World Systems Theory and related concepts often come up whenever people try to explain why Westerners are psychotic counterrevolutionary scum, etc. It's often suggested that white Americans in particular love third-world exploitation because it directly benefits those same white Americans. We might say "White Minnesotan Joe Cracker wants child slavery in southern Africa so he can get his cheap electronics." And yeah, that makes sense up to a point...
But Joe Cracker might not understand the relevant supply chain or even the basic composition of his smartphone. He probably doesn't even know about the existence of said exploitation, much less its nature or purpose. Maybe Joe Cracker WILL revolt without his cheap goods, but he probably doesn't actually know what goes into producing them or keeping the prices down. So what decisions is he making that render him "complicit" in the profiteering of some massive international corporation like Apple? Falling for their ads?
It's also worth pointing out that his iPhone doesn't actually make him richer any more than a Hulu membership does. It's a cute little toy, but it doesn't obtain food, housing, medicine or fuel. It's a cell phone with a billion bells and whistles and a monthly subscription fee. One could starve to death with it in hand. Is this really the "wealth transfer" we keep talking about? This is the socialized bribery Americans perfected?
It seems to me that Joe Cracker is complicit in fuck-all. He doesn't materially benefit from low wages in southeast Asian textile plants even if he wears one of those shirts they make every single day. It seems that he's just a different kind of poor from the Bangladeshi serfs who make his sneakers, the kind of poor with tap water, McDonalds, and WiFi. Poor overseas workers make the stupid shit, poor Americans buy the stupid shit, and they both struggle, but at least Joe Cracker has some killer kicks to go along with the Taco Bell and the wireless internet in his shitty apartment. The Nike execs, meanwhile, can smoke cigars and watch the line go up from the VIP lounge.
"Bread and Circuses" seems like a much better explanation for the behavior of these Westerners. Who says Joe Cracker has a good reason for throwing his verbal weight behind an ongoing genocide in Gaza, screaming about nuking Moscow over a slice of Ukraine, and pearl-clutching about the 100 billion victims of Communism in Xinjiang?
Yes, first world workers are complicit. That's just a fact. They benefit from exploitation of the global south in various ways (i.e. cheaper prices on imported goods). Many make their living through assisting imperialism. That doesn't mean that the first world working class isn't also exploited or coerced into complicity. It also doesn't mean that imperialism is in their interest. Obviously, socialism is in their interest. Multiple things can be true at once.
cheaper prices on imported goods
This doesn't seem true at all, if anything the people selling the shit seem to tho.
For Marxists value comes from labour. If the pay you get for one hour of your labour allows you to purchase goods that take 50 hours of labour to produce in the Global South (which is approximately the case if you live in the imperial core), you benefit from exploitation of the cheap labour in the Global South.
Nike produces 800 million shoes a year.
Nike employs 530,000 people in it's Vietnam factories. Edit: looks like Nike makes half its shoes in Vietnam.
The average work week in Vietnam is 42 hours.
That comes to
1.452.9 hours of labor for a pair of Nike shoes.The median hourly wage of a US worker is $18.12
The last article estimates the avg person that buys a Nike shoe works about 9 hours to get them paid for.
https://runrepeat.com/nike-shoes-statistics
https://www.statista.com/statistics/185335/median-hourly-earnings-of-wage-and-salary-workers/
https://www.vietnam-briefing.com/news/where-are-nikes-factories-located-in-vietnam.html/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1190342/vietnam-average-working-hours-by-gender/
https://runrepeat.com/average-price-nike-shoes
That comes to 1.45 2.9 hours of labor for a pair of Nike shoes.
The median hourly wage of a US worker is $18.12
Two vital stats even if the maths are this simple are: (1) the unit labour costs in Vietnam and (2) unit labour costs of Nike staff in the US (including all those involved in the process, logistics, admin, etc). The former will begin to show the disparity between the average US worker and the Vietnamese shoemaker. The second figure will begin to show the extent to which Nike staff in the US (et al) are better off than Nike staff in Vietnam, and the exploitative realities of that relationship.
Then it is necessary to consider all the previous nodes in the value chain before the trainers are finished in Vietnam to discover deeper levels of exploitation.
It's dated, but see this: https://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm1997/031997/ballinger.html
Examples are good, although a broader perspective is better. Still, let's stick with the example and unpack the relation following Jeff Ballinger's analysis for 1997.
Median hourly wage in the US in 1997 was $8.75
Nike was paying Vietnamese workers less than minimum wage ($42/month). Assuming (wrongly, I suspect) that they were working 42 hours:
- 42 x 4 = 168 hours
- $42 / 168 hours = $0.25/hour Ignoring the physical and sexual violence needed to keep the workers productive in the factories for the sake of focussing on the numbers, the results are still not good.
The US sports fan in 1997 can buy their Nike sneakers after $149.50 / $8.75/hr = 17.1 hours, or roughly 2 days of work (excluding taxes). The Vietnamese worker would have to work at least (we know they were being underpaid and can assumed were overworked) $149.50 / $0.25/hr = 598 hours, or roughly 14.24 months (excluding taxes) for the same shoes.
Of course, poor Americans might find that they don't have 17/hours worth of expendable cash after the end of each working week. But neither would Vietnamese worker after 14 months and a week. Shoe prices might have been cheaper in Vietnam if they could be bought in legitimate stores but why should that favour the US worker in the equation? They could travel to Vietnam to benefit from the lower prices while the Vietnamese worker could never afford to use their 10 days annual leave on a trip to the US. I realise that 10-days leave would be a luxury for modern-day US workers, even if lower than Nike's official '30-day' leave policy but this may only account for weekends, etc, considering reports of mandatory overtime.
These are still rough sums, which only relate to one (luxury) example, and the data will have changed since 1997. The difference is staggering, still. The other factor to consider is that the average US worker only gets paid its $8.75 (1997) or $18.12 (today) because their employer shifts value around with clever accounting and significantly underpays in the global south part of its production chains.
(As for the 50/hours labour-per-item, I'm not the OP but that must be an average and it's unfair to reject that figure by finding a commodity that seems to take 2.5 hours of production; a figure itself that (incorrectly) assumes the only labour is in the assembly factory.)
Labor hours and cost of goods are only directly translatable in their respective countries since we're discussing labor disparities. Its error to equate what a Vietnamese person could buy in the us. As you don't disagree it it takes 3 hours to make a shoe. This would be regardless of who is making it. What it costs to purchase a nike is whatever the person selling the shoe says it is. In the us that is 9 hours, what it costs in Vietnam idk but people there seem to wear and buy shoes. Shoes are essentially a fungible good and the cost in the us is about 3 labor hours for the cheapest [1]. I used Nike BC they are the company that comes to mind when one thinks of exploitation and it was mentioned at the above.
They could travel to Vietnam to benefit from the lower prices
The flights I found cost about 90 ($1600) hours of labor for the median worker pre tax so this isn't as a reachable thing as you may think. Especially considering most Americans must go into great debt for education, healthcare, and spend about 30% of their income on rent [2]
(As for the 50/hours labour-per-item, I'm not the OP but that must be an average and it's unfair to reject that figure by finding a commodity that seems to take 2.5 hours of production; a figure itself that (incorrectly) assumes the only labour is in the assembly factory.)
This was presented without evidence and can be dismissed without evidence.
I look around and I see Americans living sick, in debt, working gig work, in shit conditions, and with no legal protections from their employers. Then I'm told they have no revolutionary potential because they're benefiting from exploitation. I don't see that with my eyes or by research. I understand that some Americans most definitely do benefit but it seems me that they are a small minority and thus solidarity and revolutionary potential can be found in the US. This whole Joe cracker shit seems Taylor made for ultras and mtw to wreck for whatever reason.
[1]https://runrepeat.com/average-shoe-cost
[2] https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-do-households-spend-on-rent/country/united-states/
The cost to buy is high because of parasitic bourgies
If imperialism without bourgies existed, imperial loot would be extremely cheap in the imperial core
If the pay you get for one hour of your labour allows you to purchase goods that take 50 hours of labour to produce in the Global South (which is approximately the case if you live in the imperial core), you benefit from exploitation of the cheap labour in the Global South.
This is what I was responding to. It seems that with some quick research and some looking around at poor af Americans this feels like this statement is not quite right. As a Marxist I believe that assertations must be examined. I'm am more than happy to criticize Joe cracker but if in doing so I'm told that capitalists are somehow generous then my eyebrow will become raised.
I think the capitalist thievery is already calculated into those numbers and that'd mean the imperialist exploitation is even worse
Can you really be coerced into complicity, though? Complicity implies that a person could have made a different choice.
How much choice does a chronically ill desk admin have when their healthcare is tied to their job at a financial firm? How much choice does an individual dock worker have when it comes to loading weapons onto cargo ship?
They don't have much choice, do they? If we're just saying that the actions of first-world workers are necessary in perpetuating capitalism and imperialism, then yes, that's clearly true. But does that equal complicity? When I hear someoen is "complicit," I think of them as an "accomplice." Should I not?
Capitalists are trapped in the system as much as the proletariat but are also complicit in its perpetuation. The same goes for imperial core enjoyers. It’s not necessarily about what they “want”, it’s just a fact of world social relations.
It's more accurate to say that they are tools of their sovereign nations. If you're a citizen of the imperial core, you plug into your national economy for your living, you help the national economy run, and your country makes coherent decisions with the power it gets from you to directly or indirectly steal the wealth of peripheral countries.
Talking about someone as "complicit" implies both their ability to comprehend what is going on and their agency to do something about it. "Instrumental" is probably a better way of putting it.
But the more you are aware of the uneven playing field amongst different countries, and the more power you have in your own life, the more complicit you become.
The Western European diaspora did elect war criminals who commited the fake school Holocausts that that inspired the Nazi Holocaust and they hide the fake school genocide against Indigenous people in the Cold War against Soviets even as they condemn the Nazi for war crimes against Caucasians and Soviets for unproven war crimes. There is the fact that the British diaspora are denying the ongoing atrocities against the Indigenous people like the land thief to create "national parks", Federal Researve concentration camps, planned starvation, planned chemical attacks, planned assaults by Caucasianremoveds, plagiarism, and scapegoating for sabotage of reconciliation efforts.
I forget who said this but "I am pretty sure I have paid for at least one the 2000 lbs dropped on Gaza". So yes, complicit. Perhaps not as complicit as someone who is a devoted piece of shit.
Groups like Palestine Action are how you eliminate complicity in the imperial core
You may be thinking about this in the wrong way. You say, for instance:
It’s often suggested that white Americans in particular love third-world exploitation because it directly benefits those same white Americans.
I don't know who would say that white yanks love exploiting the global south. It's simply a fact that they benefit disproportionately from imperialism. Minnesotan Joe Cracker may not even want "child slavery in southern Africa so he can get his cheap electronics" but that child slavery and US-imposed oppression is the mechanism by which he can enjoy his cheap electronics.
Nobody is claiming that yanks can't be poor, suffering, or oppressed. Look at Joe Cracker, who drinks tap water, enjoys the odd McDonald's, and uses an iPhone. These are luxuries for many, many people who lack:
- potable water
- a fully nutritional diet
- road infrastructure
- access to consistent electricity or any kind of telecommunications network, including/never mind WiFi (and yes, it's a luxury—have you considered what it might be like to give birth at night in a place that has no electricity and where you cannot contact a medic to talk you through the process, never mind arrive in time to help?)
- safe indoor ovens for cooking
- it's an endless list – and as bad as things are in the US, for most people that list is substantially shorter.
As Parenti argues, the US ruling class wants the third-worldisation of the US. There is homelessness, non-potable water in Flint, and roads and rail that barely function. Let's look at some statistics to see the other side of the equation.
Note: another comment in this thread tries to work out and explain why a Vietnamese worker is no worse off than a US worker. The logic, unfortunately, distorts the picture. I’ll use four examples to demonstrate that yanks do benefit materially from imperialism, whether they ‘love’ it or choose it or hate it.
1) Unit Labour Costs
The Vietnamese or Indian factory cannot be viewed in isolation even if this is where the product is ’made’. The description is false and hourly wages are not equivalent. The ‘made in’ place is the final assembly point, usually where the head-company finds the lowest unit labour costs. Intan Suwandi summarises why unit labour costs are more important than base hourly wages or similar metrics. She writes in Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (a recommended book, less than 180 pages excluding endnotes) (p. 56):
Unit labor cost is a composite measure, combining data on labor productivity and compensation to assess the price competitiveness of a given set of countries. It is typically presented as the average cost of labor per unit of real output, or the ratio of total hourly compensation to output per hour worked (labor productivity).
There's a chart on p. 59, which:
reports average hourly labor compensation in manufacturing industries in 2017 U.S. dollars, illustrates a massive discrepancy in wage levels that exists between economies of the Global North and Global South. Here, hourly compensation is converted into actual dollars—representing the hegemonic foreign exchange/reserve currency determining the purchase price of labor, profit margins, and international financial flows—rather than applying a purchasing power parity conversion
The chart shows that isolated hourly wages are meaningless. Unit labour costs by state in 2000–14 USD were (approx.):
- Germany $46
- UK $42
- US $38
- Japan $33
- Mexico $7
- Indonesia $4
- China $2
- India $1
The data is not the most recent but here are some other details (endnotes omitted):
In 1996 … a single Nike shoe consisting of fifty-two components was manufactured in five different countries. The entire direct labor cost for the production of a pair of Nike basketball shoes in Vietnam in the late 1990s, retailing for $149.50 in the United States, was $1.50, or 1 percent. Unit labor costs for [PUMA] sneakers … in China in the early 2000s were so low that the hourly profit on each pair of sneakers was more than twenty-eight times greater than the hourly wages workers in China received to make the sneakers.
A 2019 study … interviewed 1,452 Indian women and girls, including children 17 years old or younger—85 percent of whom did home-based work “bound for export to major brands in the United States and the European Union”—[and found] that these workers earn as little as fifteen cents per hour. They “consist almost entirely” of female workers from “historically oppressed ethnic communities” in India, and their work typically involves “finishing touches” like embroidery and beadwork.
These … exploitative economic relations help us understand the reality of labor-value commodity chains and how they relate to global labor arbitrage. In essence, each node or link within a labor-value chain represents a point of profitability. Each central node, and … link in the chain, constitutes a transfer of value (or labor values). This is partially disguised by conventions with respect to GDP accounting and hence ways of computing value added. In effect, as numerous analysts have now shown, labor values generated by production are … not registered as arising in the peripheral countries due to asymmetries in power relations, in which multinational corporations are the key conduits.
Hidden in … pricing and international exchange … is an enormous gross markup on labor costs (rate of surplus value) amounting to super-exploitation, both in the relative sense of above-average rates of exploitation and also, frequently, in the absolute sense of workers paid less than the cost of the reproduction of their labor power.
Suwandi then mentions that much of this wealth goes to 26 billionaires. You might retort that poor Joe does not benefit in the same way as them. He doesn’t. He benefits when those 28 use their wealth to keep the US on top and keep the cheap goods flowing. Are the Nikes and iPhone ‘cheap’ to Joe? Maybe not; but they’re a lot cheaper than they are to Joe’s Indian counterpart, Jewana.
2) Purchasing Power
Another way of viewing the same equation is considering (i) purchasing power and (ii) the source of wages. (i) I’ll quote myself summarising Zac Cope’s Wealth of (Some) Nations (pp. 34–7):
… keeping the numbers simple.
- Take two workers, one in the global north (A), the other in the south (B)
- A is paid $10/hour to make ’widgets’
- B is paid $1/hour to make widgets
- A and B both make 1 widget an hour and they want to buy each other’s widgets
- B must work 10 hours: 10 x 1$ = $10 = one of A’s widgets @ $10/each
- In the same hours of work, A can buy: 10 x $10 = $100 = one hundred of B’s widgets @ $1/each
- The ratio of purchasing power is 1:100.
3) Functional Exploitation
(ii) The second example looks at a value chain where one worker is e.g. in India and the other in Minnesota:
How does A [functionally] exploit B? …
- Multinational Company (MNC) makes pens and sells them for $40
- Materials, use of tools, rent, and energy, etc, cost $2
- It takes two hours of labour to produce each pen, one hour each from A and B
- MNC pays A for part of the job and pays B for the other part of the job
- MNC pays A $10 for their hour of work, and pays B $2 for their hour of work: $12 total for labour Production costs are $14 in total, leaving MNC with $26 profit per pen. Forget … for a moment [that the MNC steals] $26 [value] produced by the labour of workers … we are interested in the relationship between A and B (… mediated by MNC)
- If the total cost of labour is $12 and two labour hours are needed to produce each pen, each labour hour costs $6
- If A is paid $10 but only produced $6 worth of value, then A was paid $4 more for their hour of work than they produced
- If B is paid $2 but produced $6 worth of value, then B was paid $4 less for their hour of work than they produced
- The extra $4 given to A comes directly from the value produced by B, meaning A functionally exploits B [even if the MNC exploits both].
A does not wake up and think ‘I’m going to exploit B today’. But it doesn’t matter. By they time they both go to bed, that is what [they did].
4) Environmental Benefits
Then there is the environmental damage caused by living in the US. The global south will disproportionately pay for the decadence of late stage capitalism but the emissions are overwhelmingly produced in or for the north—a hidden benefit of being poor in the US (not to say that many will not suffer from climate change). Andrew L Fanning and Jason Hickel:
There are 129 countries from the global South in our analysis, which are home to more than 80% of the total population, but their aggregate cumulative emissions surpassed fair shares of the 350 ppm carbon budget only in 2012—more than two decades after the world as a whole[.] … The remaining 39 countries in our analysis are from the global North, and we find this group of high-emitting countries used up its collective fair share of the 350 ppm carbon budget by 1969, then overshot its 1.5 °C fair share by 1986 and then surpassed its 2 °C fair share by 1995 (Fig. 1c). As of 2019, this group of countries has already exceeded its collective fair share of the 1.5 °C carbon budget by more than 2.5 times, with cumulative emissions measured from 1960.
On average, yanks benefit materially and significantly from imperialism and suffer less from its harms. Many of these will see themselves as poor. They may be poor. Still, yanks will generally demand a higher stake from the loot and demand not to suffer the consequences long before they consider turning off the tap. This does not mean that yanks cannot be educated to realise their position in imperialism but it's an uphill struggle. For more: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/497897
Thank you, this was very through and insightful. I see now that I was being a little flippant in my failure to distinguish between absolute poverty and relative poverty. I didn't account for the parameters "yanks" operate within and how that affects their decision making. Sometimes it's hard to read your own reflection.
You're welcome. It's a difficult topic. I also had to come to terms with some uncomfortable truths, being in a similar place. I had to realise that I wasn't just getting paid better than colonised people just because I'm willing to work nights and weird shifts.
As for 'yanks', I was over the character limit and saved just enough to get under by replacing 'settler' and 'USian'. I don't like to use 'American' because that label is much broader than settlers the US. It's not intended as an insult. Well, no more than if I were to call someone British, French, or German lol
I may be wrong, but the examples you have cited don't appear to make sense.
In the first example, it is assumed that the selling price of both widgets is equal to their labor cost, and that it is possible for A to buy B's widgets and vice versa. The latter condition implies an international market for these widgets where B's employer sells widgets for $1 while A's employer sells the same widgets for $10 while A's employer is not priced out of the market.
In your second example, the selling price is $40. Constant capital costs are $2 and variable capital is $12.
From this we get that the value produced by living labor (of A and B) is $38 (price - constant capital) in 2 hours total, or $17 per hour. Thus A is exploited for $7 (surplus rate = 7/10 = 70%) while B is exploited for $15 per hour (surplus rate = 750%).
While B was exploited more than A, this does not mean that A is exploiting B, functionally or otherwise.
They're great points, actually. I think I've lost something in trying to condense and simplify the points within the character count. I'm going to try to have another read of the source and re-check numbers. If I've not simplified faithfully, you may be onto a string critique of Cope. I'm not certain just, though—I'll have to think about it.
I have a feeling that it's me who's missed out some of the explanation. I've got to figure out where. It could be in suggesting, in the first example, that A and B are buying widgets off each other.
In the second, the $12 is the portion of value created by labour that the employer(s) is willing to give to the workers. The workers there are in the same value chain and contribute to one product. They could both have a pay rise if the bourgeois wasn't involved. But, crucially, worker A will usually side with the bourgeois before they side with worker B. This is because (and I accept the numbers that I've given as my example don't show this clearly) worker A realises (i) under the current arrangement, they are paid well because worker B is paid so poorly (the functional exploitation) and (ii) it is far easier to collaborate with the employer for another few dollars of the profit than to overthrow the system just so that worker B can have parity (which does not necessarily benefit worker A and may be a positive disbenefit).
Could be worth me quoting directly rather than putting it in my own words but I remember it's quite complex (hence me using a simplified version). I'll take a another look.
I’m not certain just, though—I’ll have to think about it.
NP, I can wait for you to clarify your arguments and get the quotations. In the meantime, I can try addressing the points you presented.
In the second, the $12 is the portion of value created by labour that the employer(s) is willing to give to the workers.
The amount of value given to workers is not decided by how much the employers are willing to give. It is determined by a combination of the costs of reproducing labor and the bargaining position of workers. The arguments I have heard from Marxists critical of unequal exchange theory are that the value given to workers in the third world is so low largely because
- Women in third world households do a lot of unpaid domestic work, reducing the cost of reproducing labor
- The large presence of rural migrant workers drives down wages in the third world
Of course, even without unequal exchange, super exploitation and the financial dominance of the dollar remain, leaving the first world bourgeoise with virtually unlimited purchasing power. The big controversy as far as I know is whether or not imperialism actually provides a net benefit to first world proles given the costs. Unfortunately, I still don't have enough technical understanding of the global economy to answer this question on either side of the debate.
it is far easier to collaborate with the employer for another few dollars of the profit than to overthrow the system just so that worker B can have parity (which does not necessarily benefit worker A and may be a positive disbenefit).
On a political level, I certainly have seen many liberals/conservatives justify exploiting the third world because they believe it benefits them. So I agree with this.
Marcuse is helpful here. The idea that average people in the US are actively considering how to uphold the imperial global order is preposterous. It’s more insidious. I don’t have One Dimensional Man in front of me so here are some paraphrases from the wiki article. As a disclaimer, the parts of 1D man on the USSR are based on analysis of common largely unsubstantiated western assumptions according to a former soviet psychologist I’ve spoken to about it. As they said, the USSR wasn’t maintained so it clearly had some internal concerns with getting people to accept the socialist mission, but that Marcuse’s concepts aren’t especially prescient factors in that situation, anyway:
“Modern industrial societies have furthermore created an "affluent society", which in increasing comfort have disguised the exploitative nature of the system, and have therefore strengthened means of domination and control. Modern "affluent society" therefore limits opportunities for political revolution against capitalism.
Marcuse contends that in contemporary consumer societies, a select few wield the power to shape our conceptions of freedom by offering us the means to purchase our own happiness. In this state of "unfreedom", consumers act irrationally by working more than they are required to in order to fulfill actual basic needs, by ignoring the psychologically destructive effects, by ignoring the waste and environmental damage it causes, and by searching for social connection through material items.
It is even more irrational in the sense that the creation of new products, calling for the disposal of old products, fuels the economy and encourages the need to work more to buy more. An individual loses his humanity and becomes a tool in the industrial machine and a cog in the consumer machine. Additionally, advertising sustains consumerism, which disintegrates societal demeanor, delivered in bulk and informing the masses that happiness can be bought, an idea that is psychologically damaging.”
I think we are mainly discussing intentionality and semantics.
Joe Cracker has no ‘good’ reason for supporting the imperial mission abroad but he does because of media influence, latent nationalism, etc.
I think this gets to a relevant point that the average Joe in any imperialist country has not the smallest clue about how much pain and suffering his lifestyle costs, but it does not change that his lifestyle costs that much pain and suffering, and this whole complicity stuff is some semantic hair splitting and ultimately unproductive, if by complicit you mean part of the system that exploits the subjugated countries, yes they are, but that don't mean much because by this logic most everybody is, even those living in the exploited countries, so if you mean complicit knowingly furthering the exploitation, sure most people do not act like this, in fact I'd wager a very small group does. So this complicit stuff is meaningless because either everybody is or nobody. Once that is understood the point becomes: the enemy isn't Joe cracker from America or Europe, the enemy is the system, that uses Joe cracker as frontline buy seducing him with a small share of the fruits of exploitation. Our job is to dispute the ideological mechanisms that keep Joe cracker in line and show him what could be different with the system changing and what he had to gain, like not worrying about leaving inheritance for the children for no one will ever be destitute, not worrying about cost of health, working less, retiring sooner, have appropriate support if he wants to have children.
TLDR the complicit argument is kinda pointless, and the average Joe is not necessarily our enemy many of those are potential allies once we get them to understand more about how things work.
good god, could gringos read one fucking article about dependency theory, please?
It seems to me that
Instead of making things up you could read e.g. this:
https://anti-imperialist.net/blog/2019/11/13/unequal-exchange-and-the-prospects-of-socialism/
Chapter 5 answers your question but I recommend you read the whole thing to get the entire argument.
Maybe don't insult people right before recommending literature?
Thanks for the link, I'll read from the beginning per your advice.
sometimes an insult is well-earned. suck it up and don't take it too personally
That is not conducive to learning. Criticism is sometimes necessary in discussion and acting upon this kind of stuff. Insults are generally just emotional indulgence on the part of the person doing them.
insults can teach shame when necessary. they can also communicate when you're sharing an opinion that might make people upset and make you mindful of it next time you decide to share your thoughts. in any case, there's a very relevant difference between a response that communicates "i disagree and here's why" and a response that communicates "wtf bro", and that's not simply self-indulgence
edit: in the case of this thread specifically, the insult is well earned because the post is typical of a gringo gringoing and not being able to accept all the comfort and benefits they're granted for being gringo. it's like shaking the poster back to reality and making it clear his line of reasoning is not just incorrect, but also ridiculous
I picked my words carefully. As I said, insults are not conducive to learning, meaning in an environment where the goal is to learn, they are unproductive and it is clear this is a thread made by someone who is trying to understand something better. Insults tend to just result in a person becoming defensive rather than considering what was said.
In a more general sense of learning in all walks of life, there are moments where harshness has its place, yes. And I'm not going to try to universalize it otherwise. But that is not what I was referring to.
"Wtf bro" isn't an insult and could simply be said if the point is to communicate that.
because the post is typical of a gringo gringoing and not being able to accept all the comfort and benefits they’re granted for being gringo. it’s like shaking the poster back to reality and making it clear his line of reasoning is not just incorrect, but also ridiculous
An insult doesn't communicate any of that. And that's not even getting into how tiresome it can get when the focus of a conversation about oppression becomes an attempt to universalize oppression comparisons, not for the sake of understanding the mechanics of how stuff works or how to overcome it, but just this sort of "how dare you not get how worse others have it." In practice, from what I can tell, the end result of that in people who actually listen to it isn't that they become better revolutionaries (if they come closer to being a revolutionary at all in cases they aren't at all yet) and try harder to overthrow the system; instead, they go for the catholic hairshirt thinking and the white guilt and just sort of feel bad about it and wallow in how bad they should feel about their lot in life relative to others. Maybe I'm missing cases where it is actually effective, I'm not omniscient, but it doesn't seem like a very effective way to engage with the problem of people in the imperial core living off of the mechanisms of exploitation.
Shame as a means of helping to regulate things socially does need to take into account how a culture processes shame, I would say, in order to be effective. How a person tends to think about what shame is and how they should react to being shamed and so on.
Sorry, I shouldn't be so combative. Thank you for taking the time to read it.
I think Joe Cracker is actually a little lost in the political wilderness. He's not seeing a solution.
Byung-Chul Han in Burnout Society theorized that in neoliberalism the workers are now oppressing themselves because they are competing on the job market. Even if they unionize, they are oppressed by the need for profitable production, undercutting their own wages to make sure the profit motive is served.
That job isn't guaranteed. Joe has to get his resume sorted. Sell himself. Hit his goals and get that promotion. etc.
