puts on conspiracy hat: inb4 shooter is Uke agent
You're already underselling the level of crosstalk between US white labor unions and the KKK. The St Louis "Soviet" formed a lynch mob during WW1.
Yeah colleges were heavily subsidized and California had one of the largest public systems in the country. That system also gave Bobby Seale and Huey Newton an education so it's not a coincidence that 1969 was when college prices started to spiral.
The colleges themselves are racketeers, I recommend Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris who writes about the creation of Stanford U and its subsequent role in Colonialism and Anti-Communism. Stanford's campus land houses all of the big weapon makers and it produced Herbert Hoover, the man responsible for mining gold during Australia's genocide, modernizing the March on Africa, and the modern semi-state food cartels and housing policy.
The supply and demand angle is only half-right. There's an intent to raise the costs to control the amount of people entering college as wages rise, it's supposed to be a class barrier. Combined with admissions tests (which literally started as "IQ" tests) having the scores to gain funding opportunities for education is a eugenic test. It's class-eugenicist poll-tests and poll-taxes performed nationally.
Also much of these schools are funded directly by land thefts in the US: https://www.hcn.org/issues/52-4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities/
The University of Minnesota founders started a war to create the school (and the state): https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/great-university-land-grab
This was during the US Civil War. The Dakota uprising was punished by Lincoln with the largest mass execution in US history, of 38 Dakotas, down from the original 200 captured for execution.
The endowments many of these schools have are predominantly funded from these land cessions. Washington State University's land cessions of PNW nations funded enough to fill its entire endowment with royalties from logging leases. Texas A&M and Arizona are funded by active subterranean oil drilling rights.
The other reason is because the jobs college degrees provide are getting higher wages and the schools can charge that much and someone will take it, and the banks have the surplus funds from Imperialism and the housing racket.
Weaken an economy until it's cheap and easy to purchase labor-power and mining/farming rights
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.
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.
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.
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 trans folk, and I blame imperial decline. Who gets to be a settler will be winnowed away.
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.
No, but you’ve as much said that you avoid agitating among settlers and are content to ignore them until they spontaneously join the anti-colonial struggle. You literally said " Wake me when they turn on themselves." How else am I to interpret that but you choosing only to react to spontaneous solidarity among settlers?
None of them are acknowledging the need to give up their settler society, you're telling me to value the statements on Israel that don't mention settler-Colonialism. Settlers are national oppressors as a class. In a context with no Colonialism, we still wouldn't ally with the petty bourgs as a class and center their demands, we have to slice them up and pick friends from foe. We shouldn't care about the demands of an oppressor nation unless they are in line with ours: prisoners, the homeless, and people oppressed for their bodies are people we intend to work for. If you want science on the settler question hit the books sibling, become an expert on colonial history in your immediate realm. Chunka Luta library exists for free.
No, but you’re saying they’re unproductive, even though they use their labor to produce a service.
Why does it bother you so much? Does it change that these goods and services are being paid from value stolen overseas? Quit projecting workerism onto my line.
The so-called War on Terror was a reaction to the decline of the empire and in response the police had to become more violent and more invasive and more lethal and more secretive etc etc in order to control the proles. The police became occupation soldiers to fight “terrorism” and this has been boiling over into more and more massive uprisings against them.
Maybe you won’t wake up until the streets run red, but I think it’s worth trying to anticipate what comes next.
The streets are already covered in my peoples' blood, quit playing with me. Read Blood in the Land, Fire this Time. You gotta be kidding me if you think my sense of urgency is lagging when y'all don't notice shit until you think it might be affecting you and your kin. Thinking the police presence is for you is absurd, the conditions for our oppression has already been here. The cops are killing us now, and most of us aren't Communists, square that.
Btw lets zoom in on that wage chart, looking at median wage (where half of wage workers do better), It has been increasing in the recent decades with an unusual spike in 2020 due to pandemic stimmies. Why hadn't there been revolts of white workers and youth in the 90s like Black and Latino youth? Economically the situation was worse then. Again we are looking for declines in conditions, not stagnation, for some reason "class consciousness" spiked in spite of increased earnings during the pandemic, you posit inflation economistically, I blame eugenics and national oppression. Your chart enthusiastically removes supervisors, who are a fifth of the workforce (remember 20% of white men don't even participate in labor anymore). There's really no way to see a real decline in US workers if the median and average wages are at a 4 decade high (excluding 2020). It doesn't line up with your hypothesis. Inflation did not peak with wages in 2020, it peaked in 2022, after a spike in real earnings for USians.
More police and settler-vigilante killings year over year since the 70s, police budgets expanding every year. For some reason these things occurred during "bourgeoisification", you never quite explained why that occurred.
By failing to recognize the role that settlers always play in anti-colonial struggle, instead leaving them to organize themselves spontaneously and reacting to it as it happens.
For sure but you seem to think we avoid working with settlers as a rule. It's worth agitating people genuinely interested in understanding reality and changing it, and people pushed to their limits where revolutionary change is the only thing they are satisfied with. What I'm saying is it's historically clear the base of settlers interested in our struggles has not seen significant motion through time (because they were just as reactionary during the height of exploitation against settler workers). That being said most settlers in Algeria fled, the ones that fought for Algeria earned their place. I expect in our conditions not many fleeing, but also not playing nice.
My contention was you calling socially necessary labor unproductive, when it clearly produces a social commodity. What your proposing reads like a vulgar workerism, almost like Nixonian “hard hat” fetishism, which seeks to devalue socially necessary labor as not being real work and to alienate them from the workers’ struggle.
Yeah this is no such case. I'm only using it insofar as it has been used in the literature. I'm not saying these workers are privileged above productive workers in the US, usually they are not since unions generally are paid significantly higher wages. If there's actually a group I think tends more reactionary, it's the production line workers in the AFL-CIO who practice Imperial workerism that obfuscates their relationship to their colleagues in Mexico and China. None of this is to dismiss or alienate US workers for their jobs, the system of their job economy is the problem. They must have some workerist thoughts if they think they are shunned from being Communists for their jobs.
Furthermore, my hypothesis is that debourgeoisification is occurring due to imperial decline, and that’s the source of inflation and the so-called housing “shortage” and the militarization of police and the chipping away of compromises reached by the labor movement when they chose to become collaborators in exchange for concessions etc etc
So-called shortage yes but remember that the overbuilt and expensive houses are already owned, and if Blackstone bought it, it means someone just profited of their speculation. It means somebody actually "owns" that value, and housing prices have always increased faster than inflation because Imperialists around the world (and 401ks, unions, and CPUSA) buy mortgage packages to park their money in investments outpacing inflation.
Police militarization has always been increasing since the 60s. I've posted the pic elsewhere in the thread but police and carceral spending increases every year outpacing inflation. This is a pre-existing trend. It looks to be more prevalent due to the firepower readily available to would be fighters in the streets as seen in Dallas during the first round of BLM protests. Though the trend has already been there for the likes of LAPD and NYPD.
Yes! If the chain of commodity production ended with dumping all commodities directly into the ocean then no value would be created.
Then it's not socially necessary. The manner in which exchange occurs does not matter. Value is produced from the labor not the sales. The value being realized at exchange is not being argued with, but that doesn't mean it was created by exchange. These are two different phenomena.
And as the empire enters decline, who gets to be a “settler” is winnowed away to preserve superprofits for a smaller and smaller cohort. That’s what the inflation is, that’s what the result of dedollarization will be, and instead of trying to analyze and predict where things are going you have consigned yourself purely to reacting to things after they happen.
By building a Nat Lib struggle for oppressed nations? Lmao? Just because I don't seek to organize class enemies doesn't mean I'm sitting around waiting for nothing. And no, just because a settler became a lumpen does not mean their nation has stopped occupying another nation, still a settler. Their national ties form their reactionary tendencies.
As you say, it is socially necessary labor and would still need to be done under Socialism.
Socialism would turn it into necessary labor (socialist planning, as opposed to Capitalist anarchy, this is the fundamental transition away from the prod-unprod relationship in Capitalism). It is not socially necessary labor under capitalism. It's not making the economy bigger, it's redirecting the economy. That being said I doubt the world would like to continue trading US call support for their food stuffs as in the world's current arrangement.
And what about the lowest paid call center workers? They use literal prison labor in call centers, for pennies an hour. Are they petty bourgeoisie too?
Well the vast majority of them are not prisoners (but also prisoners are hired at minimum wage and the state steals the wages, so it's not directly comparable to 3W labor). I source MIM(prisons), a prison movement, who says they are generally not near the means of production in prison. Prisoners' interests are already being agitated for the national character of prison oppression. Prisoners receive 3W wages, so yes they are genuinely exploitated workers and agitating them for JDPON rule is much much easier than other wage workers in the US. I'm sure that MIM(p) considers themselves primarily lumpen-proletarians turned revolutionaries. Once again I have not claimed that call center workers or non-managerial unproductive work is petty Bourgeois, merely that it is semi-proletarian, which Lenin never really differentiates besides when he's picking apart the various parts of the "middle classes". Semi-proletarian only in the case that they are receiving super-profits in their wages (which all except prisoners, children, and migrant workers are), but they are not alone! Productive US minimum wage jobs in a global context are also super-profit spiked wages. If the aggregate worker has no internal or external super-exploitation, i.e. management and sales paid equal as individuals to production line workers, there would be no Semi-proletarians or labor aristocracy, and all would be Proletarian.
Semi-proletarians bring Revisionism into the movement in their focus on Economism. In the case of an Imperial Semi-proletariat, a Labor Aristocracy, these economic demands are born reactionary and reformist. (wage struggles for the super-exploited would be progressive in that they put pressure back on the labor aristocracy).
I need you to know that I'm calling all legal-wage productive and unproductive US labor a Semi-proletarian Labor Aristocracy. I'm not targeting call center workers particularly as opposed to any other US labor, but it's a fact that a nearly entirely (non-direct producing) Semi-proletarian working class is not producing nearly as much as it consumes and this is a problem for such an economy if the ports were subject to blockade. Amazon workers can't ship anything because barely any of it is made here. Call centers have no products to solicit and assist. This is not the same situation if China was blockaded. A sales team isn't going to be able to transition to growing food or mining ore very quickly.
So! What would you call someone who can’t work in a factory because those jobs don’t exist after de-industrialization, and so they’re forced to work in a call center sweatshop?
Calling them sweatshops is certainly a stretch, averaging $17 compared to 60c in Haitian shops. De-industrialization is the reason why the US is becoming more bourg, its getting wealthier by simply buying more labor in the world.
Value only exists after it has been realized, the realization of value is necessary in the chain of commodity production.
Yes but is value created in exchange or socially necessary labor? These are definitions Marx used. The capitalists speculated on the productive labor, the unproductive labor helps the capitalist realize the profit, the products were already created. Shipping labor is productive in that it is necessary for products to be consumed. A corporation can't expand their products by hiring advertisers and support lines, it only helps them indirectly recover past speculation. Productive labor is the expansion of capital.
There is certainly unproductive work being done in the US i.e. bullshit jobs, but to just relegate everyone who doesn’t work in the Sparks and Steam Factory as “unproductive” is mystification.
You're applying an emotional or moral description to unproductive labor that does not exist in the literature. It's a scientific term.
You are confusing the people who manage the exchange apparatus with the ones who they manage. No one operating the phone in the sweat shop manages anything.
In the sense that there are contractor firms, who speculate on call center labor through contracts rather than them being hired directly alongside productive labor, are producing value for their employer, but this is due to increased Bourgeois cooperation. However, we can abstract conglomerate firms and realize the same productive-unproductive relations remain hidden under layers of Bourgeois contracts. Again this does not matter besides the war strategy that if the US majority is not producing products or components of products, then the real productive capacity of the US is weaker than it looks. This is not a condemnation of the type of labor, it's simply relaying how Capital treats such labor. Such work could definitely become socially necessary in a Socialist world system. Under Capitalism, it is labor that Capitalists do but now can pay it away, which distances them from the petty-bourgeoisie further.
So you can only ever react to conditions as they change. There’s a word for that~
An oppressed national who doesn't expect their oppressors to change their ways because they never have historically unless driven by the force of we oppressed, right in their face? Every revolution needs to slice friend from foe and take control in existing conditions. For now settler workers are enemies. If we are able to advance to a stage overthrowing the land regime, where new contradictions are opened as old ones close, these workers can be won en masse.
When AIM and the Lakota radicals took over the hamlet town Wounded Knee in 1973, they declared the Independent Oglala Nation and held the town for 70 days. During this period they granted citizenship to anyone who wanted it, and most of the town stayed behind even after given the chance to flee, because they knew the army would create a bloodbath if all the settlers were out of the picture. This is the faith we have in settler workers, they will not initiate such acts but many will follow when placed in the middle of a revolutionary moment.
The first and most obvious is that it renders children and disabled people who can’t do “productive” work as bourgeois.
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.
The second and more insidious is how you seem to consider customer-facing work as unproductive.
Unproductive labor is all such labor that does not create surplus-value, but helps preserve or appropriate it. Marx:
Since the direct purpose and the actual product of capitalist production is surplus value, only such labour is productive, and only such an exerter of labour capacity is a productive worker, as directly produces surplus value. Hence only such labour is productive as is consumed directly in the production process for the purpose of valorising capital.
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.
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?
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.
Never in my life have I seen so many Americans turn on Israel.
I'm sure as much was said about the Apartheid Regime. Wake me when they turn on themselves.
Alt-right is dead (in the US) and they were just (petty) Bourgeois intelligentsia coat tailing Trump's settler populism. The most successful pivot from those politics are the christo-fash "groypers". In the end Alt-righters were just Liberal elites opportunistically trying gain leverage against their own class competition with Trump's populism but are dorky snobs who clearly despise Trump's poorer voters.
I agree that both the settler-populist and Christo-Fash groups are going to be further agitated.