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.
And this explains the persistence of inflation?
Sanctions also increase shipping costs --> increased costs of goods.
We’ll come back to this!
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 bulk? Real wages have been flat for quite some time, but you handwaved this away by everyone having dual incomes because women entered the labor force (and women now have to have two jobs in the nuclear family). Yet, that doesn’t actually resolve the problem! All you have done is doubled the flat wages, you haven’t actually shown anyone getting “wealthier”.
So. We aren’t seeing higher wages and savings are at near record lows. Where is inflation coming from?
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.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only 15.5% of households earn between $100,000 and $150,000 annually.
You are not describing the white workers I interact with in my factory, except maybe people in management.
Inflation rates in the US have never been more stable than the last 3 decades.
Okay, and then inflation spiked in the last few years.
Yes, pandemic supply chain disruptions which I don’t dispute, but like you already acknowledged it’s also because of the sanctions regime now backfiring onto the imperial core. That’s not a small thing! In previous decades the US could impose sanctions on its foes without paying any price, but now those sanctions are hurting the value of USD because trade in dollars is becoming more expensive and because the sanctions regime is literally forcing the global economy to shift away! And the sanctions, which once weakened US enemies, are now unable to slow Russia’s economy down. This only accelerates the shift away from dollars.
The higher interest rates (I’ll grant, they could be higher!) are an attempt to claw back the money supply, but all it is doing is putting even more pressure on the global South as they are forced to pay those higher interest rates on their loans. As a result we’ve seen coups and massive protest movements in Africa, a pink tide in Latin America, and the high interest rate environment is itself pushing countries away from USD lending and creating fertile ground for lending from other banks in other currencies.
The low inflation was geopolitical when it was stable over the last three decades, and the higher inflation is geopolitical now.
Interest rates are still historically low.
Actually, the last time they were this high was right before the '08 financial crash. Makes you go hmm…
Yes, they used to be much higher before 2000, but I think you’re underestimating how bad even these modest rates are for USD.
I still contend that these interest rates are going to force countries to move away from taking loans in USD and is already putting incredible political pressure on countries with existing loans in USD (most recently, see what’s going on in Kenya). This, in turn, will push the global economy ever further away from exchange in dollars and towards economic alliances like BRICS.
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:
Fair. It’s only the locals that are actually calling this genocide and calling Zionism a settler-colonial project and calling for BDS.
They’re great and should be recognized! The AFL-CIA remains embedded with the State Department, though.
This must have been said during every US involved war ever.
Has a US service-member ever lit themselves on fire before?
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.
I understand and sympathize with your pessimism.
I, for one, don’t need the streets to already be running red to have at least a little revolutionary optimism.
Wages have not significantly dropped. Staying in the $23 dollar range since the 70s including the tens of millions of immigrants since then + women working more and more (and men working less) and wages are still the same? What does that mean overall? As the white male workforce aged and retired, more white men were given high wage jobs that are nearly equivalent to 2 median incomes (like missile engineering) and women and POC took the old jobs (productive factory, shipping, teaching, nursing). Incomes for Americans overall stayed consistent. On a global level $20 dollars an hour is humongous! Cost of living is actually not the cause of these wages, as most Proletarian global South cities are just as expensive as American ones and some are more expensive than NYC. Mexico, Canada, and the US have a merged market due to NAFTA, but only dead labor can travel freely, living labor is blocked by the border. What does this create? A free trade zone where workers doing the same work make $3 one one side of a deadly border, and $20 on the other. Why should we expect that US workers should be getting $25 by the 90s, $35 by now? Maintaining wealth while costs of much of personal consumption is actually dropping in real dollars (compare Nintendo consoles or appliances to the 90s). In the graph you show wages were the lowest in the 90s, where was this debourging then? The fact is that if white men were able to continue segregating women and POC, average wages still would have climbed.
But there is also the factor that average wage is being held down by immigrants, POC, and women (particularly immigrant women POC). Median white male wages have stagnated since the 70s, but the stratification is predominantly above the median, as in the rich got richer while the poor stayed the same.
The problem with centering on wages like this is that US wages have maintained global dominance while even more are getting absurd incomes. Just because tech workers are so rich does not mean GM workers have suddenly become exploited.
Again CoL is fairly comparable globally, US wages are rich everywhere, and US minimum wage is wealthier than most petty boojies in the global south, which is why they are willing to pack up and move here.
The position of US workers is high, them getting knocked off their pedestal will look a lot more drastic than this, like for instance minimum wage getting outlawed or the border blowing wide open (good tbh), or perhaps anti-peonage laws getting ripped away. Then I’d be concerned with them, but likely more concerned of them if the movement is not already approaching statehood ala (Independent Oglala Nation, Neo-Zapatistas, Panther Oakland).
The median wage of white men dropping because white women are working now does not upset me, and I would not run to white men and tell them they should be angry their monopoly on strong wages is ending. This however doesn’t solve that USians in aggregate have a monopoly on high wages (as is the case of Imperialism). And if we look at that chart, let’s say it dropped from 50k to 40k, this is not total compensation and benefits have increased since the 70s as the government props up housing speculation as a rule, retirement funds are growing in the stock market, and healthcare benefits are high. The real total compensation position of white men has not drastically changed since the 70s.
This also ignores that over half of US labor is genuinely unproductive white-collar work. 16% of jobs are factory work, then there is shipping work, and food producing work. I would consider people going from overpaid factory workers to white-collar work a bourgeois-ifying transition (have you seen the noise of this so-called intelligentsia on online?). Graph ends in 2000 but apparently it is up to 62% in 2022.
Wages have not significantly dropped. Staying in the $23 dollar range since the 70s including the tens of millions of immigrants since then + women working more and more (and men working less) and wages are still the same? What does that mean overall?
Wages haven’t really gone up either, which means it doesn’t explain inflation.
Wages only ever lag inflation. Wages rise in response to inflation, as workers are confronted by rising prices demand higher wages. Even bourgeoisified workers do this, because they’ve grown accustomed to their comfortable bourgeois lifestyle and demand wages that can sustain it. Blaming the inflation on wages is an obfuscation being pushed by bourgeois economists to hide the inflation caused by price gouging and monopolization and speculative bubbles and the geopolitics of dedollarization.
Maintaining wealth while costs of much of personal consumption is actually dropping in real dollars (compare Nintendo consoles or appliances to the 90s). In the graph you show wages were the lowest in the 90s, where was this debourging then? The fact is that if white men were able to continue segregating women and POC, average wages still would have climbed.
From 2005 to 2021, nominal wages went from $20/hr to $30/hr - a 50% increase.
From 2006 to 2021, nominal rents went from $694/mo to $1,191/mo - a 72% increase.
Wage inflation has fallen behind rent inflation. While the costs of Nintendos have fallen, the costs of having a roof over your head has risen. This bourgeois economist obfuscation creates an accounting trick that hides inflation as it is experienced by the worker, because bourgeois economists can hide unaffordable rent by telling workers “let them eat Nintendos!”
Inflation in other categories (food, home prices, etc) mostly matches wage inflation, but we see that renters specifically are falling behind. This actually creates a useful cleave to separate beourgeoisified workers from American proletarians, those who own property are bourgeoisified by their property investments and those who rent it are debourgeoisified by tenant exploitation.
Bourgeoisification does not come from personal consumption, it’s an economic relationship that comes from property.
And if we look at that chart, let’s say it dropped from 50k to 40k, this is not total compensation and benefits have increased since the 70s as the government props up housing speculation as a rule, retirement funds are growing in the stock market, and healthcare benefits are high. The real total compensation position of white men has not drastically changed since the 70s.
Healthcare costs in the US are outrageous, including them will just skew your data set. You have a good point, though, that bourgeoisified workers in the US benefit from their retirement funds and property speculation, and that’s another useful cleave between who has revolutionary potential and who is prone to reaction. If someone has a 401K or owns land, they’re not to be relied upon for revolutionary action.
And would you look at that, in 2022 about 42% of American households had $10K or less in retirement accounts.
I think it’s useful to pay attention to debourgeoisification and I think this process is only going to accelerate as the geopolitical situation worsens for the empire. Yes, white US workers are paid very highly compared to the rest of the world and compared to non-white workers. Yes, “standard of living” is a cruel obfuscation of the fact that white US workers live better livesbecause they have been bourgeoisified. Yet even still, while being paid highly and having cheap Nintendos they’re also being charged highly for the essentials of life, rendering their higher wages just another source of profit for businesses and investors to reap.
This also ignores that over half of US labor is genuinely unproductive white-collar work. 16% of jobs are factory work, then there is shipping work, and food producing work. I would consider people going from overpaid factory workers to white-collar work a bourgeois-ifying transition. Graph ends in 2000 but apparently it is up to 62% in 2022.
I think it’s more useful to look at who owns property and who owns investments, rather than specific job type. I doubt you’d say a factory worker that becomes a call center worker is in a particularly bourgeoisifying position.
The bourgeoisified workforce would, in my estimation, be somewhere between that 42% that have enough in retirement savings to the 65% that owns their own home. Either a very large minority or a solid majority. It will be important to watch these trends going forward, because if we have another housing crash or stock crash those numbers could plummet again like they did after 2008.
That’s not necessarily good, bourgeoisified workers are prone to reaction when they’re hurting, but it’s something to keep an eye on.
I doubt you’d say a factory worker that becomes a call center worker is in a particularly bourgeoisifying position.
Much of our disagreement stems from the definition of petty Bourgeoisie (which is actually many different property relations).
Going from factory to call center is being distanced from the MOP. More and more Americans are being distanced from the MOP (moreso as it leaves the country). This means that these wages are coming from someone else’s proximity to the MOP as surplus value producers. This is a more intensely Bourgeois position (Bourgeois != Capitalist or productive property owners). Workers consuming surplus-value from other workers beyond their aggregate output (so we don’t count out unproductive work that directly aids productive work) are not exploited, and are Semi-proletarian in character. The Semi-Proletariat and Petty Bourgeoisie form the “middle classes”. While America has grown simultaneously to moving MOP outside of the borders, this means that the US population as a whole including the workforce is becoming “middle class” between the global south and the Imperialist Bourgeoisie (referred to by Putin as the “golden billion”). Moving away from laboring with the MOP but keeping the same wages is a move closer to the Bourgeoisie. Lenin and Mao both referred to teachers as petty Bourgeois even though there is no productive MOP involved, this is because they are paid with someone else’s labor to facilitate Bourgeois rule. Look at the Middle Class in Britain paper I posted in the thread.
The US absorbs more value than it produces, there is inflation if it does not consume it all at once (savings are a symptom of this). If anything is leftover, inflation. Which leads once again to the problem of Semi-proles valuing land speculation. Not all want to buy an inflating home, but the majority of them do, and this causes the rest to face that inflation through renting, or worse, buy into that system themselves to keep up. The problem is every union pension and retirement fund is speculating on that same system. Caught in the contradiction, the US workforce is reinforcing the settler land regime! Simple Economistic demands further reinforce that problem!
This is why housing/asset inflation is higher than CPI. Economism is always a dead end within an Imperialist economy.
This cycle has been in existence in this exact form since WW2, relative sizes and shares of the Imperial loot are changing but not qualitatively. Just because it crashes doesn’t mean it’s created qualitatively different class consciousness, because 99% of US workers don’t even acknowledge the existence of Labor Aristocracy.
Prices and Wages are products of class struggles. You are correct to point out that there are geo-political factors but then again, how many US workers are actively Russophobes, Sinophobes, and Zionists, the vast majority?
The bottom fifth of US workers have the most potential for committing class suicide, rather than organize them around keeping up with the top 4/5ths, we need to point out to them that those demands are a dead end and can only lead to a shuffling around of who is in the bottom. Ending the colonial system through force is our only option. This is good though, since that bottom fifth represents most food workers and shipping workers, this means they are in position to starve out the fascist bastion and defend the Nat Lib struggles who will be seizing territory from the US. I want you to know that we are much agreement about the potential of the bottom of US workers, what I want to get away from is copium that this segment is growing, it’s simply just not the case. Revolution will come from the minority of the minority. Don’t fear, the US is selling us its noose.
I have two problems with this definition of “bourgeois.”
The first and most obvious is that it renders children and disabled people who can’t do “productive” work as bourgeois. As if the fact that they can’t produce commodities makes them bourgeois, and thus prone to reaction. As if the young and the disabled haven’t been at the forefront of every single movement against capitalism and imperialism and oppression and bigotry. You have to reconcile the existence of people like Helen Keller, who produced no commodities and had no inputs on production, as somehow bourgeois and reactionary by her very inability to be productive under capitalism. Or did being an author make her productive in your world view? Is that all it takes? Look at this conversation - we’re all authors now!
The second and more insidious is how you seem to consider customer-facing work as unproductive. What? Their job is to act as facilitators for exchange of commodities and as teachers for the proper utilization of those commodities after purchase to prevent returns. That’s productive! Imagine a call center worker that helps connect someone with a technitian to fix a software issue, that’s literally an act in the chain of production. They are as much producers of surplus as every other facilitator of exchange and customer-facing worker, from truckers to longshoremen to cashiers. They produce value, even if they aren’t literally manufacturing widgets in the sparks and steam factory.
The bourgeoisie are the owners of capital. They’re the investors, the proprietors, and the shareholders.
In what world is someone in a call center sweatshop bourgeois?
This cycle has been in existence in this exact form since WW2, relative sizes and shares of the Imperial loot are changing but not qualitatively. Just because it crashes doesn’t mean it’s created qualitatively different class consciousness, because 99% of US workers don’t even acknowledge the existence of Labor Aristocracy.
The transformation of quantitative change into qualitative change has to occur eventually, there are inflection points and we need to be paying attention identify them.
Is it when the streets already run red with the blood of martyrs? Or can it happen at any point before that, when people are awakening to class consciousness and internationalism and settler-colonialism and imperialism? Never in my life have I seen so many Americans turn on Israel. Something is happening and I wish you weren’t too pessimistic to see it.
The first and most obvious is that it renders children and disabled people who can’t do “productive” work as bourgeois.
Those that can’t work are a strata of the lumpen-proletariat, what separates them is not having access to legal income and consumption (outside of social democracy crumbs). Disabled proletarians working unproductive roles still form an aggregate worker alongside their peers. Nothing in my statement disregards such individuals. Hellen Keller was a professional writer and lecturer, paid for her products, she was petty bourgeois.
The second and more insidious is how you seem to consider customer-facing work as unproductive.
Unproductive labor is all such labor that does not create surplus-value, but helps preserve or appropriate it. Marx:
Since the direct purpose and the actual product of capitalist production is surplus value, only such labour is productive, and only such an exerter of labour capacity is a productive worker, as directly produces surplus value. Hence only such labour is productive as is consumed directly in the production process for the purpose of valorising capital.
Call centers do not create surplus-value, they only help realize surplus-value, this is why they are unproductive. This is not a moral assessment, and it does not mean unproductive workers can’t be exploited. Productive and Unproductive workers form an abstract Aggregate or Combined Laborer which must produce surplus-value to be exploited. If unproductive labor pool is paid more than productive labor pool, then there must be super-profits being realized, such is the case of the Aggregate US Worker and the global proletariat. Such a relationship creates Semi-Proletarians and is the start of a Labor Aristocracy or bourgeois-proletariat.
The bourgeoisie are the owners of capital. They’re the investors, the proprietors, and the shareholders.
In what world is someone in a call center sweatshop bourgeois?
I didn’t call them bourgeois, I said they are moving closer to the bourgeoisie than they are the proletariat and lumpen-proletariat, it’s a function of direction. Those that manage bourgeois apparatuses in exchange for wages are also petty-bourgeois. They work directly towards maintaining Bourgeois Rule as a system. I didn’t make this definition up. Nobody would ever deny that there are strata of workers wealthier than members of the bourgeoisie, this is due to decaying and rising strata as Capitalism develops.
Never in my life have I seen so many Americans turn on Israel.
I’m sure as much was said about the Apartheid Regime. Wake me when they turn on themselves.
Those that can’t work are a strata of the lumpen-proletariat.
Correct.
So! What would you call someone who can’t work in a factory because those jobs don’t exist after de-industrialization, and so they’re forced to work in a call center sweatshop?
Call centers do not create surplus-value, they only help realize surplus-value, this is why they are unproductive.
If value is created and never realized by anyone, does it even exist? If a factory produces widgets and then dumps them directly in the ocean, is it producing value?
Value only exists after it has been realized, the realization of value is necessary in the chain of commodity production. Facilitating commodity exchange produces the value of moving commodities from the factory to the store to the customer, while teaching customers to utilize the commodities they consume literally makes them productive. There is certainly unproductive work being done in the US i.e. bullshit jobs, but to just relegate everyone who doesn’t work in the Sparks and Steam Factory as “unproductive” is mystification.
You are confusing the people who manage the exchange apparatus with the ones who they manage.
No one operating the phone in the sweat shop manages anything.
Wake me when they turn on themselves.
So you can only ever react to conditions as they change. There’s a word for that~
So! What would you call someone who can’t work in a factory because those jobs don’t exist after de-industrialization, and so they’re forced to work in a call center sweatshop?
Calling them sweatshops is certainly a stretch, averaging $17 compared to 60c in Haitian shops. De-industrialization is the reason why the US is becoming more bourg, its getting wealthier by simply buying more labor in the world.
Value only exists after it has been realized, the realization of value is necessary in the chain of commodity production.
Yes but is value created in exchange or socially necessary labor? These are definitions Marx used. The capitalists speculated on the productive labor, the unproductive labor helps the capitalist realize the profit, the products were already created. Shipping labor is productive in that it is necessary for products to be consumed. A corporation can’t expand their products by hiring advertisers and support lines, it only helps them indirectly recover past speculation. Productive labor is the expansion of capital.
There is certainly unproductive work being done in the US i.e. bullshit jobs, but to just relegate everyone who doesn’t work in the Sparks and Steam Factory as “unproductive” is mystification.
You’re applying an emotional or moral description to unproductive labor that does not exist in the literature. It’s a scientific term.
You are confusing the people who manage the exchange apparatus with the ones who they manage. No one operating the phone in the sweat shop manages anything.
In the sense that there are contractor firms, who speculate on call center labor through contracts rather than them being hired directly alongside productive labor, are producing value for their employer, but this is due to increased Bourgeois cooperation. However, we can abstract conglomerate firms and realize the same productive-unproductive relations remain hidden under layers of Bourgeois contracts. Again this does not matter besides the war strategy that if the US majority is not producing products or components of products, then the real productive capacity of the US is weaker than it looks. This is not a condemnation of the type of labor, it’s simply relaying how Capital treats such labor. Such work could definitely become socially necessary in a Socialist world system. Under Capitalism, it is labor that Capitalists do but now can pay it away, which distances them from the petty-bourgeoisie further.
So you can only ever react to conditions as they change. There’s a word for that~
An oppressed national who doesn’t expect their oppressors to change their ways because they never have historically unless driven by the force of we oppressed, right in their face? Every revolution needs to slice friend from foe and take control in existing conditions. For now settler workers are enemies. If we are able to advance to a stage overthrowing the land regime, where new contradictions are opened as old ones close, these workers can be won en masse.
When AIM and the Lakota radicals took over the hamlet town Wounded Knee in 1973, they declared the Independent Oglala Nation and held the town for 70 days. During this period they granted citizenship to anyone who wanted it, and most of the town stayed behind even after given the chance to flee, because they knew the army would create a bloodbath if all the settlers were out of the picture. This is the faith we have in settler workers, they will not initiate such acts but many will follow when placed in the middle of a revolutionary moment.
Calling them sweatshops is certainly a stretch, averaging $17 compared to 60c in Haitian shops. De-industrialization is the reason why the US is becoming more bourg, its getting wealthier by simply buying more labor in the world.
“Averaging”
And what about the lowest paid call center workers? They use literal prison labor in call centers, for pennies an hour. Are they petty bourgeoisie too?
Yes but is value created in exchange or socially necessary labor?
Yes! If the chain of commodity production ended with dumping all commodities directly into the ocean then no value would be created. Socially necessary labor and exchange are the final mechanisms that create value from commodities in the last intense, without them they’re just objects. The realization of value creates a social commodity of exchange and therefore it is productive. As you say, it is socially necessary labor and would still need to be done under Socialism. I can’t imagine why you don’t think it is productive.
Call center workers are workers, they’re not petty bourgeoisie. They don’t manage anything, they don’t own anything, they’re producing a social commodity in exchange for a wage.
You’re applying an emotional or moral description to unproductive labor that does not exist in the literature. It’s a scientific term.
I’m just telling you, emphatically, that social production exists. If I come across as emotional it was never my intention!
For now settler workers are enemies.
And as the empire enters decline, who gets to be a “settler” is winnowed away to preserve superprofits for a smaller and smaller cohort. That’s what the inflation is, that’s what the result of dedollarization will be, and instead of trying to analyze and predict where things are going you have consigned yourself purely to reacting to things after they happen.
And this explains the persistence of inflation?
We’ll come back to this!
The bulk? Real wages have been flat for quite some time, but you handwaved this away by everyone having dual incomes because women entered the labor force (and women now have to have two jobs in the nuclear family). Yet, that doesn’t actually resolve the problem! All you have done is doubled the flat wages, you haven’t actually shown anyone getting “wealthier”.
So. We aren’t seeing higher wages and savings are at near record lows. Where is inflation coming from?
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only 15.5% of households earn between $100,000 and $150,000 annually.
You are not describing the white workers I interact with in my factory, except maybe people in management.
Okay, and then inflation spiked in the last few years.
Yes, pandemic supply chain disruptions which I don’t dispute, but like you already acknowledged it’s also because of the sanctions regime now backfiring onto the imperial core. That’s not a small thing! In previous decades the US could impose sanctions on its foes without paying any price, but now those sanctions are hurting the value of USD because trade in dollars is becoming more expensive and because the sanctions regime is literally forcing the global economy to shift away! And the sanctions, which once weakened US enemies, are now unable to slow Russia’s economy down. This only accelerates the shift away from dollars.
The higher interest rates (I’ll grant, they could be higher!) are an attempt to claw back the money supply, but all it is doing is putting even more pressure on the global South as they are forced to pay those higher interest rates on their loans. As a result we’ve seen coups and massive protest movements in Africa, a pink tide in Latin America, and the high interest rate environment is itself pushing countries away from USD lending and creating fertile ground for lending from other banks in other currencies.
The low inflation was geopolitical when it was stable over the last three decades, and the higher inflation is geopolitical now.
Actually, the last time they were this high was right before the '08 financial crash. Makes you go hmm…
Yes, they used to be much higher before 2000, but I think you’re underestimating how bad even these modest rates are for USD.
I still contend that these interest rates are going to force countries to move away from taking loans in USD and is already putting incredible political pressure on countries with existing loans in USD (most recently, see what’s going on in Kenya). This, in turn, will push the global economy ever further away from exchange in dollars and towards economic alliances like BRICS.
Fair. It’s only the locals that are actually calling this genocide and calling Zionism a settler-colonial project and calling for BDS.
They’re great and should be recognized! The AFL-CIA remains embedded with the State Department, though.
Has a US service-member ever lit themselves on fire before?
I understand and sympathize with your pessimism.
I, for one, don’t need the streets to already be running red to have at least a little revolutionary optimism.
Wages have not significantly dropped. Staying in the $23 dollar range since the 70s including the tens of millions of immigrants since then + women working more and more (and men working less) and wages are still the same? What does that mean overall? As the white male workforce aged and retired, more white men were given high wage jobs that are nearly equivalent to 2 median incomes (like missile engineering) and women and POC took the old jobs (productive factory, shipping, teaching, nursing). Incomes for Americans overall stayed consistent. On a global level $20 dollars an hour is humongous! Cost of living is actually not the cause of these wages, as most Proletarian global South cities are just as expensive as American ones and some are more expensive than NYC. Mexico, Canada, and the US have a merged market due to NAFTA, but only dead labor can travel freely, living labor is blocked by the border. What does this create? A free trade zone where workers doing the same work make $3 one one side of a deadly border, and $20 on the other. Why should we expect that US workers should be getting $25 by the 90s, $35 by now? Maintaining wealth while costs of much of personal consumption is actually dropping in real dollars (compare Nintendo consoles or appliances to the 90s). In the graph you show wages were the lowest in the 90s, where was this debourging then? The fact is that if white men were able to continue segregating women and POC, average wages still would have climbed.
But there is also the factor that average wage is being held down by immigrants, POC, and women (particularly immigrant women POC). Median white male wages have stagnated since the 70s, but the stratification is predominantly above the median, as in the rich got richer while the poor stayed the same.
The problem with centering on wages like this is that US wages have maintained global dominance while even more are getting absurd incomes. Just because tech workers are so rich does not mean GM workers have suddenly become exploited.
Again CoL is fairly comparable globally, US wages are rich everywhere, and US minimum wage is wealthier than most petty boojies in the global south, which is why they are willing to pack up and move here.
The position of US workers is high, them getting knocked off their pedestal will look a lot more drastic than this, like for instance minimum wage getting outlawed or the border blowing wide open (good tbh), or perhaps anti-peonage laws getting ripped away. Then I’d be concerned with them, but likely more concerned of them if the movement is not already approaching statehood ala (Independent Oglala Nation, Neo-Zapatistas, Panther Oakland).
The median wage of white men dropping because white women are working now does not upset me, and I would not run to white men and tell them they should be angry their monopoly on strong wages is ending. This however doesn’t solve that USians in aggregate have a monopoly on high wages (as is the case of Imperialism). And if we look at that chart, let’s say it dropped from 50k to 40k, this is not total compensation and benefits have increased since the 70s as the government props up housing speculation as a rule, retirement funds are growing in the stock market, and healthcare benefits are high. The real total compensation position of white men has not drastically changed since the 70s.
This also ignores that over half of US labor is genuinely unproductive white-collar work. 16% of jobs are factory work, then there is shipping work, and food producing work. I would consider people going from overpaid factory workers to white-collar work a bourgeois-ifying transition (have you seen the noise of this so-called intelligentsia on online?). Graph ends in 2000 but apparently it is up to 62% in 2022.
Wages haven’t really gone up either, which means it doesn’t explain inflation.
Wages only ever lag inflation. Wages rise in response to inflation, as workers are confronted by rising prices demand higher wages. Even bourgeoisified workers do this, because they’ve grown accustomed to their comfortable bourgeois lifestyle and demand wages that can sustain it. Blaming the inflation on wages is an obfuscation being pushed by bourgeois economists to hide the inflation caused by price gouging and monopolization and speculative bubbles and the geopolitics of dedollarization.
From 2005 to 2021, nominal wages went from $20/hr to $30/hr - a 50% increase.
From 2006 to 2021, nominal rents went from $694/mo to $1,191/mo - a 72% increase.
Wage inflation has fallen behind rent inflation. While the costs of Nintendos have fallen, the costs of having a roof over your head has risen. This bourgeois economist obfuscation creates an accounting trick that hides inflation as it is experienced by the worker, because bourgeois economists can hide unaffordable rent by telling workers “let them eat Nintendos!”
Inflation in other categories (food, home prices, etc) mostly matches wage inflation, but we see that renters specifically are falling behind. This actually creates a useful cleave to separate beourgeoisified workers from American proletarians, those who own property are bourgeoisified by their property investments and those who rent it are debourgeoisified by tenant exploitation.
Bourgeoisification does not come from personal consumption, it’s an economic relationship that comes from property.
Healthcare costs in the US are outrageous, including them will just skew your data set. You have a good point, though, that bourgeoisified workers in the US benefit from their retirement funds and property speculation, and that’s another useful cleave between who has revolutionary potential and who is prone to reaction. If someone has a 401K or owns land, they’re not to be relied upon for revolutionary action.
And would you look at that, in 2022 about 42% of American households had $10K or less in retirement accounts.
I think it’s useful to pay attention to debourgeoisification and I think this process is only going to accelerate as the geopolitical situation worsens for the empire. Yes, white US workers are paid very highly compared to the rest of the world and compared to non-white workers. Yes, “standard of living” is a cruel obfuscation of the fact that white US workers live better lives because they have been bourgeoisified. Yet even still, while being paid highly and having cheap Nintendos they’re also being charged highly for the essentials of life, rendering their higher wages just another source of profit for businesses and investors to reap.
I think it’s more useful to look at who owns property and who owns investments, rather than specific job type. I doubt you’d say a factory worker that becomes a call center worker is in a particularly bourgeoisifying position.
The bourgeoisified workforce would, in my estimation, be somewhere between that 42% that have enough in retirement savings to the 65% that owns their own home. Either a very large minority or a solid majority. It will be important to watch these trends going forward, because if we have another housing crash or stock crash those numbers could plummet again like they did after 2008.
That’s not necessarily good, bourgeoisified workers are prone to reaction when they’re hurting, but it’s something to keep an eye on.
Much of our disagreement stems from the definition of petty Bourgeoisie (which is actually many different property relations).
Going from factory to call center is being distanced from the MOP. More and more Americans are being distanced from the MOP (moreso as it leaves the country). This means that these wages are coming from someone else’s proximity to the MOP as surplus value producers. This is a more intensely Bourgeois position (Bourgeois != Capitalist or productive property owners). Workers consuming surplus-value from other workers beyond their aggregate output (so we don’t count out unproductive work that directly aids productive work) are not exploited, and are Semi-proletarian in character. The Semi-Proletariat and Petty Bourgeoisie form the “middle classes”. While America has grown simultaneously to moving MOP outside of the borders, this means that the US population as a whole including the workforce is becoming “middle class” between the global south and the Imperialist Bourgeoisie (referred to by Putin as the “golden billion”). Moving away from laboring with the MOP but keeping the same wages is a move closer to the Bourgeoisie. Lenin and Mao both referred to teachers as petty Bourgeois even though there is no productive MOP involved, this is because they are paid with someone else’s labor to facilitate Bourgeois rule. Look at the Middle Class in Britain paper I posted in the thread.
The US absorbs more value than it produces, there is inflation if it does not consume it all at once (savings are a symptom of this). If anything is leftover, inflation. Which leads once again to the problem of Semi-proles valuing land speculation. Not all want to buy an inflating home, but the majority of them do, and this causes the rest to face that inflation through renting, or worse, buy into that system themselves to keep up. The problem is every union pension and retirement fund is speculating on that same system. Caught in the contradiction, the US workforce is reinforcing the settler land regime! Simple Economistic demands further reinforce that problem!
This is why housing/asset inflation is higher than CPI. Economism is always a dead end within an Imperialist economy.
This cycle has been in existence in this exact form since WW2, relative sizes and shares of the Imperial loot are changing but not qualitatively. Just because it crashes doesn’t mean it’s created qualitatively different class consciousness, because 99% of US workers don’t even acknowledge the existence of Labor Aristocracy.
Prices and Wages are products of class struggles. You are correct to point out that there are geo-political factors but then again, how many US workers are actively Russophobes, Sinophobes, and Zionists, the vast majority?
The bottom fifth of US workers have the most potential for committing class suicide, rather than organize them around keeping up with the top 4/5ths, we need to point out to them that those demands are a dead end and can only lead to a shuffling around of who is in the bottom. Ending the colonial system through force is our only option. This is good though, since that bottom fifth represents most food workers and shipping workers, this means they are in position to starve out the fascist bastion and defend the Nat Lib struggles who will be seizing territory from the US. I want you to know that we are much agreement about the potential of the bottom of US workers, what I want to get away from is copium that this segment is growing, it’s simply just not the case. Revolution will come from the minority of the minority. Don’t fear, the US is selling us its noose.
I have two problems with this definition of “bourgeois.”
The first and most obvious is that it renders children and disabled people who can’t do “productive” work as bourgeois. As if the fact that they can’t produce commodities makes them bourgeois, and thus prone to reaction. As if the young and the disabled haven’t been at the forefront of every single movement against capitalism and imperialism and oppression and bigotry. You have to reconcile the existence of people like Helen Keller, who produced no commodities and had no inputs on production, as somehow bourgeois and reactionary by her very inability to be productive under capitalism. Or did being an author make her productive in your world view? Is that all it takes? Look at this conversation - we’re all authors now!
The second and more insidious is how you seem to consider customer-facing work as unproductive. What? Their job is to act as facilitators for exchange of commodities and as teachers for the proper utilization of those commodities after purchase to prevent returns. That’s productive! Imagine a call center worker that helps connect someone with a technitian to fix a software issue, that’s literally an act in the chain of production. They are as much producers of surplus as every other facilitator of exchange and customer-facing worker, from truckers to longshoremen to cashiers. They produce value, even if they aren’t literally manufacturing widgets in the sparks and steam factory.
The bourgeoisie are the owners of capital. They’re the investors, the proprietors, and the shareholders.
In what world is someone in a call center sweatshop bourgeois?
The transformation of quantitative change into qualitative change has to occur eventually, there are inflection points and we need to be paying attention identify them.
Is it when the streets already run red with the blood of martyrs? Or can it happen at any point before that, when people are awakening to class consciousness and internationalism and settler-colonialism and imperialism? Never in my life have I seen so many Americans turn on Israel. Something is happening and I wish you weren’t too pessimistic to see it.
Those that can’t work are a strata of the lumpen-proletariat, what separates them is not having access to legal income and consumption (outside of social democracy crumbs). Disabled proletarians working unproductive roles still form an aggregate worker alongside their peers. Nothing in my statement disregards such individuals. Hellen Keller was a professional writer and lecturer, paid for her products, she was petty bourgeois.
Unproductive labor is all such labor that does not create surplus-value, but helps preserve or appropriate it. Marx:
Call centers do not create surplus-value, they only help realize surplus-value, this is why they are unproductive. This is not a moral assessment, and it does not mean unproductive workers can’t be exploited. Productive and Unproductive workers form an abstract Aggregate or Combined Laborer which must produce surplus-value to be exploited. If unproductive labor pool is paid more than productive labor pool, then there must be super-profits being realized, such is the case of the Aggregate US Worker and the global proletariat. Such a relationship creates Semi-Proletarians and is the start of a Labor Aristocracy or bourgeois-proletariat.
I didn’t call them bourgeois, I said they are moving closer to the bourgeoisie than they are the proletariat and lumpen-proletariat, it’s a function of direction. Those that manage bourgeois apparatuses in exchange for wages are also petty-bourgeois. They work directly towards maintaining Bourgeois Rule as a system. I didn’t make this definition up. Nobody would ever deny that there are strata of workers wealthier than members of the bourgeoisie, this is due to decaying and rising strata as Capitalism develops.
I’m sure as much was said about the Apartheid Regime. Wake me when they turn on themselves.
Correct.
So! What would you call someone who can’t work in a factory because those jobs don’t exist after de-industrialization, and so they’re forced to work in a call center sweatshop?
If value is created and never realized by anyone, does it even exist? If a factory produces widgets and then dumps them directly in the ocean, is it producing value?
Value only exists after it has been realized, the realization of value is necessary in the chain of commodity production. Facilitating commodity exchange produces the value of moving commodities from the factory to the store to the customer, while teaching customers to utilize the commodities they consume literally makes them productive. There is certainly unproductive work being done in the US i.e. bullshit jobs, but to just relegate everyone who doesn’t work in the Sparks and Steam Factory as “unproductive” is mystification.
You are confusing the people who manage the exchange apparatus with the ones who they manage.
No one operating the phone in the sweat shop manages anything.
So you can only ever react to conditions as they change. There’s a word for that~
Calling them sweatshops is certainly a stretch, averaging $17 compared to 60c in Haitian shops. De-industrialization is the reason why the US is becoming more bourg, its getting wealthier by simply buying more labor in the world.
Yes but is value created in exchange or socially necessary labor? These are definitions Marx used. The capitalists speculated on the productive labor, the unproductive labor helps the capitalist realize the profit, the products were already created. Shipping labor is productive in that it is necessary for products to be consumed. A corporation can’t expand their products by hiring advertisers and support lines, it only helps them indirectly recover past speculation. Productive labor is the expansion of capital.
You’re applying an emotional or moral description to unproductive labor that does not exist in the literature. It’s a scientific term.
In the sense that there are contractor firms, who speculate on call center labor through contracts rather than them being hired directly alongside productive labor, are producing value for their employer, but this is due to increased Bourgeois cooperation. However, we can abstract conglomerate firms and realize the same productive-unproductive relations remain hidden under layers of Bourgeois contracts. Again this does not matter besides the war strategy that if the US majority is not producing products or components of products, then the real productive capacity of the US is weaker than it looks. This is not a condemnation of the type of labor, it’s simply relaying how Capital treats such labor. Such work could definitely become socially necessary in a Socialist world system. Under Capitalism, it is labor that Capitalists do but now can pay it away, which distances them from the petty-bourgeoisie further.
An oppressed national who doesn’t expect their oppressors to change their ways because they never have historically unless driven by the force of we oppressed, right in their face? Every revolution needs to slice friend from foe and take control in existing conditions. For now settler workers are enemies. If we are able to advance to a stage overthrowing the land regime, where new contradictions are opened as old ones close, these workers can be won en masse.
When AIM and the Lakota radicals took over the hamlet town Wounded Knee in 1973, they declared the Independent Oglala Nation and held the town for 70 days. During this period they granted citizenship to anyone who wanted it, and most of the town stayed behind even after given the chance to flee, because they knew the army would create a bloodbath if all the settlers were out of the picture. This is the faith we have in settler workers, they will not initiate such acts but many will follow when placed in the middle of a revolutionary moment.
“Averaging”
And what about the lowest paid call center workers? They use literal prison labor in call centers, for pennies an hour. Are they petty bourgeoisie too?
Yes! If the chain of commodity production ended with dumping all commodities directly into the ocean then no value would be created. Socially necessary labor and exchange are the final mechanisms that create value from commodities in the last intense, without them they’re just objects. The realization of value creates a social commodity of exchange and therefore it is productive. As you say, it is socially necessary labor and would still need to be done under Socialism. I can’t imagine why you don’t think it is productive.
Call center workers are workers, they’re not petty bourgeoisie. They don’t manage anything, they don’t own anything, they’re producing a social commodity in exchange for a wage.
I’m just telling you, emphatically, that social production exists. If I come across as emotional it was never my intention!
And as the empire enters decline, who gets to be a “settler” is winnowed away to preserve superprofits for a smaller and smaller cohort. That’s what the inflation is, that’s what the result of dedollarization will be, and instead of trying to analyze and predict where things are going you have consigned yourself purely to reacting to things after they happen.
And there’s a word for that.