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. The best way to build a movement against US imperialism is to build the labor movement domestically.
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%.
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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.
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.
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.
Hell they purge anyone that criticizes them in most environments. Little petty fiefdoms.
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.
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.