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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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Bold statement!
Yes? Inflation, as experienced by the worker, is the cost of goods and services and housing rising faster than wages. Which is happening. Inflation does not automatically equal higher wages. Inflation, again as experienced by the worker, means higher prices. If that comes with higher wages then the worker can keep up with inflation and no one notices much other than the fact that their savings literally lose value over time, but debourgeoisification has disrupted this process. We are now seeing inflation actually outpace workers, they are not just making more to pay their higher bills and it's lead to the recent labor upsurge.
This is not universal, obviously. The wages of managers, cops, so-called skilled laborers, bureaucrats, etc have risen in pace with inflation. We have seen some workers keep up and other workers fall behind, splitting off those workers and debourgeoisifying them as they fail to save and fail to attain property and fail to get "ahead." I'm not sure why you're insisting this isn't happening.
Do you think there isn't a labor upsurge and that class consciousness isn't rising?
You're right! And would you look at that, the savings rate in the US has been declining since the 60s, supposedly the period when things stopped changing. The savings rate briefly went up after the financial crash and bucked the trend of decline (i.e. when capital destruction created new avenues for investment) and obviously spiked during the period when people cared about COVID, but on the whole there has been a steady decline that coincides with the way real wages have stagnated.
Inflation is not in "luxury spending" it's in fucking groceries and rent and housing.
Okay, so you are speaking literally of currency being exported. But you're contradicting yourself and I'm confused.
You say "capital exports bring down the prices of goods" yet we are also talking about conditions of strong inflation. Is this not a contradiction? Does this not indicate that capital exports are falling, and that demand for USD is falling? You say nothing has changed, but despite the harshest sanctions regime in history we have seen Russia's economy continue to grow! We are seeing nations make deals with each other in national currencies, totally bypassing USD. We are seeing alternatives to the World Bank and IMF, which offer loans in currencies other than USD.
The world is changing, and the conditions for white workers will change with it. Maybe it's too early to say
What productive assets do they own? I think they're a special protected class created by the State, and while their class interests align with business owners and independent farmers they are still distinct and it's worth recognizing it.
Maybe. Some of the trends I'm noticing have only been around for a few years, it could just be a blip and the white working class will go back to feasting on the superprofits of the global South soon enough. But-
We've also seen the contract fights have not focused on wages. While the companies have been throwing record wages at workers the contracts still get rejected because what they actually want is time away from work and time where they can't be scheduled and an end to understaffing, or like you say, workers' health and wellness.
But we are also seeing union locals organizing against the Zionist genocide. That's huge! The labor upsurge might be gaining a political character and you seem to be ignoring it in favor of pessimism. The union leadership is still in lockstep with the Democrats, and as long as that is the case they will hit those dead ends, but if I'm right and the rank-and-file are being debourgeoisified then we are going to either see the leadership change or we'll see the NLRB declared unconstitutional and unions will have to go back to illegal strikes.
Inflation is mostly due to higher wages, and savings. Savings are reinvested by banks and turned into new constant and variable capital (hiring more workers). It can be turned into new consumption (like video games, social media, more advertising). It can be turned into student loans, and mortgages (if there is a surplus of money-capital all of these things will get more expensive relative the the unit of money), and "gentrification" re-developments or new suburban developments. Your savings become a smaller share of the MOP because they got invested elsewhere and more things were made or labor paid because of it! Simultaneously capital will be exported, mostly to China, where it is used to decrease the prices of expensive goods like video game consoles and microwaves (which is why they have gotten cheaper since the 80s/90s). The increase in the prices of other goods are due to the increases of incomes whether directly or indirectly through cheaper living and therefore savings, this causes the propertied classes to raise prices to capture these excess monies in savings so they can maintain their relative share of ownership. The bourgeoisie does not want dollars sitting around, they want them put into motion so they can be accumulated. This means increased consumption, and consumption remains high. USians consume way more than the global south citizens do.
Though again, buying lots of things and not saving money doesn't mean your life is actually getting worse! The "60 percent of USians are paycheck to paycheck" talking point in media obfuscates that the median US worker makes hundreds of thousands a year, that 60% must include people doing better than the median worker.
All that said, family incomes have not changed beyond historical levels for the bottom 20%, all other brackets are growing, and there are more families.
The recent "labor upsurge" was pandemic related, just as inflation was largely pandemic related due to transportation delays and more spending per-worker on minimal safety precautions (with some level of "greed-flation" but again that's just opportunism on behalf of the bourgs).
None of this really effects US workers, besides the tech sector and the housing bubble (this means less workers able to speculate on land) which was being supplied by Counter-revolutionary Russian Bourgs who parked their money in the US for these "industries". This does explain some of the attention TikTok is getting as US-based companies are losing their technology monopolies. However, conditions for Imperialism are still better than when the USSR existed. Capital exports of specific commodities are decreased when that specific commodity making capital is exported, but it need not be existing machines. GM mostly built new machines in their transition to Mexico and the US factories make largely high end cars and trucks now, while Mexicans make the lower end vehicles which are sold to US GM workers lol. Surplus-Capital either finds new industries or expands elsewhere, but this could easily be to an underdeveloped sector in an Imperialist ally (such as Germany, South Korea). You're right that if not enough surplus-capital finds a home, that the value of dollars goes down, this is effected by dollar demand but also capital exports can take the form of bombs, ultimately the destruction of capital, which allows for demand to be re-established. New sources of consumption counter-balance inflation, essentially, which is why the US is the least susceptible state to inflation.
This is due to what I said above, that people are saving money, so loans get more expensive because there is a surplus of capital to be turned into loans (they make bigger loans because they can find people to take them). This makes college and housing more expensive. Local landlord regimes (city-government "deep states") subsidize development to attract higher wage sectors like tech so they can realize more real-estate capital in the form of land-values and rents. So you're right that wage differentiation has something to do with cost increases, but again 4/5th of USian incomes are increasing yoy, overall the bulk is on the upswing. You must be reading too much Hudson to think that the dollar system itself is the source of inflation, no, it's actually "unequal exchange" and the increased wages it brings.
The petty-bourgeoisie need not actually own productive assets, this is an overly mechanical analysis of petty bourg classes. Lenin and Mao referred to academics, teachers, doctors, and nurses to be petty-bourgeoisie, see the source in my other comment on the Middle Classes in Britain. The petty-bourgeoisie is simply non-capitalists and non-proletarians converging into a "middle strata".
To a certain extent, working hours struggles are progressive, to another extent, they are simply wage struggles hidden behind math. In an Imperial economy where wages are already built from stolen labor of the global proletariat, cutting hours in Imperialist states comes at the expense of the global proletariat, it's ultimately reactionary organizing unless it doubles with demands of a shorter working day globally for all workers, i.e. proletarian internationalism.
We see this was not the case...
Where? Outside of the walk-outs of academics who some happened to be in the UAW, there hasn't been any anti-Imperialist actions by US unions. They make statements but my dog could make just as valuable of a statement if she could write. Opportunist gonna opportunist, this isn't a sign of anything lasting, if it was they'd be seizing land and handing them over to the Indigenous peoples as we speak. UAW would divest from weapons manufacturing and Israeli settlements. The academic protesters only jumped in when their students were getting beat up by pigs, again a valiant action, but ultimately has not progressed the struggle. The youth are always worth agitating but it's important they can't be lead by Opportunists in the union movement and academic circles. As seen Liberals also protest, doesn't mean Liberals or union-locals have developed more class consciousness beyond white guilt for being in-Empire.
Nothing novel has occurred between this moment and the anti-Vietnam days besides much less whites caring because they successfully got the draft paused indefinitely. When union workers start destroying weapons manufacturing equipment I'll have to change my mind, but that seems to be far from where we are, and the "toughest actions" have been climbing (office, not factory) buildings and tagging them with paint.
"Savings savings savings" you say, and yet the rate of savings has been declining since the 60s and right now is on par with the period just before the 2008 financial crash. Savings are not an explanation for the inflation we are seeing and this is another contradiction to your claims: if savings are a source of inflation, and savings are down, where is the inflation coming from? Is it only coming from wage increases like is being claimed by bourgeois economists? I'm skeptical, and so I'm hypothesizing that the inflation is geopolitical.
And yet, the state is grappling with inflation despite being the least susceptible state to inflation. Does this not indicate a change?
Do you think the bourgeois want a high interest rate environment? Do you think they want the global South to turn to other countries for loans?
One thing that stood out to me was the demands for an end to understaffing, which necessarily means hiring more people. It's not quite internationalism, no, but it does benefit the internally colonized people who could gain employment instead of being forced to fill the ranks of the gig economy and reserve army of unemployed workers.
I will acknowledge the labor upsurge lacks enough international character. I'll be watching for who starts to organize migrant temp workers first.
UAW International is calling for a ceasefire, a full list of unions who have signed on can be found here. I'm not overly impressed by their calls, they only call for Israelis to be released when they should be calling for a hostage exchange and acknowledge that the Zionists have been taking Palestinians hostage by the thousands into detention centers, but they aren't just silently supporting Israel either.
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union recently shut down the Port of Oakland to prevent ships carrying weapons bound for Israel from leaving the docks. In fact, the ILWU has a long history of being interested in and supportive of Palestinian liberation going back decades because of their internationalist character that was cultivated during the anti-apartheid struggle against South Africa.
It's not just academics. The labor upsurge is gaining a political character. Something is happening.
I'll cheer when that happens, and you're right to point out the lacking radicalism in US unions. Yet, you're underestimating the importance of public demonstration and should recognize that even non-destructive acts still act as propaganda for further radical action. Tagging a building with paint can be a precursor to tagging it with... something else.
I don't share your pessimism for the white US working class. I think we're on the brink of a change and these are all signs.
We'll see.
I already pointed out that inflation, the value of the dollar, compared to 2019 is due to pandemics slowing shipping down, you literally had to pay for more labor for the same amount of goods shipped --> increased costs of goods. Sanctions also increase shipping costs --> increased costs of goods. The bulk of American workers are getting wealthier, thus inflation for even things like apples and watermelon, because there are more people who will spend that money. The struggle between US workers and US petty bourgs over who gets a bigger share of Imperialism does nothing to advance Communism. Savings rate propaganda induced by bourgeois media promotes Economistic organizing, again 6 figure workers spending their full monthly paycheck, whether to rents, social security and retirement funds (savings but not called savings), student/mortgage/consumer loans (others' savings), gambling/gatcha/collecting, "investing" in bubbles (housing, crypto, Tesla stock, "retail" investment has been growing ala "roaring 20s"), or doordash for every meal does not mean these workers are going to be any more interested in proletarian revolution.
Inflation rates in the US have never been more stable than the last 3 decades.
Interest rates are still historically low. Many loans were forgiven so the recent rise in interest rates seeks to slow down borrowing that the pandemic induced to absorb stimmy checks. It's all about inducing circulation or slowing it down when the bourgs want to.
This is not a new demand, it's consistent with Imperialist union activity historically. This type of reform still works on behalf of Imperialism to delay national liberation, it's certainly a contradiction we intend to exploit where available to us, though this requires we have an even stronger anti-Colonial line since making more oppressed nation bourgs adds troubling revisionisms to the movement.
So it's a bourgeois humanist position, without a hint of Marxism, and covering the true nature of Zionism and US labor's role in occupation and genocide? Color me surprised, this is nothing to celebrate, we've seen it before:
Don't downplay the role of conditional solidarity in shaping the demands of a Decolonization struggle. The form of the ANC now can't be separated from the way in which Apartheid "ended" (who owns the land and bread?). The same goes for these "anti-Zionist"-but-nowhere-anti-Zionist gestures that push blame on the Resistance and deny the reality of settler-Colonialism in Palestine.
This must have been said during every US involved war ever. I think such acts result because such bloodshed exists, before the bloodshed, none of them cared. After the bloodshed, they'll return to not caring. Until white workers are climbing over each other to commit class-suicide on behalf of revolution, I'll have little reason to value their solidarity.
And this explains the persistence of inflation?
We'll come back to this!
The bulk? Real wages have been flat for quite some time, but you handwaved this away by everyone having dual incomes because women entered the labor force (and women now have to have two jobs in the nuclear family). Yet, that doesn't actually resolve the problem! All you have done is doubled the flat wages, you haven't actually shown anyone getting "wealthier".
So. We aren't seeing higher wages and savings are at near record lows. Where is inflation coming from?
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only 15.5% of households earn between $100,000 and $150,000 annually.
You are not describing the white workers I interact with in my factory, except maybe people in management.
Okay, and then inflation spiked in the last few years.
Yes, pandemic supply chain disruptions which I don't dispute, but like you already acknowledged it's also because of the sanctions regime now backfiring onto the imperial core. That's not a small thing! In previous decades the US could impose sanctions on its foes without paying any price, but now those sanctions are hurting the value of USD because trade in dollars is becoming more expensive and because the sanctions regime is literally forcing the global economy to shift away! And the sanctions, which once weakened US enemies, are now unable to slow Russia's economy down. This only accelerates the shift away from dollars.
The higher interest rates (I'll grant, they could be higher!) are an attempt to claw back the money supply, but all it is doing is putting even more pressure on the global South as they are forced to pay those higher interest rates on their loans. As a result we've seen coups and massive protest movements in Africa, a pink tide in Latin America, and the high interest rate environment is itself pushing countries away from USD lending and creating fertile ground for lending from other banks in other currencies.
The low inflation was geopolitical when it was stable over the last three decades, and the higher inflation is geopolitical now.
Actually, the last time they were this high was right before the '08 financial crash. Makes you go hmm...
Yes, they used to be much higher before 2000, but I think you're underestimating how bad even these modest rates are for USD.
I still contend that these interest rates are going to force countries to move away from taking loans in USD and is already putting incredible political pressure on countries with existing loans in USD (most recently, see what's going on in Kenya). This, in turn, will push the global economy ever further away from exchange in dollars and towards economic alliances like BRICS.
Fair. It's only the locals that are actually calling this genocide and calling Zionism a settler-colonial project and calling for BDS.
They're great and should be recognized! The AFL-CIA remains embedded with the State Department, though.
Has a US service-member ever lit themselves on fire before?
I understand and sympathize with your pessimism.
I, for one, don't need the streets to already be running red to have at least a little revolutionary optimism.
Wages have not significantly dropped. Staying in the $23 dollar range since the 70s including the tens of millions of immigrants since then + women working more and more (and men working less) and wages are still the same? What does that mean overall? As the white male workforce aged and retired, more white men were given high wage jobs that are nearly equivalent to 2 median incomes (like missile engineering) and women and POC took the old jobs (productive factory, shipping, teaching, nursing). Incomes for Americans overall stayed consistent. On a global level $20 dollars an hour is humongous! Cost of living is actually not the cause of these wages, as most Proletarian global South cities are just as expensive as American ones and some are more expensive than NYC. Mexico, Canada, and the US have a merged market due to NAFTA, but only dead labor can travel freely, living labor is blocked by the border. What does this create? A free trade zone where workers doing the same work make $3 one one side of a deadly border, and $20 on the other. Why should we expect that US workers should be getting $25 by the 90s, $35 by now? Maintaining wealth while costs of much of personal consumption is actually dropping in real dollars (compare Nintendo consoles or appliances to the 90s). In the graph you show wages were the lowest in the 90s, where was this debourging then? The fact is that if white men were able to continue segregating women and POC, average wages still would have climbed.
But there is also the factor that average wage is being held down by immigrants, POC, and women (particularly immigrant women POC). Median white male wages have stagnated since the 70s, but the stratification is predominantly above the median, as in the rich got richer while the poor stayed the same.
The problem with centering on wages like this is that US wages have maintained global dominance while even more are getting absurd incomes. Just because tech workers are so rich does not mean GM workers have suddenly become exploited.
Again CoL is fairly comparable globally, US wages are rich everywhere, and US minimum wage is wealthier than most petty boojies in the global south, which is why they are willing to pack up and move here.
The position of US workers is high, them getting knocked off their pedestal will look a lot more drastic than this, like for instance minimum wage getting outlawed or the border blowing wide open (good tbh), or perhaps anti-peonage laws getting ripped away. Then I'd be concerned with them, but likely more concerned of them if the movement is not already approaching statehood ala (Independent Oglala Nation, Neo-Zapatistas, Panther Oakland).
The median wage of white men dropping because white women are working now does not upset me, and I would not run to white men and tell them they should be angry their monopoly on strong wages is ending. This however doesn't solve that USians in aggregate have a monopoly on high wages (as is the case of Imperialism). And if we look at that chart, let's say it dropped from 50k to 40k, this is not total compensation and benefits have increased since the 70s as the government props up housing speculation as a rule, retirement funds are growing in the stock market, and healthcare benefits are high. The real total compensation position of white men has not drastically changed since the 70s.
This also ignores that over half of US labor is genuinely unproductive white-collar work. 16% of jobs are factory work, then there is shipping work, and food producing work. I would consider people going from overpaid factory workers to white-collar work a bourgeois-ifying transition (have you seen the noise of this so-called intelligentsia on online?). Graph ends in 2000 but apparently it is up to 62% in 2022.
Wages haven't really gone up either, which means it doesn't explain inflation.
Wages only ever lag inflation. Wages rise in response to inflation, as workers are confronted by rising prices demand higher wages. Even bourgeoisified workers do this, because they've grown accustomed to their comfortable bourgeois lifestyle and demand wages that can sustain it. Blaming the inflation on wages is an obfuscation being pushed by bourgeois economists to hide the inflation caused by price gouging and monopolization and speculative bubbles and the geopolitics of dedollarization.
From 2005 to 2021, nominal wages went from $20/hr to $30/hr - a 50% increase.
From 2006 to 2021, nominal rents went from $694/mo to $1,191/mo - a 72% increase.
Wage inflation has fallen behind rent inflation. While the costs of Nintendos have fallen, the costs of having a roof over your head has risen. This bourgeois economist obfuscation creates an accounting trick that hides inflation as it is experienced by the worker, because bourgeois economists can hide unaffordable rent by telling workers "let them eat Nintendos!"
Inflation in other categories (food, home prices, etc) mostly matches wage inflation, but we see that renters specifically are falling behind. This actually creates a useful cleave to separate beourgeoisified workers from American proletarians, those who own property are bourgeoisified by their property investments and those who rent it are debourgeoisified by tenant exploitation.
Bourgeoisification does not come from personal consumption, it's an economic relationship that comes from property.
Healthcare costs in the US are outrageous, including them will just skew your data set. You have a good point, though, that bourgeoisified workers in the US benefit from their retirement funds and property speculation, and that's another useful cleave between who has revolutionary potential and who is prone to reaction. If someone has a 401K or owns land, they're not to be relied upon for revolutionary action.
And would you look at that, in 2022 about 42% of American households had $10K or less in retirement accounts.
I think it's useful to pay attention to debourgeoisification and I think this process is only going to accelerate as the geopolitical situation worsens for the empire. Yes, white US workers are paid very highly compared to the rest of the world and compared to non-white workers. Yes, "standard of living" is a cruel obfuscation of the fact that white US workers live better lives because they have been bourgeoisified. Yet even still, while being paid highly and having cheap Nintendos they're also being charged highly for the essentials of life, rendering their higher wages just another source of profit for businesses and investors to reap.
I think it's more useful to look at who owns property and who owns investments, rather than specific job type. I doubt you'd say a factory worker that becomes a call center worker is in a particularly bourgeoisifying position.
The bourgeoisified workforce would, in my estimation, be somewhere between that 42% that have enough in retirement savings to the 65% that owns their own home. Either a very large minority or a solid majority. It will be important to watch these trends going forward, because if we have another housing crash or stock crash those numbers could plummet again like they did after 2008.
That's not necessarily good, bourgeoisified workers are prone to reaction when they're hurting, but it's something to keep an eye on.
Much of our disagreement stems from the definition of petty Bourgeoisie (which is actually many different property relations).
Going from factory to call center is being distanced from the MOP. More and more Americans are being distanced from the MOP (moreso as it leaves the country). This means that these wages are coming from someone else's proximity to the MOP as surplus value producers. This is a more intensely Bourgeois position (Bourgeois != Capitalist or productive property owners). Workers consuming surplus-value from other workers beyond their aggregate output (so we don't count out unproductive work that directly aids productive work) are not exploited, and are Semi-proletarian in character. The Semi-Proletariat and Petty Bourgeoisie form the "middle classes". While America has grown simultaneously to moving MOP outside of the borders, this means that the US population as a whole including the workforce is becoming "middle class" between the global south and the Imperialist Bourgeoisie (referred to by Putin as the "golden billion"). Moving away from laboring with the MOP but keeping the same wages is a move closer to the Bourgeoisie. Lenin and Mao both referred to teachers as petty Bourgeois even though there is no productive MOP involved, this is because they are paid with someone else's labor to facilitate Bourgeois rule. Look at the Middle Class in Britain paper I posted in the thread.
The US absorbs more value than it produces, there is inflation if it does not consume it all at once (savings are a symptom of this). If anything is leftover, inflation. Which leads once again to the problem of Semi-proles valuing land speculation. Not all want to buy an inflating home, but the majority of them do, and this causes the rest to face that inflation through renting, or worse, buy into that system themselves to keep up. The problem is every union pension and retirement fund is speculating on that same system. Caught in the contradiction, the US workforce is reinforcing the settler land regime! Simple Economistic demands further reinforce that problem!
This is why housing/asset inflation is higher than CPI. Economism is always a dead end within an Imperialist economy.
This cycle has been in existence in this exact form since WW2, relative sizes and shares of the Imperial loot are changing but not qualitatively. Just because it crashes doesn't mean it's created qualitatively different class consciousness, because 99% of US workers don't even acknowledge the existence of Labor Aristocracy.
Prices and Wages are products of class struggles. You are correct to point out that there are geo-political factors but then again, how many US workers are actively Russophobes, Sinophobes, and Zionists, the vast majority?
The bottom fifth of US workers have the most potential for committing class suicide, rather than organize them around keeping up with the top 4/5ths, we need to point out to them that those demands are a dead end and can only lead to a shuffling around of who is in the bottom. Ending the colonial system through force is our only option. This is good though, since that bottom fifth represents most food workers and shipping workers, this means they are in position to starve out the fascist bastion and defend the Nat Lib struggles who will be seizing territory from the US. I want you to know that we are much agreement about the potential of the bottom of US workers, what I want to get away from is copium that this segment is growing, it's simply just not the case. Revolution will come from the minority of the minority. Don't fear, the US is selling us its noose.
I have two problems with this definition of "bourgeois."
The first and most obvious is that it renders children and disabled people who can't do "productive" work as bourgeois. As if the fact that they can't produce commodities makes them bourgeois, and thus prone to reaction. As if the young and the disabled haven't been at the forefront of every single movement against capitalism and imperialism and oppression and bigotry. You have to reconcile the existence of people like Helen Keller, who produced no commodities and had no inputs on production, as somehow bourgeois and reactionary by her very inability to be productive under capitalism. Or did being an author make her productive in your world view? Is that all it takes? Look at this conversation - we're all authors now!
The second and more insidious is how you seem to consider customer-facing work as unproductive. What? Their job is to act as facilitators for exchange of commodities and as teachers for the proper utilization of those commodities after purchase to prevent returns. That's productive! Imagine a call center worker that helps connect someone with a technitian to fix a software issue, that's literally an act in the chain of production. They are as much producers of surplus as every other facilitator of exchange and customer-facing worker, from truckers to longshoremen to cashiers. They produce value, even if they aren't literally manufacturing widgets in the sparks and steam factory.
The bourgeoisie are the owners of capital. They're the investors, the proprietors, and the shareholders.
In what world is someone in a call center sweatshop bourgeois?
The transformation of quantitative change into qualitative change has to occur eventually, there are inflection points and we need to be paying attention identify them.
Is it when the streets already run red with the blood of martyrs? Or can it happen at any point before that, when people are awakening to class consciousness and internationalism and settler-colonialism and imperialism? Never in my life have I seen so many Americans turn on Israel. Something is happening and I wish you weren't too pessimistic to see it.
Those that can't work are a strata of the lumpen-proletariat, what separates them is not having access to legal income and consumption (outside of social democracy crumbs). Disabled proletarians working unproductive roles still form an aggregate worker alongside their peers. Nothing in my statement disregards such individuals. Hellen Keller was a professional writer and lecturer, paid for her products, she was petty bourgeois.
Unproductive labor is all such labor that does not create surplus-value, but helps preserve or appropriate it. Marx:
Call centers do not create surplus-value, they only help realize surplus-value, this is why they are unproductive. This is not a moral assessment, and it does not mean unproductive workers can't be exploited. Productive and Unproductive workers form an abstract Aggregate or Combined Laborer which must produce surplus-value to be exploited. If unproductive labor pool is paid more than productive labor pool, then there must be super-profits being realized, such is the case of the Aggregate US Worker and the global proletariat. Such a relationship creates Semi-Proletarians and is the start of a Labor Aristocracy or bourgeois-proletariat.
I didn't call them bourgeois, I said they are moving closer to the bourgeoisie than they are the proletariat and lumpen-proletariat, it's a function of direction. Those that manage bourgeois apparatuses in exchange for wages are also petty-bourgeois. They work directly towards maintaining Bourgeois Rule as a system. I didn't make this definition up. Nobody would ever deny that there are strata of workers wealthier than members of the bourgeoisie, this is due to decaying and rising strata as Capitalism develops.
I'm sure as much was said about the Apartheid Regime. Wake me when they turn on themselves.
Correct.
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?
If value is created and never realized by anyone, does it even exist? If a factory produces widgets and then dumps them directly in the ocean, is it producing value?
Value only exists after it has been realized, the realization of value is necessary in the chain of commodity production. Facilitating commodity exchange produces the value of moving commodities from the factory to the store to the customer, while teaching customers to utilize the commodities they consume literally makes them productive. 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 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.
So you can only ever react to conditions as they change. There's a word for that~
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.
If I don't respond directly respond to a point I think they are fair. Inflation eats at the super-profits in wages and eats into the super-profits in greater proportion the smaller the wage. That being said I would put the limit of boojified to be the point where they cross into genuine exploitation (but this does need to be factor in time, segments with long breaks between sources of income would be falling fast into lumpen: unemployed, health/body reasons, discrimination, national oppression). In reality we generally skip over realizing an exploited proletariat due to moving straight from semi-proles to lumpen-proles, this is somewhat problematic for economic organizing and this relationship should be focused on rather than one of the loot share struggle between semi-proles and bourgs (petite and haute). Organizing as anti-inflation attracts strata with interests against national liberation and the bottom 20%, and these cannot be organized as a single mass without convincing the these strata to commit class suicide (challenge level extreme). So far the loot sharing struggle remains as no real exploited prole exists within citizenship standards (outside of some children), so we need to be careful who we are organizing, because just as quickly the balance can swing back towards the boojified workers if they are able to co-opt the energy for their own selfish reforms, (much of the bottom would like it too, pushing us further from agitating towards revolution and prole internat). I want to be clear that my disagreement with your original post is that this strata of people "losing" is growing. I don't think this is the case, "racial" and gender wealth gaps are increasing which points to privileges growing for white-men. Gender oppressed whites could be on the decline as it seems white-men are desperate to maintain monopoly on income streams "for the sake of the white nation". That's certainly a contradiction worth digging at to lop off the white gender-oppressor strata.
Yes but ratios of physical commodities to services do matter globally (the nature of Imperialism). The US workforce is predominantly service facing. If the world was to be equalized, it would be noted that the US has too many of such workers than would be valued by equal exchange. The point is, radical change would happen in the economy if the economy was cut off from physical inputs, including much of the factory work. This would cause internal pressure in the US's near environment, heightening the settler relationship to the extreme. This is already the scenario Magacoms dream of, being able to "re-industrialize" with all all these natural resources "available to us". That being said the US white-collar industry has specific anti-communist goals as well. Growing a Labor Aristocracy encourages "brain drain" from all other states and forces even Communist ones to adopt this model of valuing labor, creating Semi-Proles if not LA classes in their countries. It is a sign of bourgeoisification when these workers are paid significantly higher wages than primary and secondary industries. I only mean to say lower wage office workers are pushed from their role as equal users of the MOP, as in paid the same for even less access to it, like in terms of proximity, when looking at the global context in a fair LTV world (e.g. it's not natural but policy that these workers maintain wages well above global standards). The bulk of office workers are being privileged with increased pay and benefits and this gives them interests that put them at odds with the global proletariat and in the case of Socialist countries with their own proletariat. China has been clamping down on housing speculation and tackling wages for white-collar workers to keep them in check and the current TikTok debacle has Chinese employees potentially benefiting from ByteDance entering the US exchange, likely to be the biggest IPO of all time and the workers own 20% of the company. This leads to the increased stock ownership of unions and unorganized white-collar work in that apparently some 72% of companies offer equity, most give bonuses (which shouldn't be directly compared yoy but happen often as carrot sticks), and some 19% of employees individually own their employer's stock. Now stock grants are simply a sleight of hand keep a share of an employee's wages, but that also means that total compensation is the more accurate number in terms of labor costs and carries with it some stake the employee has in the company. US wide stock ownership dipped in the early 2010s but has since raised back to over 60%. There are not many Capitalists in terms population points, and about 1/5th is considered petty business owners, so much of the stock owners are wage workers who do not own direct productive assets. More households own stocks than ever before. That being said, in general, the top 4/5ths of USian workers are gaining bigger shares of global production (though there might be tugs and pulls in the innards of this mass), the bottom 20% are (slowly) falling behind and here the bulk is oppressed nations. The value of the bottom mass has never been understated though its improvement directly contradicts the global proletariat and indirectly themselves with increased eugenics and increased incarceration.
I would not premise Algeria as a model for WITBD in the Americas. The land relationship in the US is essentially one big "tourist sector" that would be visible in Algiers but gone from the rest of the country. Much of the land in the US is run by settler kulaks, and settler claims for domination of land are much greater in the US. The US settler regime has always harmed the bottom of settlers, it seems this does not matter much to the vast majority self interested mass, besides that they are given much lighter treatment if not loopholes to avoid punishment from civil society. Again I strongly put primary fear of oppressed nation led lumpen revolt in the cities, and Indigenous land protection all over, as the reason why police and settlers are getting more militant (only a continuing trend of the last 70 years of continued Jim Crow).
That being said I agree that gender oppression is packaged into settler-nationalism through colonially imposed gender domination. Certainly there is a struggle as strata of settlers are more obsessed with the nation (settler-nationalist sexual politics, white anxiety) than others, the recycling of petty bourg settlers during the growth (and decline) of Imperialism I think holds contradictory seeds for gender liberation and increased gender oppression (combined form assimilation). So I think, motion in Imperialism whether up or down fans the flames of the gender struggle. I believe this also reflects in other eugenic regimes of social control ("ability", "race" -- which is obfuscated national character). Having an antagonized position in the gender structure certainly reduces national ties, often to the point where it's easy to sever, this is why it's more important to stress the nat-lib struggles who do not uniformly adopt settler gender norms (certain class-strata may) and are often antagonized by them as policy (ON lumpen "surplus males", state enforced "single-motherhood", forced adoptions, and gender oppression in the carceral system). We should not be scared of calling national and gender antagonisms, class antagonisms, and in that sense in certain contexts they can become primary antagonisms in a decisive moment, superseding other class identities including settler and bourgeois. All of these oppressed classes have interests to agitate and form lines on. The support we get at CLN from settlers is already showing strong correlation to certain gender and sexual demographics, regardless of "economic class" background, and our opponents are more often than not bigots towards them. Just as WITBD with the Feminism movement, Marxists must be able to slice the economic sources of Revisionism and solidify a line that is revolutionary even if that means being less "popular" than bourgeois lines, we don't need a majority.
From MIM Theory 1:
The formerly high-paid worker or small business owner will certainly become reactionary, and in fact I think they already have.
What of the children of those bourgeoisified white workers who came into adulthood and found out they can't afford education, can't afford property, can barely afford rent, and have to live paycheck to paycheck paying off debts their parents never had?
I don't think they're responding to debourgeoisification the way their parents are, and that makes all the difference.