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?

  • Muad'DibberA
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    11 months ago

    Here’s where you start getting into really messy definitions of what a worker, or “working-class” actually means, for imperial-core countries, which is what I assume you’re referring to.

    The very introductory and now-unsatisfactory original answer, from Engels:

    The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition.

    But even in his lifetime, he could see that britain’s “working-class” was turning into a “bourgeois proletariat / labor aristocracy”, living more-and-more off of the labor and commodities produced by the colonies.

    Nowadays, that process is nearly complete: nearly all global production (and class struggle), has been exported to the global south. The imperialist countries don’t actually produce many commodities at all, and most of their population is employed in the service and transportation economy: both necessary, but not quite the same as super-exploited proletarians producing commodities for a world market, who are the main source of surplus value in the modern day. Imperial-core “workers” remain net takers, not creators, of surplus value, their livelihoods and well-being actually coming out of the portion of surplus value captured from global-south proles.

    Simply earning a wage is not enough to define one as “working-class”, otherwise drone pilots and hedge fund managers could be considered working class. Transportation workers and service workers could be considered working-class, but whether they actually produce surplus value, or are the net recipients of it, is a more difficult question.

    Its comparable to house and field slaves. House slaves don’t produce commodities or surplus value: they create use-values in the form of meals and services for the slave-owner. As such, their livelihood is off the backs of the field slaves, a part of whose surplus-value they must live off of. Are they still slaves? Yes, but not quite the same.

    Can there be a revolution of those who produce no surplus value, who don’t actually produce commodities, who don’t hold the reigns of production, but only of moving the products around? IE the house slaves, or in our case, service and transport workers? It remains to be seen, however it is a fact that we haven’t seen a successful revolution in any imperial-core country, and Lenin’s correction to Marx and Engels: that revolution would occur not in Britain, but in the weakest link in the capitalist and imperialist chain, where exploitation remains highest, has been historically borne out.

    To get more to your point, transport workers are no different from service-workers in that neither produce surplus value, but both are still necessary components of moving products through global value chains. Focus should be on who actually produces most of the surplus value captured in global value chains, very few of which live in imperial core countries.

    I recommend reading Zak Cope, divided world divided class, and John smith - imperialism in the 21st century, for more on how class struggle has been exported to the global south, and how the lives of imperial-core citizens are sustained by the surplus value created in the global south.

    • @freagle
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      1111 months ago

      This is the first time I’ve seen the material basis for this distinction written so clearly and succinctly. Thank you for this. I need to find more analysis on this topic now.

    • JucheBot1988
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      11 months ago

      Now this is why genzedong on lemmygrad is superior to genzedong on reddit, because a struggle session on labor is exactly the kind of struggle session we should be having. Not the monthly “is Bernie really that bad” or the weekly “hey guys, is porn okay” we always seemed to get on reddit.

      • Muad'DibberA
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        1011 months ago

        Absolutely, and thank you for your excellent contributions in this thread too.

    • @CannotSleep420
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      911 months ago

      This is why I don’t consider programmers working class.

    • relay
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      11 months ago

      Can those who don’t produce suplus value contribute to the revolution? Yes, because they have in the past.

      Should the vanguard mostly consist of labor aristocrats? No because the most exploited have intimate knowledge of the jobs required to run the economy and directly experience society’s contradictions. That kind of knowledge is needed to make decisions that meet the needs of the masses.

      Would it be wrong to unionize the transporters of the exploiter nations? No, because they either cut into the profits of the capitalists, or they increase the exploitation of the third world, which can by enhancing the contradictions between the imperial core and periphery make socialism more necessary.

      I’ll read those books, but I don’t see how right now how the average imperial core person benefits from the millitary industrial complex, it creates debt and inflation. Even with the exploited labor of the third world, with the profit motive and reduced competition between firms the low production cost does not necessary create cheaper prices for consumers for many products.

      • @redtea
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        811 months ago

        Should the vanguard mostly consist of labor aristocrats? No because the most exploited have intimate knowledge of the jobs required to run the economy and directly experience society’s contradictions.

        This seems contradictory to me. Not necessarily in itself, but in the context of the broader discussion. If most people in the imperial core are labour aristocrats, then we will not find the most exploited people in the imperial core. And that suggests that it doesn’t really matter so much which of the imperial core workers are organised.

        At the same time, the opposite also seems true. Considering the types of economies in the imperial core, the labour aristocrats are the ones work intimate knowledge of how the system works and can do a lot – maybe or maybe not the ‘most’, which seems like a red herring – to stop capitalism from working.

        But I think this is closer to what you were arguing? That something like the ‘most skillful’ workers are most useful to a revolution. The difference is maybe that you exclude the labour aristocracy and the lumpen proletariat from that category? Is that right? If so, I think our disagreement / my confusion comes from different definitions.

        I don’t see how right now how the average imperial core person benefits from the millitary industrial complex, it creates debt and inflation.

        They benefit because it’s the MIC that guarantees huge and unequal flows of wealth from the periphery to the core; and it’s that wealth that makes the labour aristocracy what it is.

        The idea of debt needs unpacking a little bit, too. All money is debt, meaning that it’s not necessarily a problem in itself. It’s not as simple as saying all debt is bad just because it is debt.

        I can see the point about inflation, but is the MIC the worst or only contender? Plus, inflation is only a problem for the poorer end of the inequality relation. Wealthy people benefit from inflation. And if imperial core workers are labour aristocrats because they are wealthy, then they, too, benefit from inflation.

        Would it be wrong to unionize the transporters of the exploiter nations? No, because … they increase the exploitation of the third world, which can by enhancing the contradictions between the imperial core and periphery make socialism more necessary.

        This seems more like a tragic consequence of, rather than a reason for, unions in the imperial core.

        • relay
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          711 months ago

          On the inflation, I suspect it is price gouging from lack of competition in many industries in the USA in particular, and a result of energy prices in Europe and the Ukraine war. If the US dollar stops being the currency that all need to buy oil in, I expect further inflation for Americans in particular. For other imperial core nations, I don’t know if de-dollarization will affect them as greatly.

      • Muad'DibberA
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        611 months ago

        Can those who don’t produce suplus value contribute to the revolution? Yes, because they have in the past.

        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.

        I’ll read those books, but I don’t see how right now how the average imperial core person benefits from the millitary industrial complex, it creates debt and inflation.

        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.

        1. Outsourcing enables capitalists to replace higher-paid domestic labor with low-wage Southern labor, exposing workers in imperialist nations to direct competition with similarly skilled but much lower paid workers in Southern nations,
        2. While falling prices of clothing, food, and other articles of mass consumption protects consumption levels from falling wages and magnifies the effect of wage increases.

        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.

        Inflation-adjusted Average Wage Rates for male workers in 2007 _
        Monthly wage for OECD workers $2,378
        Monthly wage for non-OECD workers $253
        Hourly wage for OECD workers $17
        Hourly wage for non-OECD workers $1.50
        Factoral Difference between OECD and non-OECD wages 11
        Median Global Hourly wage $9.25
        • relay
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          611 months ago

          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?

          • Muad'DibberA
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            511 months ago

            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.

            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?

            Definitely. We can already see some of the US’s soft-power failing in Latin America.

  • @lil_tank
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    1811 months ago

    Service workers have skills that are very versatile and relevant to building solidarity by organising distribution of goods and services

    Students need educating to not be manipulated into counter revolution. They often are extremely sensitive to psyops while being ready to go nuts on some occasions, so working with them is a matter of survival

    Lumpens develop a lot of skills in the aera of unlawful activities, circumventing a lot of state control, and survival skills

    And finally artists can bring life back into the communities of exploited people. The PLA got support from the masses by playing music, the various communist parties at their peak in Europe had theatres for the people. It’s extremely important for mass support

    Patsocs are out of touch with life

    • JucheBot1988
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      1211 months ago

      Nothing you said is wrong, but organizing among these classes comes with certain inherent dangers which need to be recognized.

      1. Students tend to come from a privileged strata relative to the majority of the population, and I say this as someone with a graduate degree. My parents were never wealthy, and I got into college on scholarships; still, they owned their own house, they had some land, and my mother was able to stay home and not work. Money was sometimes a little tight, but we never really felt much of a crunch. This is a basically middle-class lifestyle that a whole lot of people in the US don’t have. A lot of college students, being from the middle class, do have a fear of being absorbed into the proletariat; they may resent the ruling class for squeezing them, but they don’t themselves have much natural solidarity with working-class people. They in fact often see the ruling class and the working class as two millstones grinding the innocent middle class; thus, they are easily led toward fascism.

      2. One has to distinguish between types of service workers here. In deindustrialized countries like the US, there is a strata among service workers which can be described as “workers becoming lumpen;” they have the values and general class tendencies of the the industrial proletariat, but from economic necessity are stuck working at Kmart or McDonalds or the like. It is a precarious position that cannot be maintained for very long, but one can often reach these people with the promise of real jobs: “wouldn’t you rather be building a hydroelectric plant on the Mississippi River than flipping burgers?” On the other hand, there are certain service jobs which seem to recruit largely from students, or parts of the middle class who have sunk economically. Luxury boutiques and high-end stores are an example of this. Their employees are not paid well, but I have found that (rather paradoxically), they tend to identify more with their employers than with working class people; probably because they make their money (and at times have a certain status within the service industry) in an artificial market propped up entirely by wealthy people’s spending.

      3. The great danger of organizing among the lumpen is getting drawn into the criminal element which tends to exist wherever you have desperately poor people. This happened to the KPD during the 1920s. Very often, party efficiency degrades as a result. Moreover (as Marx points out) the lumpen are easily bought off, since they have literally nothing. Often they are served better by working with sectors of the working class who have a vested interest in never siding with capital; thus one can create extra-governmental structures, and eventually an entire society, which enables people to escape lumpen status.

      4. The same things said about students can generally be said about artists, though (as you said) they are certainly important for reaching the masses.

      • @lil_tank
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        811 months ago

        Completely agree on every points! Your comment ad the nuances that are needed to answer the question of working with a given group at a given place in time!

    • @gun@lemmy.ml
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      -711 months ago

      Lumpen being able to “circumvent state control” is worthless if they are incapable of developing class consciousness.

      CPUSA:

      “Generally unemployable people who make no positive contribution to an economy. Sometimes described as the bottom layer of a capitalist society. May include criminal and mentally unstable people. Some activists consider them “most radical” because they are “most exploited,” but they are un-organizable and more likely to act as paid agents than to have any progressive role in class struggle.”


      What Marx said in the Communist Manifesto:
      The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

      And this observation was visionary as proven decades later by fascism.

      If you want to organize lumpen, you are not a Marxist, you are a fascist.

      • @CannotSleep420
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        1511 months ago

        The class base of fascism is the petite bourgeoisie, not the lumpen.

      • relay
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        1111 months ago

        That does not necessarily make one fascist, just maybe not functional to the cause. I can undestand not wanting to start with the Lumpenproles, maybe organize the regular proles in transportation, agriculture, industry, and tech before you can get social workers to integrate the lumpenproles into the more functional industries.

        • @gun@lemmy.ml
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          -511 months ago

          Impossible to organize lumpen as lumpen. Successful communism would eliminate the lumpenproletariat as a class.

          • relay
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            1211 months ago

            Yea, but in order to do that, you’ll need to work with the people of that class to integrate them into productive industries. Also the more of them that see our interests as their interests, means that we’ll have to deal with fewer reactionaries. Doing so also means adding more people with lumpen backgrounds to assimilate other lumpens to become proles. It is good to have fewer people to fight against us. I don’t think you need to wait till full communism to work with them. Somewhere in the socialism stage, it is good to integrate them into the economy.

            • @gun@lemmy.ml
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              211 months ago

              Fair point, I don’t disagree. But that’s not what lil tank was talking about.

              • @frippa@lemmy.ml
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                211 months ago

                If we are fine with China using the capitalists to their advantage we must be fine with using the lumpens to our advantage

                • @gun@lemmy.ml
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                  111 months ago

                  It’s not about what is permissible or not. It is about what is effective or not. China used the national and petit bourgeoisie against imperial Japan because everyone in China had an interest in resisting Japan’s imperialism. Even then, the lumpen do not get a star on the Chinese flag

      • @redtea
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        1011 months ago

        Who is lumpen in the modern context? I don’t think we can uncritically take Marx’s categories and concepts and apply them to the modern world without updating them or our analysis. People move through classes fluidly. One day lumpen, one day a student, next day a worker, then again lumpen, and so on.

        How useful is the category, ‘lumpen’, in countries where even the very poorest have free education, healthcare, housing, albeit not of the highest standard but which is paid for by exploiting the periphery? I don’t necessarily have an answer and the question is not rhetorical.

        It’s certainly not fascist to organise these lumpen, even if that is what some fascists will do. But we may be talking past one another with different definitions, here.

        • @gun@lemmy.ml
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          111 months ago

          Lumpenproletariat does deserve a refreshed analysis in the modern context, but what Marxists observed in the past is still observable. There are still criminals and thieves and so on. I’m not sure what difference education makes when most jobs that demand some type of education want a secondary degree.

          Naturally, when we talk about classes, we are not talking about strictly defined groups where everyone has a class passport and can only be identified with that class. You will have people who fit the description of lumpen join the fold of a revolutionary movement. That’s inevitable. Hard to deny it happened in history.

          But this is different from organizing lumpen AS lumpen. We’re talking about replacing “dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” with “dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry AND the lumpenproletariat” That kind of thinking is the beginning of fascism.

          At the very least, it’s counterproductive. The ruling class has a budget of trillions on standby to squash any movement that poses them a threat, not to mention standing armies. On the communist side, resources are slim and so is manpower. It is critical to focus energy on rallying the right people. This is not a “why not both?” situation. You have to make a choice. Are you going to go to the farmers or go to the meth heads? Will the meth heads pay their party dues? Will they assist in organizing others? Or will they be a liability?

          • @redtea
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            411 months ago

            I can agree with that.

            I think I misinterpreted some of what you said before, though. I think we interpreted the OP differently.

            I didn’t mean to suggest that Marxists should organise lumpen as lumpen (I’m unsure why your explicit comment on that point got so down voted, tbh). Personally, rather than theoretically, I can’t see why any lumpen would join any revolutionary activity except for the promise of a better life (more stable, more secure, more social acceptance, less stigma, etc), but maybe I’m missing something.

            Surely (<— weak argumentation, I know) a major task of a socialism is to eliminate unemployment and ensure that everyone can contribute to production, meaning the very act of revolutionarily organising any class is to try to eradicate class distinctions so that there’s only a proletariat left.

            The point about education was related to a wider issue. I should’ve made that clearer.

            Unemployment in some global north countries is high. Governments use education as a way of fudging the unemployment statistics, regardless of whether there’s a related job at the end of it. It seems to me that if governments didn’t do this, or if those students were excluded from the not-employed-but-not-unemployed stats, the number of people we’d see in the ‘lumpen’ category would increase.

            As Marxists, we probably don’t want to conflate unemployment with lumpen. But there is a link. (Governments won’t count career criminals as employed even if they do regular burglaries. White collar criminals and corrupt officials do count in the employment stats, though!)

            There also seems to be a link between student and lumpen as so many students enroll to stave off being a lumpen, where there aren’t enough jobs around. This doesn’t work for all, as poor students still need an income, which turns many to e.g. sex work and/or crime (depending on whether sex work is criminalised). Maybe we need a new category for the lower rung of the labour aristocracy – those who benefit materially from imperialism but who cannot find work and support themselves with a mixture of welfare and alternative, unstable income sources.

  • JucheBot1988
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    1511 months ago

    It is not in itself inefficient, since every successful revolution comes in part from a broad alliance of classes. However, it must always be done in conjuction with the sort of productive labor you mentioned – the people who have the power actually to shut down the economy. Moreover, these same productive laborers must be recognized as the most advanced sector of the proletariat, and their demands should in general come first. The problem with most western communists is not they organize service workers and student unions, but that they focus almost solely on that. Thus they tend to lack a real proletarian ideology, since productive labor is where the proletarian essence is most clearly found.

    We should remember that one of Lenin’s key contributions – expanded on and brought to its logical conclusion by Mao, and (I would argue) Kim Il-Sung – is that because imperialism is now the primary contradiction, other classes besides the “classic” proletarian have revolutionary potential. These classes, however, need to be led by a party with proletarian ideology, and which is thus grounded in the industrial proletariat. For that reason I would argue, though I am not a third-worldist, that until real collapse in the first world happens, an important step in communist organizing is getting first-world workers to see that many of their interests actually align with workers in socialist countries – hence the importance right now of anti-war agitation.

  • There’s not a lot of productive labour left in the imperial core compared to the Global South. I think it’s valid to say that focusing on the workers who have more leverage against bourgeois control (especially logistics) is more effective than focusing on other work that’s less integral (e.g. the average Silicon Valley job), as long as they don’t have stubborn petit bourgeois aspirations. On the other hand, if you can organize enough people for a local or national armed revolution, it doesn’t necessarily matter what their jobs are or if they even have jobs

  • @linkhidalgogato
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    11 months ago

    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?

    • Muad'DibberA
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      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:

      The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries and colonies.

      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:

      In all the civilised, advanced countries the bourgeoisie rob—either by colonial oppression or by financially extracting “gain” from formally independent weak countries—they rob a population many times larger than that of “their own” country. This is the economic factor that enables the imperialist bourgeoisie to obtain super-profits, part of which is used to bribe the top section of the proletariat and convert it into a reformist, opportunist petty bourgeoisie that fears revolution.

      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.

      • Economically, the embourgeoisement of First World workers has provided oligopolies with the secure and thriving consumer markets necessary to capital’s expanded reproduction.
      • Politically, the stability of pro-imperialist polities with a working-class majority is of paramount concern to cautious investors and their representatives in government.
      • Militarily, a pliant and/or quiescent workforce furnishes both the national chauvinist personnel required to enforce global hegemony and a secure base from which to launch the subjugation of Third World territories.
      • Finally, ideologically, the lifestyles and cultural mores enjoyed by most First World workers signifies to the Third World not what benefits imperialism brings, but what capitalist industrial development and parliamentary democracy alone can achieve.

      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:

      At the expense of the plundered colonial peoples capital corrupted its wage slaves, created a community of interest between the exploited and the exploiters as against the oppressed colonies—the yellow, black, and red colonial people—and chained the European and American working class to the imperialist “fatherland.”

      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:

      I was in the West End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for “bread!” “bread!” and on the way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism … My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and the mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.

      • @linkhidalgogato
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        -411 months ago

        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.

        • Muad'DibberA
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          911 months ago

          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.

          because that says nothing about whether it is worth it to organize such people, which if you have nothing better to do it is.

          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.

        • @CannotSleep420
          link
          811 months ago

          Imperial core people don’t do productive labor.