Sorry about the long post (shortest leftist wall of text be like)
When it comes to the “labour aristocracy” in the first world, I feel like many leftists wildly exaggerate both its size and wealth. This is often done to the point of erasing class conflict in the first world, as this article does. I might be totally wrong here, but i feel like these authors are making anti-marxist errors. The following points are emblematic of what I am talking about (emphasis mine):
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.
This is just completely wrong when one considers just how many poor people live in the first world who obviously don’t receive super-wages. US poverty rates alone are always above 10%, and that poverty line is widely known to be inadequate. The US also is significantly more wealthy than Europe, where the calculus is even worse. And that doesn’t even account for the wild wealth disparities that exist in the first world.
When … the relative importance of the national exploitation from which a working class suffers through belonging to the proletariat diminishes continually as compared with that from which it benefits through belonging to a privileged nation, a moment comes when the aim of increasing the national income in absolute terms prevails over that of improving the relative share of one part of the nation over the other
What it is saying is that when the working class share of national income becomes high enough, they start to want to exploit other nations as that becomes beneficial. However, the expansion of imperialism in the neoliberal era is also the reason for the stagnation of living standards in the imperial core. By accessing a larger pool of labor in the south, the position of northern workers is threatened. That’s why Northern workers have fought against outsourcing, the very fundamental imperialist measure.
Thereafter a de facto united front of the workers and capitalists of the well-to-do countries, directed against the poor nations, co-exists with an internal trade-union struggle over the sharing of the loot. Under these conditions this trade-union struggle necessarily becomes more and more a sort of settlement of accounts between partners, and it is no accident that in the richest countries, such as the United States—with similar tendencies already apparent in the other big capitalist countries—militant trade-union struggle is degenerating first into trade unionism of the classic British type, then into corporatism, and finally into racketeering
I am not too familiar with the history of the trade union, but wasn’t the degeneration of the unions largely a result of state and corporate action against the unions? They engage in union busting, forced out radical leaders, performed assasinations, etc. This seems like an erasure of the class struggle to the point that the unions are depicted as voluntarily degenerating.
I feel like these kinds of narratives, which are popular amongst liberals as well (liberals will often admit that weak nations are exploited. Example - America invades for oil meme) tend to justify imperialism to westerners. I have on more than one occasion seen westerns outright say that they don’t want to fight against imperialism because they benefit from it. I think that’s how a lot of westerners justify supporting imperialism. This kind of narrative ironically cements the power of imperialism
No? America produces almost a fifth of the world’s cereal. I don’t understand this attempt at downplaying American industrial capacity. It’s atrophied to begin with, I don’t see why we need to pretend as if it just doesn’t even exist.
What are you even talking about. The strategic reserves are 700 million barells and the yearly production is overly 4.4 billion
No I’m not, I’ve deliberately used use values and haven’t made a single mention to market value or gdp.
That’s just saying the same thing in another way. The loss of union bargaining power is just one cost the American workers have to pay for imperialism.
Does not say anything about how much America produces domestically, how much American labour is spent exchanging for imports, how this consumption is distributed, how much of it is by the American military (a bigger polluter and consumer than literally pver a 100 countries).
Also, when you list freshwater use, are you saying that American steal water from the third world?
Who gets the blame is absolutely important when it comes to class analysis. Assigning the emissions of the military to the homeless is one way the study comes to its poor-shaming conclusions. If you are not using that study, then can you tell me which one you are using?
Commodities aren’t sold at their floor price, so that’s irrelevant.
Shipping and storage aren’t paid from profits.
Yes. From Day 1, the USA was organized as an export economy because it was a colony. It was fundamentally envisioned as an export economy.
I’m not. I’m saying it’s not relevant to your question. The means to produce what Americans consume en masse IS NOT PRESENT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_trade_of_the_United_States#Imports_and_exports
https://www.bea.gov/data/intl-trade-investment/international-trade-goods-and-services
The trade deficit is real. How much of this is the American military? The USA is the largest weapons exporter in the world, so I would say that if you remove the military it becomes abundantly clear that the trade deficit looks rosier with the military included than excluded.
You haven’t mentioned many use values at all. So far I think you mentioned cereal grains and oil.
Yes, but the USA only became a net exporter in 2020 and production peaked in 2019. Statistically, this is a small time frame, considering it was a growing net importer of oil for over 50 years. Maybe the USA could maintain its oil production with working class solidarity, but it could certainly ONLY do so by continuing to oppress the indigenous, and loss of the dollar as the world reserve currency and the petrodollar would certainly make it incredibly difficult to refine and make us of all that crude extraction.
So what other use values does America produce in enough quantity to not be harmed by an ascendant global south?
They certainly colonize water from the third world. Fiji water and Nestle come to mind.
American workers don’t need bargaining power unless the bourgeoisie are in power. You’re confusing cause and effect. If the bourgeoisie were not in power, the American proletariat would STILL be incentivized to suppress wages in the global south in order to maintain their rate of their consumption which is supported through unequal and extractive trade. Exploitation is GLOBAL.
This is so anti-Marxist its ridiculous. Blame is a concept in ethics, not in political economy.
It’s only poor-shaming to liberals. It’s an accurate account of what it means to have national defense in America.
You’re not doing the math. The PROFIT is what the owners take away. The MARGIN is the delta between price points. The PROFIT is taken from MARGINS. As wages increase, MARGIN absolutely decreases. That margin is the margin between the market price of the good and the wages paid to produce it. That margin is not all profit. Much of that margin is spent on transport, storage, marketing, distribution, and waste. What’s left over is where profit is extracted from. As wages of coffee plantations increase, the margin shrinks. As wages of shipping companies and storage companies increase, the margin shrinks. As environmental controls protect more people, the cost of waste increases and the margin decreases. Eventually, that margin gets thin enough that it becomes uneconomical to establish cash crop monocultures with massive shipping dependencies, which is what the USA has been doing in Africa for generations. When these things come to pass there will be massive adjustments in the quality of life across the world. People in the global south will finally have the freedom to produce what they need domestically, while people in the global north will have to sacrifice so much of their international consumption while they struggle to rebuild their productive base after it was hollowed out.
NONE of these problems exist in the global south. And this is why the analysis is that the labor aristocracy lacks the revolutionary potential of the periphery. It’s likely also why the analysis has so far been accurate with regard to history. Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, China, and Soviet Russia were predominantly peasant revolts, without even the possibility of a proletariat due to under development. Show me an industrialized country that had a successful communist revolution after industrialization. It doesn’t exist.
The more I look into this, the more I find that I am lacking in sufficient knowledge to to address your claims. I will concede this thread and on the points you make. Going further would just be pointless. Thanks for taking the time to discuss this. I’ll have to do more in depth research which will take time