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.
Yes! If the chain of commodity production ended with dumping all commodities directly into the ocean then no value would be created.
Then it’s not socially necessary. The manner in which exchange occurs does not matter. Value is produced from the labor not the sales. The value being realized at exchange is not being argued with, but that doesn’t mean it was created by exchange. These are two different phenomena.
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.
By building a Nat Lib struggle for oppressed nations? Lmao? Just because I don’t seek to organize class enemies doesn’t mean I’m sitting around waiting for nothing. And no, just because a settler became a lumpen does not mean their nation has stopped occupying another nation, still a settler. Their national ties form their reactionary tendencies.
As you say, it is socially necessary labor and would still need to be done under Socialism.
Socialism would turn it into necessary labor (socialist planning, as opposed to Capitalist anarchy, this is the fundamental transition away from the prod-unprod relationship in Capitalism). It is not socially necessary labor under capitalism. It’s not making the economy bigger, it’s redirecting the economy. That being said I doubt the world would like to continue trading US call support for their food stuffs as in the world’s current arrangement.
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?
Well the vast majority of them are not prisoners (but also prisoners are hired at minimum wage and the state steals the wages, so it’s not directly comparable to 3W labor). I source MIM(prisons), a prison movement, who says they are generally not near the means of production in prison. Prisoners’ interests are already being agitated for the national character of prison oppression. Prisoners receive 3W wages, so yes they are genuinely exploitated workers and agitating them for JDPON rule is much much easier than other wage workers in the US. I’m sure that MIM(p) considers themselves primarily lumpen-proletarians turned revolutionaries. Once again I have not claimed that call center workers or non-managerial unproductive work is petty Bourgeois, merely that it is semi-proletarian, which Lenin never really differentiates besides when he’s picking apart the various parts of the “middle classes”. Semi-proletarian only in the case that they are receiving super-profits in their wages (which all except prisoners, children, and migrant workers are), but they are not alone! Productive US minimum wage jobs in a global context are also super-profit spiked wages. If the aggregate worker has no internal or external super-exploitation, i.e. management and sales paid equal as individuals to production line workers, there would be no Semi-proletarians or labor aristocracy, and all would be Proletarian.
Semi-proletarians bring Revisionism into the movement in their focus on Economism. In the case of an Imperial Semi-proletariat, a Labor Aristocracy, these economic demands are born reactionary and reformist. (wage struggles for the super-exploited would be progressive in that they put pressure back on the labor aristocracy).
I need you to know that I’m calling all legal-wage productive and unproductive US labor a Semi-proletarian Labor Aristocracy. I’m not targeting call center workers particularly as opposed to any other US labor, but it’s a fact that a nearly entirely (non-direct producing) Semi-proletarian working class is not producing nearly as much as it consumes and this is a problem for such an economy if the ports were subject to blockade. Amazon workers can’t ship anything because barely any of it is made here. Call centers have no products to solicit and assist. This is not the same situation if China was blockaded. A sales team isn’t going to be able to transition to growing food or mining ore very quickly.
Then it’s not socially necessary. The manner in which exchange occurs does not matter. Value is produced from the labor not the sales. The value being realized at exchange is not being argued with, but that doesn’t mean it was created by exchange. These are two different phenomena.
In the capitalist economy the mere existence of exchange does matter, if value is never realized through exchange then it does not exist.
We know that value comes from labor. We know that commodities are valueless if they are not exchanged.
Therefore, the socially necessary labor in the last moment of exchange is also part of the value of the commodity. Value is created at every stage of production, and the social production of exchange and customer service and quality assurance are also productive acts. Value is produced from labor, including emotional and social labor in call centers.
A sales team isn’t going to be able to transition to growing food or mining ore very quickly.
Nope, but they can smuggle guns to guerillas because no one is going to check the nice white lady’s trunk if she gets pulled over.
By building a Nat Lib struggle for oppressed nations?
By failing to recognize the role that settlers always play in anti-colonial struggle, instead leaving them to organize themselves spontaneously and reacting to it as it happens.
Fanon talks about how, in Algeria, French settlers played a vital role by posing as French nationals who could pass by checkpoints undetected while delivering weapons to Algerian nationals or would hide guerillas in their homes when they were being hunted by the military. Do you think this just happens spontaneously?
By joining the anti-colonial struggle they became Algerian, but bringing them into the struggle starts with agitation and propaganda. In Algeria that was done through radio and leaflets in the French language to directly reach out to French nationals, who were convinced to turn on the mother country and join the struggle for national liberation.
I will say that not everyone needs to take on the job of reaching out to settlers! That’s for white passing folks who, themselves, can pass through checkpoints without getting searched and can hide guerillas in their homes when soldiers are searching for them. I don’t expect you to have faith in them or anything, but have some revolutionary optimism!
I need you to know that I’m calling all legal-wage productive and unproductive US labor a Semi-proletarian Labor Aristocracy.
Well, yeah, and I agree with you? White workers in the first world are bourgeoisified by superprofits.
My contention was you calling socially necessary labor unproductive, when it clearly produces a social commodity. What you’re proposing reads like a vulgar workerism, almost like Nixonian “hard hat” fetishism, which seeks to devalue socially necessary labor as not being real work and to alienate them from the workers’ struggle.
Furthermore, my hypothesis is that debourgeoisification is occurring due to imperial decline, and that’s the source of inflation and the so-called housing “shortage” and the militarization of police and the chipping away of compromises reached by the labor movement when they chose to become collaborators in exchange for concessions etc etc
Again, I’m not asking for faith. Just look at the changing material conditions and consider that maybe something has changed.
By failing to recognize the role that settlers always play in anti-colonial struggle, instead leaving them to organize themselves spontaneously and reacting to it as it happens.
For sure but you seem to think we avoid working with settlers as a rule. It’s worth agitating people genuinely interested in understanding reality and changing it, and people pushed to their limits where revolutionary change is the only thing they are satisfied with. What I’m saying is it’s historically clear the base of settlers interested in our struggles has not seen significant motion through time (because they were just as reactionary during the height of exploitation against settler workers). That being said most settlers in Algeria fled, the ones that fought for Algeria earned their place. I expect in our conditions not many fleeing, but also not playing nice.
My contention was you calling socially necessary labor unproductive, when it clearly produces a social commodity. What your proposing reads like a vulgar workerism, almost like Nixonian “hard hat” fetishism, which seeks to devalue socially necessary labor as not being real work and to alienate them from the workers’ struggle.
Yeah this is no such case. I’m only using it insofar as it has been used in the literature. I’m not saying these workers are privileged above productive workers in the US, usually they are not since unions generally are paid significantly higher wages. If there’s actually a group I think tends more reactionary, it’s the production line workers in the AFL-CIO who practice Imperial workerism that obfuscates their relationship to their colleagues in Mexico and China. None of this is to dismiss or alienate US workers for their jobs, the system of their job economy is the problem. They must have some workerist thoughts if they think they are shunned from being Communists for their jobs.
Furthermore, my hypothesis is that debourgeoisification is occurring due to imperial decline, and that’s the source of inflation and the so-called housing “shortage” and the militarization of police and the chipping away of compromises reached by the labor movement when they chose to become collaborators in exchange for concessions etc etc
So-called shortage yes but remember that the overbuilt and expensive houses are already owned, and if Blackstone bought it, it means someone just profited of their speculation. It means somebody actually “owns” that value, and housing prices have always increased faster than inflation because Imperialists around the world (and 401ks, unions, and CPUSA) buy mortgage packages to park their money in investments outpacing inflation.
Police militarization has always been increasing since the 60s. I’ve posted the pic elsewhere in the thread but police and carceral spending increases every year outpacing inflation. This is a pre-existing trend. It looks to be more prevalent due to the firepower readily available to would be fighters in the streets as seen in Dallas during the first round of BLM protests. Though the trend has already been there for the likes of LAPD and NYPD.
For sure but you seem to think we avoid working with settlers as a rule.
No, but you’ve as much said that you avoid agitating among settlers and are content to ignore them until they spontaneously join the anti-colonial struggle. You literally said " Wake me when they turn on themselves." How else am I to interpret that but you choosing only to react to spontaneous solidarity among settlers?
I think we should be looking for these points of contradiction that push settlers into action against imperialism and colonialism, yes even when those actions are protest and demands and peaceful demonstration. A settler is ripe for agitation even before they decide to douse themselves in fuel and light themselves on fire in front of an embassy. Things drive them to take on an internationalist character or an anti-settler-nationalist character; we must try to learn from why this and not that drove them to act. Scientifically approach the settler question.
Historically it is clear that settlers will betray the mother land under the right conditions. That’s useful.
Yeah this is no such case. I’m only using it insofar as it has been used in the literature. I’m not saying these workers are privileged above productive workers in the US, usually they are not since unions generally are paid significantly higher wages.
No, but you’re saying they’re unproductive, even though they use their labor to produce a service.
And the literature uses production to refer to services in addition to goods and widgets.
Like???
So-called shortage yes but remember that the overbuilt and expensive houses are already owned, and if Blackstone bought it, it means someone just profited of their speculation.
Right, but they’re not owned by the growing mass of first world workers who do not and will never own a home, and that is significant. Who gets to be a settler is not set in stone, it’s determined by how many bourgeoisified workers can be supported by the existing base of superprofit collected from imperialism.
Once the rate of superprofit declines, some settlers suddenly find themselves losing their privileged status.
Police militarization has always been increasing since the 60s.
The kind of military hardware they have access to these days the cops in the 1960s could scarcely dream of, not just because tech advances, but because the relationship between military and police was made closer and closer throughout the 80s and 90s and 00s up to today.
The so-called War on Terror was a reaction to the decline of the empire and in response the police had to become more violent and more invasive and more lethal and more secretive etc etc in order to control the proles. The police became occupation soldiers to fight “terrorism” and this has been boiling over into more and more massive uprisings against them.
Maybe you won’t wake up until the streets run red, but I think it’s worth trying to anticipate what comes next.
No, but you’ve as much said that you avoid agitating among settlers and are content to ignore them until they spontaneously join the anti-colonial struggle. You literally said " Wake me when they turn on themselves." How else am I to interpret that but you choosing only to react to spontaneous solidarity among settlers?
None of them are acknowledging the need to give up their settler society, you’re telling me to value the statements on Israel that don’t mention settler-Colonialism. Settlers are national oppressors as a class. In a context with no Colonialism, we still wouldn’t ally with the petty bourgs as a class and center their demands, we have to slice them up and pick friends from foe. We shouldn’t care about the demands of an oppressor nation unless they are in line with ours: prisoners, the homeless, and people oppressed for their bodies are people we intend to work for. If you want science on the settler question hit the books sibling, become an expert on colonial history in your immediate realm. Chunka Luta library exists for free.
No, but you’re saying they’re unproductive, even though they use their labor to produce a service.
Why does it bother you so much? Does it change that these goods and services are being paid from value stolen overseas? Quit projecting workerism onto my line.
The so-called War on Terror was a reaction to the decline of the empire and in response the police had to become more violent and more invasive and more lethal and more secretive etc etc in order to control the proles. The police became occupation soldiers to fight “terrorism” and this has been boiling over into more and more massive uprisings against them.
Maybe you won’t wake up until the streets run red, but I think it’s worth trying to anticipate what comes next.
The streets are already covered in my peoples’ blood, quit playing with me. Read Blood in the Land, Fire this Time. You gotta be kidding me if you think my sense of urgency is lagging when y’all don’t notice shit until you think it might be affecting you and your kin. Thinking the police presence is for you is absurd, the conditions for our oppression has already been here. The cops are killing us now, and most of us aren’t Communists, square that.
Btw lets zoom in on that wage chart, looking at median wage (where half of wage workers do better), It has been increasing in the recent decades with an unusual spike in 2020 due to pandemic stimmies. Why hadn’t there been revolts of white workers and youth in the 90s like Black and Latino youth? Economically the situation was worse then. Again we are looking for declines in conditions, not stagnation, for some reason “class consciousness” spiked in spite of increased earnings during the pandemic, you posit inflation economistically, I blame eugenics and national oppression. Your chart enthusiastically removes supervisors, who are a fifth of the workforce (remember 20% of white men don’t even participate in labor anymore). There’s really no way to see a real decline in US workers if the median and average wages are at a 4 decade high (excluding 2020). It doesn’t line up with your hypothesis. Inflation did not peak with wages in 2020, it peaked in 2022, after a spike in real earnings for USians.
More police and settler-vigilante killings year over year since the 70s, police budgets expanding every year. For some reason these things occurred during “bourgeoisification”, you never quite explained why that occurred.
None of them are acknowledging the need to give up their settler society, you’re telling me to value the statements on Israel that don’t mention settler-Colonialism.
No, I’m telling you to look for trends that may show segments of settler society are ripe for agitation, not to see them as “good” or something.
Why does it bother you so much? Does it change that these goods and services are being paid from value stolen overseas? Quit projecting workerism onto my line.
You literally said “I would consider people going from overpaid factory workers to white-collar work a bourgeois-ifying transition” because it is supposedly unproductive labor and because the rise of white collar work comes from imperialist superprofits, which mystifies social production. White collar work rises over time in every country country as development occurs and the societal needs for social labor increase. That’s just a factor of development, it’s not a sign of bourgeoisification.
The lacking white collar work in the Global South comes from underdevelopment which is caused by imperialism, but development itself is not inherently bourgeoisifying. Blue collar workers in the US are bourgeoisified by superprofits too, the actual job that they perform is not the source of bourgeoisification.
White collar work isn’t inherently removed from the MoP either, many simply produce a different commodity than the widgets in the Sparks and Steam Factory. Work becomes unproductive when their “”“job”“” is just to tell other people to do work for them i.e. managers, supervisors, executives, directors, etc. They don’t actually produce anything, not even a social service, they’re merely beknighted middlemen whose primary job is labor discipline and prole control and spying on workers to watch out for unionization.
You gotta be kidding me if you think my sense of urgency is lagging when y’all don’t notice shit until you think it might be affecting you and your kin. Thinking the police presence is for you is absurd, the conditions for our oppression has already been here. The cops are killing us now, and most of us aren’t Communists, square that.
The colonial police are being transformed into colonial soldiers by the heightened contradictions, but yeah, they were always meant to keep the peace for settlers.
But in Algeria the colonial police did, eventually, start torturing and killing white Algerians. Who gets to be a settler changes as conditions worsen for the empire.
For example, I get to be a settler as long as I stay white passing and am not visibly trans. That goes away if I don’t do my makeup or get literally any Sun etc etc but soon enough that shit isn’t going to protect me because the knives are out for white passing trans folk, and I blame imperial decline. Who gets to be a settler will be winnowed away.
Your chart enthusiastically removes supervisors, who are a fifth of the workforce (remember 20% of white men don’t even participate in labor anymore)
Supervisors and managers and other beknighted sectors of the workforce are certainly our class enemies, they’re almost always white for a reason! You’ll see no disagreement from me on this. They will not join the struggle against settler-colonialism and capitalism when their conditions worsen, they’ll pick up guns and enthusiastically kill us.
Did you think I was arguing in favor of them?
More police and settler-vigilante killings year over year since the 70s, police budgets expanding every year. For some reason these things occurred during “bourgeoisification”, you never quite explained why that occurred.
Bourgeoisification comes from superexploitation, which necessarily means some people need to be colonized and superexploited. This happens abroad, obviously, but the US is settler-colonial and so the colonization also happens within its borders. More colonial police were necessary to enforce the social hierarchy and ensure the settler’s protected status and to extract superprofit from internally colonized people. Settler-vigilante killings are an outrgrowth of the growing contradictions between settlers and colonized peoples, as settlers become deputized to enforce racial hierarchy.
Inflation did not peak with wages in 2020, it peaked in 2022, after a spike in real earnings for USians.
Inflation is a rate of change, which means even if it has peaked prices continued to rise.
More useful would be comparing the price index to wages, and here we see that consumer prices have continued to increase even after wages fell.
Read Blood in the Land, Fire this Time
Thanks. I’m currently working through How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, but new book recommendations are always welcome!
While we’re talking book recommendations, read Black Skin: White Masks, The Wretched of the Earth, and A Dying Colonialism.
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.
Then it’s not socially necessary. The manner in which exchange occurs does not matter. Value is produced from the labor not the sales. The value being realized at exchange is not being argued with, but that doesn’t mean it was created by exchange. These are two different phenomena.
By building a Nat Lib struggle for oppressed nations? Lmao? Just because I don’t seek to organize class enemies doesn’t mean I’m sitting around waiting for nothing. And no, just because a settler became a lumpen does not mean their nation has stopped occupying another nation, still a settler. Their national ties form their reactionary tendencies.
Socialism would turn it into necessary labor (socialist planning, as opposed to Capitalist anarchy, this is the fundamental transition away from the prod-unprod relationship in Capitalism). It is not socially necessary labor under capitalism. It’s not making the economy bigger, it’s redirecting the economy. That being said I doubt the world would like to continue trading US call support for their food stuffs as in the world’s current arrangement.
Well the vast majority of them are not prisoners (but also prisoners are hired at minimum wage and the state steals the wages, so it’s not directly comparable to 3W labor). I source MIM(prisons), a prison movement, who says they are generally not near the means of production in prison. Prisoners’ interests are already being agitated for the national character of prison oppression. Prisoners receive 3W wages, so yes they are genuinely exploitated workers and agitating them for JDPON rule is much much easier than other wage workers in the US. I’m sure that MIM(p) considers themselves primarily lumpen-proletarians turned revolutionaries. Once again I have not claimed that call center workers or non-managerial unproductive work is petty Bourgeois, merely that it is semi-proletarian, which Lenin never really differentiates besides when he’s picking apart the various parts of the “middle classes”. Semi-proletarian only in the case that they are receiving super-profits in their wages (which all except prisoners, children, and migrant workers are), but they are not alone! Productive US minimum wage jobs in a global context are also super-profit spiked wages. If the aggregate worker has no internal or external super-exploitation, i.e. management and sales paid equal as individuals to production line workers, there would be no Semi-proletarians or labor aristocracy, and all would be Proletarian.
Semi-proletarians bring Revisionism into the movement in their focus on Economism. In the case of an Imperial Semi-proletariat, a Labor Aristocracy, these economic demands are born reactionary and reformist. (wage struggles for the super-exploited would be progressive in that they put pressure back on the labor aristocracy).
I need you to know that I’m calling all legal-wage productive and unproductive US labor a Semi-proletarian Labor Aristocracy. I’m not targeting call center workers particularly as opposed to any other US labor, but it’s a fact that a nearly entirely (non-direct producing) Semi-proletarian working class is not producing nearly as much as it consumes and this is a problem for such an economy if the ports were subject to blockade. Amazon workers can’t ship anything because barely any of it is made here. Call centers have no products to solicit and assist. This is not the same situation if China was blockaded. A sales team isn’t going to be able to transition to growing food or mining ore very quickly.
In the capitalist economy the mere existence of exchange does matter, if value is never realized through exchange then it does not exist.
We know that value comes from labor. We know that commodities are valueless if they are not exchanged.
Therefore, the socially necessary labor in the last moment of exchange is also part of the value of the commodity. Value is created at every stage of production, and the social production of exchange and customer service and quality assurance are also productive acts. Value is produced from labor, including emotional and social labor in call centers.
Nope, but they can smuggle guns to guerillas because no one is going to check the nice white lady’s trunk if she gets pulled over.
By failing to recognize the role that settlers always play in anti-colonial struggle, instead leaving them to organize themselves spontaneously and reacting to it as it happens.
Fanon talks about how, in Algeria, French settlers played a vital role by posing as French nationals who could pass by checkpoints undetected while delivering weapons to Algerian nationals or would hide guerillas in their homes when they were being hunted by the military. Do you think this just happens spontaneously?
By joining the anti-colonial struggle they became Algerian, but bringing them into the struggle starts with agitation and propaganda. In Algeria that was done through radio and leaflets in the French language to directly reach out to French nationals, who were convinced to turn on the mother country and join the struggle for national liberation.
I will say that not everyone needs to take on the job of reaching out to settlers! That’s for white passing folks who, themselves, can pass through checkpoints without getting searched and can hide guerillas in their homes when soldiers are searching for them. I don’t expect you to have faith in them or anything, but have some revolutionary optimism!
Well, yeah, and I agree with you? White workers in the first world are bourgeoisified by superprofits.
My contention was you calling socially necessary labor unproductive, when it clearly produces a social commodity. What you’re proposing reads like a vulgar workerism, almost like Nixonian “hard hat” fetishism, which seeks to devalue socially necessary labor as not being real work and to alienate them from the workers’ struggle.
Furthermore, my hypothesis is that debourgeoisification is occurring due to imperial decline, and that’s the source of inflation and the so-called housing “shortage” and the militarization of police and the chipping away of compromises reached by the labor movement when they chose to become collaborators in exchange for concessions etc etc
Again, I’m not asking for faith. Just look at the changing material conditions and consider that maybe something has changed.
For sure but you seem to think we avoid working with settlers as a rule. It’s worth agitating people genuinely interested in understanding reality and changing it, and people pushed to their limits where revolutionary change is the only thing they are satisfied with. What I’m saying is it’s historically clear the base of settlers interested in our struggles has not seen significant motion through time (because they were just as reactionary during the height of exploitation against settler workers). That being said most settlers in Algeria fled, the ones that fought for Algeria earned their place. I expect in our conditions not many fleeing, but also not playing nice.
Yeah this is no such case. I’m only using it insofar as it has been used in the literature. I’m not saying these workers are privileged above productive workers in the US, usually they are not since unions generally are paid significantly higher wages. If there’s actually a group I think tends more reactionary, it’s the production line workers in the AFL-CIO who practice Imperial workerism that obfuscates their relationship to their colleagues in Mexico and China. None of this is to dismiss or alienate US workers for their jobs, the system of their job economy is the problem. They must have some workerist thoughts if they think they are shunned from being Communists for their jobs.
So-called shortage yes but remember that the overbuilt and expensive houses are already owned, and if Blackstone bought it, it means someone just profited of their speculation. It means somebody actually “owns” that value, and housing prices have always increased faster than inflation because Imperialists around the world (and 401ks, unions, and CPUSA) buy mortgage packages to park their money in investments outpacing inflation.
Police militarization has always been increasing since the 60s. I’ve posted the pic elsewhere in the thread but police and carceral spending increases every year outpacing inflation. This is a pre-existing trend. It looks to be more prevalent due to the firepower readily available to would be fighters in the streets as seen in Dallas during the first round of BLM protests. Though the trend has already been there for the likes of LAPD and NYPD.
No, but you’ve as much said that you avoid agitating among settlers and are content to ignore them until they spontaneously join the anti-colonial struggle. You literally said " Wake me when they turn on themselves." How else am I to interpret that but you choosing only to react to spontaneous solidarity among settlers?
I think we should be looking for these points of contradiction that push settlers into action against imperialism and colonialism, yes even when those actions are protest and demands and peaceful demonstration. A settler is ripe for agitation even before they decide to douse themselves in fuel and light themselves on fire in front of an embassy. Things drive them to take on an internationalist character or an anti-settler-nationalist character; we must try to learn from why this and not that drove them to act. Scientifically approach the settler question.
Historically it is clear that settlers will betray the mother land under the right conditions. That’s useful.
No, but you’re saying they’re unproductive, even though they use their labor to produce a service.
And the literature uses production to refer to services in addition to goods and widgets.
Like???
Right, but they’re not owned by the growing mass of first world workers who do not and will never own a home, and that is significant. Who gets to be a settler is not set in stone, it’s determined by how many bourgeoisified workers can be supported by the existing base of superprofit collected from imperialism.
Once the rate of superprofit declines, some settlers suddenly find themselves losing their privileged status.
The kind of military hardware they have access to these days the cops in the 1960s could scarcely dream of, not just because tech advances, but because the relationship between military and police was made closer and closer throughout the 80s and 90s and 00s up to today.
The so-called War on Terror was a reaction to the decline of the empire and in response the police had to become more violent and more invasive and more lethal and more secretive etc etc in order to control the proles. The police became occupation soldiers to fight “terrorism” and this has been boiling over into more and more massive uprisings against them.
Maybe you won’t wake up until the streets run red, but I think it’s worth trying to anticipate what comes next.
None of them are acknowledging the need to give up their settler society, you’re telling me to value the statements on Israel that don’t mention settler-Colonialism. Settlers are national oppressors as a class. In a context with no Colonialism, we still wouldn’t ally with the petty bourgs as a class and center their demands, we have to slice them up and pick friends from foe. We shouldn’t care about the demands of an oppressor nation unless they are in line with ours: prisoners, the homeless, and people oppressed for their bodies are people we intend to work for. If you want science on the settler question hit the books sibling, become an expert on colonial history in your immediate realm. Chunka Luta library exists for free.
Why does it bother you so much? Does it change that these goods and services are being paid from value stolen overseas? Quit projecting workerism onto my line.
The streets are already covered in my peoples’ blood, quit playing with me. Read Blood in the Land, Fire this Time. You gotta be kidding me if you think my sense of urgency is lagging when y’all don’t notice shit until you think it might be affecting you and your kin. Thinking the police presence is for you is absurd, the conditions for our oppression has already been here. The cops are killing us now, and most of us aren’t Communists, square that.
Btw lets zoom in on that wage chart, looking at median wage (where half of wage workers do better), It has been increasing in the recent decades with an unusual spike in 2020 due to pandemic stimmies. Why hadn’t there been revolts of white workers and youth in the 90s like Black and Latino youth? Economically the situation was worse then. Again we are looking for declines in conditions, not stagnation, for some reason “class consciousness” spiked in spite of increased earnings during the pandemic, you posit inflation economistically, I blame eugenics and national oppression. Your chart enthusiastically removes supervisors, who are a fifth of the workforce (remember 20% of white men don’t even participate in labor anymore). There’s really no way to see a real decline in US workers if the median and average wages are at a 4 decade high (excluding 2020). It doesn’t line up with your hypothesis. Inflation did not peak with wages in 2020, it peaked in 2022, after a spike in real earnings for USians.
More police and settler-vigilante killings year over year since the 70s, police budgets expanding every year. For some reason these things occurred during “bourgeoisification”, you never quite explained why that occurred.
No, I’m telling you to look for trends that may show segments of settler society are ripe for agitation, not to see them as “good” or something.
You literally said “I would consider people going from overpaid factory workers to white-collar work a bourgeois-ifying transition” because it is supposedly unproductive labor and because the rise of white collar work comes from imperialist superprofits, which mystifies social production. White collar work rises over time in every country country as development occurs and the societal needs for social labor increase. That’s just a factor of development, it’s not a sign of bourgeoisification.
The lacking white collar work in the Global South comes from underdevelopment which is caused by imperialism, but development itself is not inherently bourgeoisifying. Blue collar workers in the US are bourgeoisified by superprofits too, the actual job that they perform is not the source of bourgeoisification.
White collar work isn’t inherently removed from the MoP either, many simply produce a different commodity than the widgets in the Sparks and Steam Factory. Work becomes unproductive when their “”“job”“” is just to tell other people to do work for them i.e. managers, supervisors, executives, directors, etc. They don’t actually produce anything, not even a social service, they’re merely beknighted middlemen whose primary job is labor discipline and prole control and spying on workers to watch out for unionization.
The colonial police are being transformed into colonial soldiers by the heightened contradictions, but yeah, they were always meant to keep the peace for settlers.
But in Algeria the colonial police did, eventually, start torturing and killing white Algerians. Who gets to be a settler changes as conditions worsen for the empire.
For example, I get to be a settler as long as I stay white passing and am not visibly trans. That goes away if I don’t do my makeup or get literally any Sun etc etc but soon enough that shit isn’t going to protect me because the knives are out for white passing trans folk, and I blame imperial decline. Who gets to be a settler will be winnowed away.
Supervisors and managers and other beknighted sectors of the workforce are certainly our class enemies, they’re almost always white for a reason! You’ll see no disagreement from me on this. They will not join the struggle against settler-colonialism and capitalism when their conditions worsen, they’ll pick up guns and enthusiastically kill us.
Did you think I was arguing in favor of them?
Bourgeoisification comes from superexploitation, which necessarily means some people need to be colonized and superexploited. This happens abroad, obviously, but the US is settler-colonial and so the colonization also happens within its borders. More colonial police were necessary to enforce the social hierarchy and ensure the settler’s protected status and to extract superprofit from internally colonized people. Settler-vigilante killings are an outrgrowth of the growing contradictions between settlers and colonized peoples, as settlers become deputized to enforce racial hierarchy.
Inflation is a rate of change, which means even if it has peaked prices continued to rise.
More useful would be comparing the price index to wages, and here we see that consumer prices have continued to increase even after wages fell.
Thanks. I’m currently working through How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, but new book recommendations are always welcome!
While we’re talking book recommendations, read Black Skin: White Masks, The Wretched of the Earth, and A Dying Colonialism.