transport trade and in the final stages of production of the more perishable goods: all the main arterial
industries would have disappeared, the staple foods and semimanufactures flowing in as tribute from Asia and Africa… We
have foreshadowed the possibility of even a larger alliance of
Western states, a European federation of Great Powers which,
so far from forwarding the cause of world civilization, might
introduce the gigantic peril of a Western parasitism, a group of
advanced industrial nations, whose upper classes drew vast tribute from Asia and Africa, with which they supported great tame masses of retainers, no longer engaged in the staple industries
of agriculture and manufacture but kept in the performance of
personal or minor industrial services under the control of a new
financial aristocracy.(2)
The above quote was from Hobson, a “social-liberal" whom Lenin found
useful to quote, lest he be disbelieved. To would-be communist organizers
of the labor aristocracy, Lenin exclaimed: “At the present time, you are
fawning on the opportunists, who are alien to the proletariat as a class,
who are the servants, the agents of the bourgeoisie and the vehicles of its
influence, and unless the labor movement rids itself of them, it will remain
a bourgeois labor movement."(3)
Most white workers in this country are not prepared to ditch bourgeois aspirations and high-paying jobs to drop everything for the
good of the international proletariat.
Notes:
What is MIM pamphlet p. 8.
I.V. Lenin, Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, Moscow Progress Publishers, 1979, p. 9.
The cold-hearted Maoist replies, “Dream on, by that point what’s left of them shall still be white-collar fascists defending a starving fortress Amerika and firing bullets at Third World Maoist armies, while eating old Spam and lining up to perish for the ‘right’ of their toxic-mutated children to ‘live free or die!’”
The formerly high-paid worker or small business owner will certainly become reactionary, and in fact I think they already have.
What of the children of those bourgeoisified white workers who came into adulthood and found out they can’t afford education, can’t afford property, can barely afford rent, and have to live paycheck to paycheck paying off debts their parents never had?
I don’t think they’re responding to debourgeoisification the way their parents are, and that makes all the difference.
Family size decreased because more households were created (i.e. people moved out sooner, less multi-generational households). USian consumption has never decreased. Women were not forced to work, work became more available to them and then at a certain point it became a necessity for white women to work for white households to stay competitive and maintain segregation, women of other backgrounds were already working wage labor. Also birthrates are declining in Imperialist nations mostly due to policies that cut down teen parenthood (increased bodily autonomy, contraceptives and sex education, more access to higher education, more things to consume as opposed to raising children).
“afford childcare”: More and more USians do not live with family or support systems that assist in child-rearing, this is due to their ability not to. Childcare costs a lot in the US because it costs a lot to hire Americans to do anything (globally high wages!). These economic dynamics in reproductive relations are experienced broadly in all Imperialist societies. It’s a matter of class struggle that some other Imperialist states have subsidized childcare (the US does too, through tax breaks and public education, it just sucks). On a global level, it’s very privileged to pay someone to watch your kids, just because it costs a significant chunk of paychecks doesn’t mean it isn’t historically a bourgeois privilege, and less non-white women are forced to take waged domestic labor up since more jobs are available elsewhere. BTW, inflation for USD is due to a surplus of capital in the country, which is turned into novel industries (Hollywood, Malls, Amazon shopping, Silicon Valley, new cars, new guns), housing speculation, and “sin-taxes” (gambling, drugs, lootboxes). USD inflation is the result of the “Clipping Coupons” part of Imperialism.
No legal US working relationship outside of “customary agriculture” (migrant/child exploitation) is at exploitation level wages. Minimum wage is above Chinese factory wages, you’re going to need to see people getting 2-4 dollars before regular exploitation hits. Super-exploitation is the 60 cent wages seen in Haiti.
White men have been leaving the labor force since the 50s. Black men have been leaving too, but for different reasons, in different directions. This points to an increase in bourgeois white men.
“Cost of living” is an obfuscation. Poor Brazilian workers do not live in Favelas because their cost of living is lower, but that their wages are tiny so they can’t afford a well constructed home:
Okay, so I should clarify what I’m hypothesizing.
I’m not saying that bourgeoisification has already been eliminated or that we have reached the end of superprofits and their redistribution to the US working class, I merely contend that it’s begun its decline and is stratifying into even smaller and smaller subsections of the white working class. It would also be some time before we see the effects on things like air conditioning because of the inertia from previous development. The already installed air conditioners don’t just go away - people just stop running them.
US inflation used to be something that could be exported onto the rest of the world, but now the chickens are coming home to roost. The surplus of dollars is a poor explanation (kind of libertarian tbh), it only explains half the problem. The other side of the surplus comes from declining demand for dollars. The US sanctions regime has overreached on Russia and is now bifurcating the global economy into “countries that can trade with the US” and “everyone else” which created a boom in non-dollar trade. The high interest rate environment, too, is hurting demand for loans in US dollars as countries look for other sources of capital and deleverage themselves from US loans and debts.
The US is still superexploiting those workers in Brazil and Mexico; US workers are not going to be living like them in the near future! Yet as worker’s struggle in Latin America brings a new pink tide we are going to see more trade in national currency, more internal development, more investment from outside the US, and ultimately less superexploitation.
This is a trend, that’s all I’m saying.
Surplus capital is not a “libertarian thing”, it’s a Lenin thing, it’s the reason why capital is exported.
Where is the money going? Police, judicial, and carceral costs are increasing year over year. Capital is coming in from other Imperialist states and neo-Colonial outposts, which is fueling both housing construction and housing cost at the same time. There has never been more homes to workers in the US than right now.
And if you find my other post quoting Lenin, the petty bourgs are constantly being destroyed and refreshed, which is why the workers movement consistently gains new revisionist ideologies.
What I contend: The US middle classes have always been in this cycle, ya know many whites have struggles with drugs and drug incarceration (which has softened, drug use charges are getting lighter and lighter). De-Dollarization is still not affecting US workers, but also it’s greatly over-hyped. Surplus Capital will continue to be sent from all over the world to the US housing market and silicon valley.
Old homes and old appliances are still signs of total wealth growth, but also, new appliances have never been cheaper for USians and more people in the lower income brackets can afford them. Capital exports bring down the prices of goods. Car ownership is a luxury, it’s at 90+%, but also, the bottom 20% of population owns just 1% of cars:
This bottom 20% of USians is 60% Black/Indigenous/Latino. White poverty has been fairly consistent while poverty in other groups has been dropping in approach.
And just because someone is low income, doesn’t mean they have no wealth (housing speculation, owner-farmer).
It’s clear that wealth is increasing even though incomes are stagnating (because surplus money-capital arrives in the form of globally funded mortgages and historically low interest rates). Wages in 2020 are about as good (but way better for more people!) as the last 50 years, USians are not gonna have a lot of economic smoke for the Imperial regime.
Class consciousness is useless if it does not address labor aristocracy, and Communists have been saying “it’s getting worse!” since WW2, but it never has.
You should take a larger study of US economic conditions. We are in a much worse position of Economistic practices than WW1 Germans who Lenin railed against, I have linked the text in my other comment in the thread. These aren’t conditions to wait around for! Don’t wait for shit to get worse! There is revolutionary potential now! You have hundreds of national liberation struggles and 100 million oppressed nationals across Black/Indigenous people and Chicanos/Latinos. These struggles could have been turned into revolution in the 60s but revisionist Communists at that time said “wait we need white workers!”.
Did I mention that over half of the money spent on incarceration and policing (reaching a quarter trillion dollars every year, chart ends in 04, $261B spent in 2018) is wages for cops, guards, and judicial staff?
You say you are noticing a trend, I’m saying there’s always a small amount of losers in a massive petty booj economy, and this accounts for the trend you see, even though it has always been a factor, and adds new petty booj ideologies to workers movements, the state of the movement is evidence as such. The US is “overextended” (with few boots on the ground…), but what will happen when the US needs to ramp up war production to keep global wages low? Another boost in wages and carrot sticks of Opportunism so unions take war contracts (like they are doing right now making bombs that drop in Gaza). The US was able to “defeat Communism” through the height of anti-Imperial consciousness in the 70s, don’t hold your breath that movements that haven’t changed since then will be any different in the future.
It’s important to get across that a worker can go from high income ($150k) to low income ($12k, minimum wage), but actually double down on their bourgeois character because they started a business. From Semi-proletarian to Petty Bourg proper. Their total wealth would not have changed.
Sorry, we’re miscommunicating I think. Are you conflating “dollars” with “capital” here?
My reading tells me the export of surplus capital refers to the export of productive machines, not the literal national currency. But I am, in fact, talking about the demand for the literal national currency i.e. not surplus capital specifically. Yes, US productive capacity is still high and there’s still a lot of unequal exchange happening between the US and its imperialized holdings as it forces them to use its machines and proprietary software etc etc, but notably interest rates have needed to remain high (so no more historically low interest rates) and this has put incredible downward pressure on the value of loans in USD.
At the same time, the sanctions regime has bifurcated the global economy. There’s now a parallel economy that exists outside of USD and this is adding additional downward pressure. Nations can now get loans from elsewhere (notably China), trade with national currencies for commodities and even resources like oil, and avoid unequal exchange with the declining hegemon because of the large and growing non-USD economy. The value of US dollar and demand for dollars can still decline despite US exports.
So, between nations not wanting loans from the US and being able to trade without USD, literal demand for dollars has fallen. This is, in part, where the inflation is coming from.
Is this not a sign of the debourgeoisification of the rest of the working class? The empire needs to spend more and more on policing and incarceration of exploited and superexploited workers at home, to the point that those high costs of control are now eating into quality of life of the rest of the working class due to inflation. At the same time it needs to keep elevating the lifestyles of pigs higher and higher to keep them showing up to work, as the act of policing itself becomes more reviled and more mentally taxing (I’m reminded of Fanon talking about how colonialism dehumanizes the colonizer). This is the other side of where the inflation is coming from.
As the cops, guards, judicial staff, and all the other carceral employees demand more wages they’re acquiring investments and housing and special legally protected status. They’re being further bourgeoisified, developing into their own special class and totally separate from the rest of workers who are beginning to be debourgeoisified (they can’t acquire housing, they can’t build savings, they don’t have investments, they certainly can’t seclude and segregate themselves away from the rest of the working class into white enclaves).
This special class of carceral workers is being elevated at their expense. They’re being turned from national police to colonial police, many white workers are being turned from settlers into… not natives, but something adjacent?
When did I give this impression? I merely contend that shit is getting worse, not that we need to wait for anything!
Yes, the internally colonized people of the US are the most revolutionary force within it. I work in a factory and I can see how all the positions of management are only given to white English speakers, while the production floor is dominated by nonwhite people whose first languages are French, Arabic, or Spanish. I can see what you’re talking about every day.
I guess I’m just optimistic that the white working class has finally entered its own decline, but as you say, the embodied and generational wealth that they’ve accumulated will take quite some time to disappear. This is not a call to wait around, merely an observation that the time those misguided white communists were waiting for might be happening.
All of this is to say that the recent labor upsurge and rise in class consciousness has a material basis and isn’t just a fad.
Am I to understand that your point is nothing has fundamentally changed?
Nothing has fundamentally changed from the 60s, assimilation (which is paid for by Imperial value transfers) of oppressed nations is dual education and incarceration, both have increased over time, in dialectic. Women have been participating in wage labor more and more but that looks to have reached a relative peak.
You seem to think inflation is anything other than more wages than can be spent or reinvested (if in savings banks and credit unions). Inflation in the US is due to super-profits added to wages. An exploited Proletariat literally cannot save money, and globally luxury spending does not mean they are exploited!
Example: Sterling system. Britain exported capital to its own settlements in Canada and Australia. Britain was practicing “unequal exchange” (violent trade monopoly) with India, paying off their domestic workers with it, and then sending settlers to collect more resources in the colonies. Also, Lenin called French Imperialism “usury Imperialism” because France was exporting literal currency in loans to Russia and other European states. Capital exports of “real machines” are mostly to other Imperialist states or military allies, or Socialist states brought into circumstantial trade deals (same as Lenin’s time with NEP), and not “backward” economic systems of semi-colonial, semi-feudal character as seen in former Spanish colonies, India, and Africa. France still performs “usury Imperialism” (coupon clipping) with French and Euro currencies.
Cops are petty booj, more cops means more petty booj.
The US is a more advanced British Empire + French Empire in one. It’s not a surprise since the US inherited every Imperial relationship the former great powers had!
This is copium and you’re universalizing your position within the Settler economy. In my other post there’s a Polemic Against Settler “Maoism” that criticizes your line (this does not mean you are 100% wrong! It means you have some fundamental misunderstandings but you are in the right direction!). New class consciousness is due to the eugenic nature of settler society where productive, but unexploited economically due to Imperialism, workers were put into the disease gauntlet serving fascistic semi-proles and petty boojies who did not care for their well being.
Outside of Economistic practices focusing on wages and prices, the great thing this new wave has brought through the pandemic is organizing around workers’ health and wellness, as well as property abuses such as AI likenesses for performers. These are still material problems and the pandemic exposed them, but still this unions are hitting Economistic dead ends in organizing energy, still many workers are were permanently injured by the pandemic conditions and many are still getting sick with no protections. Union activity isn’t the end all be all of class consciousness, as seen in AFL’s history of making the bombs that kill people so they can have houses and cushy retirements.
And don’t pray for white conditions to worsen. Lenin railed against German comrades who were preoccupied with wages in Imperialist states. No strong party was developed during and after WW1 and when the “crunch” actually happened to workers obsessed with wages and inflation, they suited up to herd the “undesirables” into camps. My worry is that when whites start feeling real class struggle they’ll turn my people in prison into actual slaves if we don’t have the readiness for a violent opposition ala AIM and the BPP.
Bold statement!
Yes? Inflation, as experienced by the worker, is the cost of goods and services and housing rising faster than wages. Which is happening. Inflation does not automatically equal higher wages. Inflation, again as experienced by the worker, means higher prices. If that comes with higher wages then the worker can keep up with inflation and no one notices much other than the fact that their savings literally lose value over time, but debourgeoisification has disrupted this process. We are now seeing inflation actually outpace workers, they are not just making more to pay their higher bills and it’s lead to the recent labor upsurge.
This is not universal, obviously. The wages of managers, cops, so-called skilled laborers, bureaucrats, etc have risen in pace with inflation. We have seen some workers keep up and other workers fall behind, splitting off those workers and debourgeoisifying them as they fail to save and fail to attain property and fail to get “ahead.” I’m not sure why you’re insisting this isn’t happening.
Do you think there isn’t a labor upsurge and that class consciousness isn’t rising?
You’re right! And would you look at that, the savings rate in the US has been declining since the 60s, supposedly the period when things stopped changing. The savings rate briefly went up after the financial crash and bucked the trend of decline (i.e. when capital destruction created new avenues for investment) and obviously spiked during the period when people cared about COVID, but on the whole there has been a steady decline that coincides with the way real wages have stagnated.
Inflation is not in “luxury spending” it’s in fucking groceries and rent and housing.
Okay, so you are speaking literally of currency being exported. But you’re contradicting yourself and I’m confused.
You say “capital exports bring down the prices of goods” yet we are also talking about conditions of strong inflation. Is this not a contradiction? Does this not indicate that capital exports are falling, and that demand for USD is falling? You say nothing has changed, but despite the harshest sanctions regime in history we have seen Russia’s economy continue to grow! We are seeing nations make deals with each other in national currencies, totally bypassing USD. We are seeing alternatives to the World Bank and IMF, which offer loans in currencies other than USD.
The world is changing, and the conditions for white workers will change with it. Maybe it’s too early to say
What productive assets do they own? I think they’re a special protected class created by the State, and while their class interests align with business owners and independent farmers they are still distinct and it’s worth recognizing it.
Maybe. Some of the trends I’m noticing have only been around for a few years, it could just be a blip and the white working class will go back to feasting on the superprofits of the global South soon enough. But-
We’ve also seen the contract fights have not focused on wages. While the companies have been throwing record wages at workers the contracts still get rejected because what they actually want is time away from work and time where they can’t be scheduled and an end to understaffing, or like you say, workers’ health and wellness.
But we are also seeing union locals organizing against the Zionist genocide. That’s huge! The labor upsurge might be gaining a political character and you seem to be ignoring it in favor of pessimism. The union leadership is still in lockstep with the Democrats, and as long as that is the case they will hit those dead ends, but if I’m right and the rank-and-file are being debourgeoisified then we are going to either see the leadership change or we’ll see the NLRB declared unconstitutional and unions will have to go back to illegal strikes.
Inflation is mostly due to higher wages, and savings. Savings are reinvested by banks and turned into new constant and variable capital (hiring more workers). It can be turned into new consumption (like video games, social media, more advertising). It can be turned into student loans, and mortgages (if there is a surplus of money-capital all of these things will get more expensive relative the the unit of money), and “gentrification” re-developments or new suburban developments. Your savings become a smaller share of the MOP because they got invested elsewhere and more things were made or labor paid because of it! Simultaneously capital will be exported, mostly to China, where it is used to decrease the prices of expensive goods like video game consoles and microwaves (which is why they have gotten cheaper since the 80s/90s). The increase in the prices of other goods are due to the increases of incomes whether directly or indirectly through cheaper living and therefore savings, this causes the propertied classes to raise prices to capture these excess monies in savings so they can maintain their relative share of ownership. The bourgeoisie does not want dollars sitting around, they want them put into motion so they can be accumulated. This means increased consumption, and consumption remains high. USians consume way more than the global south citizens do.
Though again, buying lots of things and not saving money doesn’t mean your life is actually getting worse! The “60 percent of USians are paycheck to paycheck” talking point in media obfuscates that the median US worker makes hundreds of thousands a year, that 60% must include people doing better than the median worker.
All that said, family incomes have not changed beyond historical levels for the bottom 20%, all other brackets are growing, and there are more families.
The recent “labor upsurge” was pandemic related, just as inflation was largely pandemic related due to transportation delays and more spending per-worker on minimal safety precautions (with some level of “greed-flation” but again that’s just opportunism on behalf of the bourgs).
None of this really effects US workers, besides the tech sector and the housing bubble (this means less workers able to speculate on land) which was being supplied by Counter-revolutionary Russian Bourgs who parked their money in the US for these “industries”. This does explain some of the attention TikTok is getting as US-based companies are losing their technology monopolies. However, conditions for Imperialism are still better than when the USSR existed. Capital exports of specific commodities are decreased when that specific commodity making capital is exported, but it need not be existing machines. GM mostly built new machines in their transition to Mexico and the US factories make largely high end cars and trucks now, while Mexicans make the lower end vehicles which are sold to US GM workers lol. Surplus-Capital either finds new industries or expands elsewhere, but this could easily be to an underdeveloped sector in an Imperialist ally (such as Germany, South Korea). You’re right that if not enough surplus-capital finds a home, that the value of dollars goes down, this is effected by dollar demand but also capital exports can take the form of bombs, ultimately the destruction of capital, which allows for demand to be re-established. New sources of consumption counter-balance inflation, essentially, which is why the US is the least susceptible state to inflation.
This is due to what I said above, that people are saving money, so loans get more expensive because there is a surplus of capital to be turned into loans (they make bigger loans because they can find people to take them). This makes college and housing more expensive. Local landlord regimes (city-government “deep states”) subsidize development to attract higher wage sectors like tech so they can realize more real-estate capital in the form of land-values and rents. So you’re right that wage differentiation has something to do with cost increases, but again 4/5th of USian incomes are increasing yoy, overall the bulk is on the upswing. You must be reading too much Hudson to think that the dollar system itself is the source of inflation, no, it’s actually “unequal exchange” and the increased wages it brings.
The petty-bourgeoisie need not actually own productive assets, this is an overly mechanical analysis of petty bourg classes. Lenin and Mao referred to academics, teachers, doctors, and nurses to be petty-bourgeoisie, see the source in my other comment on the Middle Classes in Britain. The petty-bourgeoisie is simply non-capitalists and non-proletarians converging into a “middle strata”.
To a certain extent, working hours struggles are progressive, to another extent, they are simply wage struggles hidden behind math. In an Imperial economy where wages are already built from stolen labor of the global proletariat, cutting hours in Imperialist states comes at the expense of the global proletariat, it’s ultimately reactionary organizing unless it doubles with demands of a shorter working day globally for all workers, i.e. proletarian internationalism.
We see this was not the case…
Where? Outside of the walk-outs of academics who some happened to be in the UAW, there hasn’t been any anti-Imperialist actions by US unions. They make statements but my dog could make just as valuable of a statement if she could write. Opportunist gonna opportunist, this isn’t a sign of anything lasting, if it was they’d be seizing land and handing them over to the Indigenous peoples as we speak. UAW would divest from weapons manufacturing and Israeli settlements. The academic protesters only jumped in when their students were getting beat up by pigs, again a valiant action, but ultimately has not progressed the struggle. The youth are always worth agitating but it’s important they can’t be lead by Opportunists in the union movement and academic circles. As seen Liberals also protest, doesn’t mean Liberals or union-locals have developed more class consciousness beyond white guilt for being in-Empire.
Nothing novel has occurred between this moment and the anti-Vietnam days besides much less whites caring because they successfully got the draft paused indefinitely. When union workers start destroying weapons manufacturing equipment I’ll have to change my mind, but that seems to be far from where we are, and the “toughest actions” have been climbing (office, not factory) buildings and tagging them with paint.
“Savings savings savings” you say, and yet the rate of savings has been declining since the 60s and right now is on par with the period just before the 2008 financial crash. Savings are not an explanation for the inflation we are seeing and this is another contradiction to your claims: if savings are a source of inflation, and savings are down, where is the inflation coming from? Is it only coming from wage increases like is being claimed by bourgeois economists? I’m skeptical, and so I’m hypothesizing that the inflation is geopolitical.
And yet, the state is grappling with inflation despite being the least susceptible state to inflation. Does this not indicate a change?
Do you think the bourgeois want a high interest rate environment? Do you think they want the global South to turn to other countries for loans?
One thing that stood out to me was the demands for an end to understaffing, which necessarily means hiring more people. It’s not quite internationalism, no, but it does benefit the internally colonized people who could gain employment instead of being forced to fill the ranks of the gig economy and reserve army of unemployed workers.
I will acknowledge the labor upsurge lacks enough international character. I’ll be watching for who starts to organize migrant temp workers first.
UAW International is calling for a ceasefire, a full list of unions who have signed on can be found here. I’m not overly impressed by their calls, they only call for Israelis to be released when they should be calling for a hostage exchange and acknowledge that the Zionists have been taking Palestinians hostage by the thousands into detention centers, but they aren’t just silently supporting Israel either.
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union recently shut down the Port of Oakland to prevent ships carrying weapons bound for Israel from leaving the docks. In fact, the ILWU has a long history of being interested in and supportive of Palestinian liberation going back decades because of their internationalist character that was cultivated during the anti-apartheid struggle against South Africa.
It’s not just academics. The labor upsurge is gaining a political character. Something is happening.
I’ll cheer when that happens, and you’re right to point out the lacking radicalism in US unions. Yet, you’re underestimating the importance of public demonstration and should recognize that even non-destructive acts still act as propaganda for further radical action. Tagging a building with paint can be a precursor to tagging it with… something else.
I don’t share your pessimism for the white US working class. I think we’re on the brink of a change and these are all signs.
We’ll see.
I already pointed out that inflation, the value of the dollar, compared to 2019 is due to pandemics slowing shipping down, you literally had to pay for more labor for the same amount of goods shipped --> increased costs of goods. Sanctions also increase shipping costs --> increased costs of goods. The bulk of American workers are getting wealthier, thus inflation for even things like apples and watermelon, because there are more people who will spend that money. The struggle between US workers and US petty bourgs over who gets a bigger share of Imperialism does nothing to advance Communism. Savings rate propaganda induced by bourgeois media promotes Economistic organizing, again 6 figure workers spending their full monthly paycheck, whether to rents, social security and retirement funds (savings but not called savings), student/mortgage/consumer loans (others’ savings), gambling/gatcha/collecting, “investing” in bubbles (housing, crypto, Tesla stock, “retail” investment has been growing ala “roaring 20s”), or doordash for every meal does not mean these workers are going to be any more interested in proletarian revolution.
Inflation rates in the US have never been more stable than the last 3 decades.
Interest rates are still historically low. Many loans were forgiven so the recent rise in interest rates seeks to slow down borrowing that the pandemic induced to absorb stimmy checks. It’s all about inducing circulation or slowing it down when the bourgs want to.
This is not a new demand, it’s consistent with Imperialist union activity historically. This type of reform still works on behalf of Imperialism to delay national liberation, it’s certainly a contradiction we intend to exploit where available to us, though this requires we have an even stronger anti-Colonial line since making more oppressed nation bourgs adds troubling revisionisms to the movement.
So it’s a bourgeois humanist position, without a hint of Marxism, and covering the true nature of Zionism and US labor’s role in occupation and genocide? Color me surprised, this is nothing to celebrate, we’ve seen it before:
Don’t downplay the role of conditional solidarity in shaping the demands of a Decolonization struggle. The form of the ANC now can’t be separated from the way in which Apartheid “ended” (who owns the land and bread?). The same goes for these “anti-Zionist”-but-nowhere-anti-Zionist gestures that push blame on the Resistance and deny the reality of settler-Colonialism in Palestine.
This must have been said during every US involved war ever. I think such acts result because such bloodshed exists, before the bloodshed, none of them cared. After the bloodshed, they’ll return to not caring. Until white workers are climbing over each other to commit class-suicide on behalf of revolution, I’ll have little reason to value their solidarity.
From MIM Theory 1:
The formerly high-paid worker or small business owner will certainly become reactionary, and in fact I think they already have.
What of the children of those bourgeoisified white workers who came into adulthood and found out they can’t afford education, can’t afford property, can barely afford rent, and have to live paycheck to paycheck paying off debts their parents never had?
I don’t think they’re responding to debourgeoisification the way their parents are, and that makes all the difference.