- cross-posted to:
- the_dunk_tank
- cross-posted to:
- the_dunk_tank
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Some real bangers in this one
This is why imperialism traditionally has been used by many Marxists and non-Marxists in a similar way, which is to refer to a fundamentally political phenomenon, not an economic one.
Ah yes those two entirely separate realms, politics and economics
Marxists are sometimes confused about this. Imperialism isn’t a situation when capitalists of one country exploit workers of another one. We already have a theory to explain that, and that’s our theory of capitalism.
It means that the ruling class of one nation-state limits or constrains the sovereignty and the autonomy of another nation-state.
So the theory of capitalism and the theory of imperialism are two entirely separate things? Imperialism is not a natural outgrowth of capitalism? Why would the ruling class of one country seek to constrain the working class of another if not to exploit them? (Later he goes on to explain that colonialism happens because of capitalism and he also calls colonialism a form of imperialism)
After decades of argument and research from the 1960s onward, it’s pretty well-established that the evidence for a new stage of capitalism that arose by the 1920s and 1930s — superseding the competitive stage — is very flimsy. Capitalism back then was a competitive capitalism, as it has always been.
"Capitalism is still competitive" what universe does this moron live in?
Karl Kautsky turned out to be more correct than Lenin on this issue, in that he predicted that what you would get is cooperation between capitalist countries, not competition
Lenin states that the imperialist countries divide up the world and fight at the boundaries. He predicts a "United States of Europe" in Imperialism, He never said they don't cooperate - they just choose their battlefields together.
The Leninist theory of imperialism is still used as a justification for Third World nationalism, which is not progressive in character.
Lmao Cuban, Vietnamese, and Palestinian nationalism isn't progressive?
What’s ironic here was that Lenin was entirely correct in his criticism of the German Social Democratic Party and of the Second International, their decision to vote for the war, and of the workers’ parties across Europe that lent their support to it. So his political conclusion was right.
So Lenin's theory was bad but he reached the correct conclusion - Kautsky had the right theory and the wrong conclusion. I am very smart.
The mere fact that you have gigantic firms doesn’t mean that they’re also monopolies. They are now competing with each other as gigantic firms.
How did they become gigantic firms Jim? How many gigantic firms do we have?
there was no continuous stream of revenues originating from imperialism that fed the wages of workers in, say, England or Germany.
Because imperialism cheapens foreign goods against domestic wages! It's why an apple picked next door costs a dollar but a banana picked a thousand miles away costs 25 cents!
highly skilled workers in high-end firms that were integrated in the global economy — were actually the more radical workers. Skilled workers in the machine and textile industry in England were the ones that led the class struggle.
Maybe in the 1890s, you know before the imperialist stage of capitalism. By the mid 20th century they weren't leading shit.
First of all, international flows of capital don’t constitute imperialism — that’s just capitalism.
No it is not. The ownership of foreign industrial capital by imperialist finance capital was a new phenomenon by the end of the 19th century - distinct from the national capitalism of Marx's era.
Secondly, wages are a matter of class struggle, not a national affair.
gibberish
proponents of this view implicitly assume that workers and capitalists within a particular country are partners, not antagonists.
How many American unions have made deals with capital to become undemocratic, opposed to growth, and downright conservative? How many American unions have fervently supported every war effort in the last 100 years? How many unions have become xenophobic and nationalist because they agreed with capital that foreigners were undermining them?
There is still no successor theory to Lenin’s
There are successors though they aren't particularly significant. World Systems is probably the most mainstream. The anti-colonial movement also advanced new understandings of imperialism.
there is an added urgency to trying to understand the Atlantic alliance and NATO as the institution which oversees it
Maybe American capital invests in European countries and then sends its military to protect those investments? Idk just spitballing here.
Funny enough, his definition of anti-imperialism is fine at the end, but he avoids why the labor aristocracy is conservative, why it is nationalist, and the question of whether it will ever revolt is never brought up.
Edit: https://jacobin.com/2020/01/afl-cio-cold-war-imperialism-solidarity
That's a pretty informative takedown, one thing about third world nationalism: Cuba, Palestine and Vietnam didn't start off where they are now, they had to adjust their nationalism to get there and also there is a reason why Chibber wasn't mentioning them as an example.
Also third world nationalism isn't only a thing in AES states, there are reactionary nationalist states in the third world, i don't think what he says here is that much off.
Can't say anything else about the others, you're probably right or i didn't read enough lenin.
Maybe American capital invests in European countries and then sends its military to protect those investments? Idk just spitballing here.
Do you have any article or study about this? Unrelated but i am in a debate on reddit exactly about this topic.
Unfortunately I can't find numbers for US overseas investment by country, but it totals to thirty-one trillion (table A). Of that, six and a half trillion is Foreign Direct Investment which means investments that yield at least a 10% stake. Nearly four trillion (around 64%) of US FDI is in Europe which I think is a good indicator of where portfolio investments are as well. You can compare FDI data of countries here.
That's not the whole picture of course. For example US/global oil policy aims to control prices (via the OPEC cartel) so we garrison armies in Saudi Arabia even if we don't have huge investments there. There's also the military industrial complex which is extremely profitable and needs lots of troops to be stationed overseas to remain as such. Geostrategic positioning also plays a role, we put troops on the border of Russia's sphere of influence.
Of course Jacobin would bring out an "academic" to find some flimsy redefinition of imperialism and shit all over Lenin:
"First of all, they wrongly identified capitalism as having entered a new stage, which they called the “monopoly” stage, which I think is fundamentally flawed. After decades of argument and research from the 1960s onward, it’s pretty well-established that the evidence for a new stage of capitalism that arose by the 1920s and 1930s — superseding the competitive stage — is very flimsy. Capitalism back then was a competitive capitalism, as it has always been." ...
"Karl Kautsky turned out to be more correct than Lenin on this issue, in that he predicted that what you would get is cooperation between capitalist countries, not competition. We are still suffering from the consequences of these misjudgments on the orthodox Left." :gulag: :gulag: :gulag:
Karl Kautsky turned out to be more correct than Lenin on this issue, in that he predicted that what you would get is cooperation between capitalist countries, not competition
This person should google these two countries called "Russia" and "China"
It's just like what happened in Lenin's time. Everyone is a "Marxist" now - when in reality they are philistines, opportunists, and revisionists.
The labor movement is picking up in the imperial core and these people are trying to ride its coattails as supposed experts on it. The labor movement is also picking up among socialist organizations in the imperial core and these academics don't want it polluted by those dirty tankies.
looking at the comments it might get crossposted but i have to read it first.
Okay, finished it, probably not gonna crosspost it, especially since the conclusion is the same that all of the MLs here would draw
Final point: I've never seen a class conscious union in the United States, anywhere. Socialism is an extreme minority position, most self-described "socialists" in the US are just social democrats that want socialized healthcare and don't care about our military or financial devastation of those abroad.
This ends up meaning that all of these people romanticizing the labor movement and its capacity are fundamentally out of touch with the actual goings-on at unions here right now today. Even though many work at them, they come in thinking they'll be able to have basic class conscious conversations and to push them left, only to find that their only political interest is on "social issues" and which Democrats to support, with no long-term strategy or consistency. Socialists run head-long into the colonizer union machine and burn themselves out on 80 hour weeks "for the working class" just to watch their union boss cut a deal to decrease wages with the boss or a politician because the union itself is weak, has no class consciousness, and the rank and file are checked out. All of these amount to the same thing, really.
And then, once a socialist has overinvested themselves in the capacity of colonizers to run a class conscious union, they start telling themselves stories about how actually if you read this academic who can't even read Lenin for comprehension, you can squint and look at it from this other angle and now all the unions you helped build that disappoint and alienate their workers and cozy up to bourgeois political parties are still actually building socialism rather than acting a lightning rod for burning out comrades. And to do that, you need to reject the obvious explanations for why workers see themselves as powerless, for why even when empowered they can't imagine a better world, or why the unionized defense contractor workers aren't going to be anti-war. You need to see the revolutionary potential in retail workers who don't even join their own pickets and rely on a socialist party to do all of the work for them. In other words, you need to invent a new religion for imperial core socialism.
I was looking at the latest rail union contract vote and I think less than 60% of the membership bothered to cast a ballot. That level of apathy blew my mind. Is there any hope in these independent unions popping up like Amazon and Starbucks? I know Taft-Hartley has badly kneecapped the labor movement, but I didn't realize how badly.
The Starbucks unions are done on a store-by-store basis and corporate finds ways to fire or move around the radicals, so usually they will be around for the vote but won't actually remain at the store without an unfair labor practices win or a pressure campaign like The Memphis 7. Buffalo is pretty good. But random stores, for the most part, are good on social issues but not class conscious nor do they actually organize coherently.
Amazon warehouses are similar in that they are warehouse-by-warehouse. Amazon is more effective at union busting at them and they're not particularly class conscious. They are missed opportunities because American union organizers and lefties don't really have a plan for how to make a union class conscious, they just think if you use the organizer model things will work themselves out or maybe you can co-opt them a bit.
Jane McAlevey is about as good as it gets in the US, and she still pushes a Bernie version of class consciousness.
These are both excellent points. I'm a bit I'll at the moment and my vocabulary is failing me, but my basic idea is that the are some additional difficult realities we have to contend with.
For the first point, I agree that it's necessary to build ground-up unions in order to have a labor base of power. I would also say that there are many ways for those to fail as well and tons of organizer model unions are... in precarious situations. I'm talking about unions where only 1/100 or 1/1000 workers are doing anything for the union... in a union using the organizer model. The workers at these places still don't see the relevance of the union, even though there are socialists in leadership calling each other comrades and patting each other on the back. Basically... shit is even worse than most unions being top-down and run by class traitors.
For the second point, I'd say that I have at times had a similar belief. That the nascent class consciousness of "workers vs. the bosses" would be enough to build from. In my experience, it is not. You build from a radical core that can command respect - or just dictate from a position of power. That's the only lever that's really available in America, and it's why capitalists pull it to great effect with class traitors. This is because rank and file engagement is truly dismal. There is no fighting spirit, many folks don't even know they're in a union or what they'd vote for in one or do in one. So many people say, "this is so important, but I can't afford the dues". People making $90k say that.
The battle is much harder and deeper than that, and Lenin inherited a situation that was already much more radical and class conscious. He's not wrong, he just had different conditions. And he wonin the periphery, whereas movements in the imperial core failed, were murdered, were taken over be fascists, we're mollified with socdemery.
This isn't doomerposting. We just need to know where our fight is and what the prospects are. It is much more valuable for the socialist project to join a socialist org and recruit 2 people than to form a union. Not that the union formation can't be important and beautiful, but its capacity to build socialism is a delusion that will suck up your time and has dubious prospects without being much more disciplined, not unlike electoralism.
Will have to check this out, love me some dense explanations of modern neocolonialism.
Anti-imperialism means collective action in your country against your government’s militarism and aggression against other countries, and convincing your working class that their material interests are bound up with the de-escalation of conflict and the demilitarization of their own state. That’s anti-imperialism.
Closing line, lol.
The US' ability to depress wages overseas and therefore create cheap imports is very much dependent on its military and associated financial institutions. This author's understanding of the labor aristocracy is literally, "average wages should go up when you do an imperialism".
The entirety of the imperial core working class is the beneficiary of unequal exchange due to imperialism: dramatically underpaying people in the third world for their labor and resources to create products for export, which are them split amongst the labor aristocracy as ill-gotten gains. Through commodity fetishization, the knowledge of how ill-gotten it is is largely ignorable by that aristocracy, though not by anyone else.
In terms of higher wages, it's virtually uncontestable that imperial core workers are paid more than their peripheral counterparts. The existence of bullshit jobs in the first place is an artifact of this shift to service jobs of questionable productive value, for example. It also ties into exchange rates and how they are maintained, which can be simplified down to the US military hegemony and its financial instruments of mass destruction, i.e. imperial tools. Why are you paid more for the same job here than in India? Why does this trend hold consistently for the core vs. the periphery? Why is it cheaper to have someone harvest pears in Argentina and ship them to Vietnam for packaging and then ship them to America for consumption than to do even one more of those steps domestically?
Also, nobody said the labor aristocracy had to be cognizant of their status. Systems of control sure do seem to think it's better that they don't, or that if they do the justification is dumbed down to racism. Though some of them are aware and fight hard for it. See: the long and shitty history of American unions for the last 70 years.
Edit: I should also make note that this alternative hypothesis requires that the United States has more "class struggle" that increases wages than Cuba, than Vietnam, than India, than Venezuela, than Chile... hell, nearly every other country. That Chile under a coup government fascist had more wage-increasing class struggle than when it organized under a socialist. The US union density rate is about 10%.
The usefulness of describing the labor aristocracy is that their exploitation is decreased relative to the same conditions in the periphery, and they are actually sometimes aware of why this is the case, so they are poor allies and will not be - and haven't been - where socialist revolution takes hold first. There has always been poverty and a highly exploited underclass in the imperial core, don't get me wrong, but it has been successfully marginalized. The group of people who recognize their exploitation is increasing as wages stagnate and inflation increases and homeownership becomes unattainable, but that process will take decades. And there continues to be a serious risk that they will be easily led into imperial endeavors to save their quality of life at the expense of others, as convincing Americans of war has never been easier.
It is also useful to understand why you can't just add unions to the equation and get good results. Unions have been kneecapped and turned into collaborative apparatuses by default in the United States, they have to be made radical and at least nascently class conscious. That will be very difficult to do because, in reality, the politics of class struggle is anemic in the imperial core, it was blacklisted and killed off in the red scares. We have to build both up from almost nothing and that will take a lot of time. It's also necessary to understand that we are still very few. Lots of people call themselves socialist but don't even know the basics of the term, they just want taxing the rich and social spending. This is all easier to understand in the context of a labor aristocracy that has an interest in imperialism. They don't need to be aware of it, they just need to exist where social structures reinforce it.
I don’t think this is necessarily true.
From the article: "The reason there’s no necessary link between the two is that workers’ wages always depend on two things: productivity and class struggle."
I was hoping we could just agree that productivity is largely bullshit because GDP is largely bullshit, particularly in imperial core economies based on the FIRE sector. And not only that, but funny enough they are also propped up by imperialism, as finance capital is extremely predatory on the periphery. If we do agree, then it's left up to class struggle, per this loser.
If capitalists understand that the imperialist system is dependent on a smoothly functioning imperial core, then they are more likely to try to cede ground to workers in said core.
Only until they bottom out on profits from imperialism, but yes. And this would actually be something that happens via negotiations with the federal government, which tries to keep capitalism functioning.
They are also going to do their best to purge class conscience workers and elevate class traitors (who can be found in leadership positions at many of the remaining US unions).
Hell they purge anyone that criticizes them in most environments. Little petty fiefdoms.
That prevents the development of an organized working class and therefore limits workers’ ability to fight imperialism from within the US.
It's not like firing the agitators is new, yet union membership is down down down. There's something else at work, and has been since the late 1940s: systemic purges of the left, blacklists, murders, kneecapping of unions, and offshoring of union jobs. The offshoring is, itself, a part of imperialism as well. But wages are high, even as class conflict decreased - or to be more accurate, as capitalists won over and over again. There is very little collective bargaining power in the US, labor rights are miniscule or actively hamper organizing (it's illegal to even form unions in many government sectors), and socialists are largely a bunch of kids that haven't read theory and don't know how to form unions - but they do often make up for it in enthusiasm.
As I see it, this system will remain of effect as long as profits are maintained. Once profits start to dry up, capitalists will squeeze workers both in the periphery as well as the imperial core. In the latter case this increases the level of class struggle and class consciousness and therefore the potential for anti imperialist organizing. I believe we’ve started to see this in recent years within the US.
Well yeah that's just imperialism turning inwards, the labor aristocracy will get a little taste of what they've been living off of and it will indeed stoke conflict. Though we are completely and utterly fucked if we don't grow our ranks ASAP, like wildfire. Because those conditions aren't an automatic win for socialists, they're great for various fashy reactions as well, and we - and people overseas - are the perfect scapegoats for them. A variant of The Jakarta Method can easily play out here.
The idea that workers in wealthy countries like the United States are part of a “labor aristocracy” bought off with the fruits of imperialism is nonsense.
Why isn't this article in the dunk tank?
The first line of this article fucking blows. That's honestly enough for me.
In her article “The Global Class War” in Catalyst, Ramaa Vasudevan has shown that the era of the greatest expansion of American investment abroad (the period from 1980 onward), which should have been the period in which the American working class gorged on the fruits of imperialism, was in fact the longest period of wage stagnation. Now you could say that’s because the spoils of imperialism were kept away from the working class. But if you say that, then you’ve given up the argument, because what it shows is that there is no necessity that internationally acquired profits should lead to higher wages for workers in imperialist countries.
When you don't know what neoliberalism nor the fruits of imperialism are, lol
I'm not on board with a lot of this article, but this is a decent point. There's a lot of tension between:
- The last half century of soaring imperial core profits combined with the simultaneous hollowing out of the imperial core's middle class, and
- The claim that the imperial core's middle class is being bought off with imperial spoils.
I also see a much simpler critique of the labor aristocracy theory: most people just don't care about stuff that happens too far from home. They're generally indifferent about wars that don't directly effect them (through a draft, or a tax, or a noticeable change in the price of daily purchases, etc.). Hell, they're often indifferent about stuff that happens the next town over, or even on the other side of their own town. Why would imperial powers need to buy the consent of people who mostly don't care in the first place?
There isn't really tension between 1 and 2 because the primary impacts of imperialism for the imperial core working class have been conversion to service sector jobs (capital for manufacturing was exported) and then cheap goods via an imbalanced exchange. The suppression of wages overseas combined with dollar hegemony means Wal-Mart prices on your goods. Combine that with the free ride of financialized homeownership (for those that could buy homes, which was the vast majority back then) and you've got the consumerized "middle class" labor aristocracy getting way more for what they do than the rest of the proletariat.
Re: not caring about what happens overseas, I would say that is generally true, though that's also a luxury of being part of the labor aristocracy and doesn't change the calculus of exploitation. When you are the beneficiary, the media would very much like you to not really process the sweatshop conditions of children making your status symbol shoes. Laugh at it in some comedy, but don't think too hard about it or ask why. When you live in the country with the sweatshops, you know where the products go and the price you pay for that arrangement. Of course, all of this is under conditions of intense propaganda, so I'm describing a powerful material force, but not the only one.
The error was in thinking that capitalism, as it matures, veers toward a monopoly stage. Capitalism, as we’ve known it so far, has always had very powerful impulses toward eroding monopolies, not toward constructing them.
Jacobin moment
