redtea

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/971805

Sources for all claims in link.

I wrote in December that to call China the "world leader in renewable energy" was a colossal understatement.

Even the Western press considers the PRC's climate target to be all-important to preventing complete global disaster. It was estimated to reduce projected temperature by 0.3 degrees Celsius, the largest drop ever calculated by climate models.

Anyone doubting that the PRC is willing and capable of not just fulfilling, but exceeding, its goals is not paying attention.

Each year from 2020 to 2022, China installed about 140GW of new renewable electricity capacity, more than the US, the EU, and India put together. (A gigawatt is enough to power 750,000 homes.)

In December, ground was broken on the world's largest desert renewable energy project in Inner Mongolia.

The IEA estimated China would add 80GW of new solar capacity in 2023; in February, the China Photovoltaic Industry Association said between 95 and 120

Both are already wrong. In the first four months of 2023, nearly THREE TIMES as much new solar capacity had been installed than in the same period in 2022. China's NEW solar capacity installed this year will exceed the entire TOTAL in the US.

In May, the chairman of Tongwei Solar predicted that new installations might fall between 200 and 300 gigawatts in 2024—almost TWICE the current US total.

It's not just solar energy that China does well. In 2021, China installed more offshore wind capacity in one year than the rest of the world combined had in the past five. As of January 2022, China operated half of all the world’s offshore wind turbines.

According a report by Global Energy Monitor in June, China is currently on track to DOUBLE its entire renewable energy capacity by 2025—five years earlier than the government's original target date of 2030.

China’s “nuclear pipeline” or the total capacity of all its new reactors under development, is also as big as the rest of the world’s combined, at ~250 GW. In 2021, 19 new reactors were under construction, 43 awaiting permits, and another 166 were planned.

In April 2022, plans for another 6 new reactors were announced. China also has the most advanced and efficient reactors in the world, with no need for water cooling; in 2022, for example, the first “fourth-generation” reactor came online in Shandong.

… In fact, proportional to their share, the US contribution was 0.05% of China’s in 2021.

Energy is only one aspect of the climate solution, though; China is ALSO far and away the world leader in EVERY OTHER aspect.

Since 1980, China doubled its forest coverage, planting more new trees than the rest of the world combined.

Per the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, between 2010 and 2020 China had an average annual net gain in forest area of almost 2 million hectares, over 4 times as much as Australia’s (2nd-largest) and nearly 20 times as much as the United States’.

In 2021, the government set a new target rate of afforestation of 36,000 square kilometers per year—or 3.6 million hectares, nearly double its previous rate, or enough new trees to cover the land area of Belgium.

China's shift to a green economy isn't just happening fast—it's still accelerating.

From 2016-2018, EV sales in China jumped from 1% to 5%. They reached 20% in 2022—three years ahead of schedule. (The US finally reached 5% in 2022.)

As of 2022, 98% of all electric buses in the world were deployed in Chinese cities.

China's electric high-speed rail network is longer than every other country's combined, and continues to expand. In 2007 China had virtually no HSR; today, if they had been placed in one line, China's high-speed railways could wrap around the circumference of the Earth.

According to the Paulson Institute in Chicago, when accounting for not just revenue but passenger time and airline trips saved, China's HSR had generated a net surplus of nearly $400 billion as of 2022.

No other country is forcing China to lead the world in the conversion to a sustainable economy—in fact, the United States government has been trying to STOP it, for example by placing sanctions on China's photovoltaic manufacturing.

China's goal was peak emissions before 2030 and carbon-neutrality by 2060. Given how much Chinese renewables have overperformed recently, the peak will likely come sooner rather than later—maybe within the next two years. It may even already be passed.

China's emissions are mainly from coal. But Chinese coal-fired power plants are much different from Western plants.

Chinese coal plants have set the world record for efficiency, approaching 50%, compared with a typical Australian plant’s 30% efficiency.

The PRC’s clean air policies not only cut air pollution almost in half between 2013 and 2020, but also drove a global decline in air pollution. (I.e. if China’s contribution were tallied separately, the overall rate would have increased, not decreased.)

Violating China's environmental policies can lead to real punishment. In March 2021, four major steel mills in Hebei were caught falsifying records to evade carbon emission limits; the next year, dozens of executives responsible were sentenced to prison.

In contrast, though the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe killed several workers and was the largest marine oil spill in history, no one from BP spent even a day in jail.

As of this tweet, Norfolk Southern faces no criminal charges for the East Palestine train disaster in February.

Last summer, after weeks of struggle, the wildfires besieging Chongqing were driven back and extinguished; not just by water, sand, chemicals, or controlled burns, but by community.

Twenty thousand civil servants and volunteers climbed or biked up and down the mountain in the sweltering heat to deliver supplies and construct fire barriers; through their collective action, the cities were saved.

The solutions to the climate apocalypse are collective and mundane—economic planning, technological development, and the redistribution of resources—but the freedom to pursue those solutions is very rare and very dear.

Presently, China alone seems to have this freedom.

Also in China is the largest economic engine in history controlled by a Communist Party and a workers' state, that is not required by class interest to seek profit above all else.

Probably just a coincidence or something, idk.

Sources for all claims in link.

I wrote in December that to call China the "world leader in renewable energy" was a colossal understatement.

Even the Western press considers the PRC's climate target to be all-important to preventing complete global disaster. It was estimated to reduce projected temperature by 0.3 degrees Celsius, the largest drop ever calculated by climate models.

Anyone doubting that the PRC is willing and capable of not just fulfilling, but exceeding, its goals is not paying attention.

Each year from 2020 to 2022, China installed about 140GW of new renewable electricity capacity, more than the US, the EU, and India put together. (A gigawatt is enough to power 750,000 homes.)

In December, ground was broken on the world's largest desert renewable energy project in Inner Mongolia.

The IEA estimated China would add 80GW of new solar capacity in 2023; in February, the China Photovoltaic Industry Association said between 95 and 120

Both are already wrong. In the first four months of 2023, nearly THREE TIMES as much new solar capacity had been installed than in the same period in 2022. China's NEW solar capacity installed this year will exceed the entire TOTAL in the US.

In May, the chairman of Tongwei Solar predicted that new installations might fall between 200 and 300 gigawatts in 2024—almost TWICE the current US total.

It's not just solar energy that China does well. In 2021, China installed more offshore wind capacity in one year than the rest of the world combined had in the past five. As of January 2022, China operated half of all the world’s offshore wind turbines.

According a report by Global Energy Monitor in June, China is currently on track to DOUBLE its entire renewable energy capacity by 2025—five years earlier than the government's original target date of 2030.

China’s “nuclear pipeline” or the total capacity of all its new reactors under development, is also as big as the rest of the world’s combined, at ~250 GW. In 2021, 19 new reactors were under construction, 43 awaiting permits, and another 166 were planned.

In April 2022, plans for another 6 new reactors were announced. China also has the most advanced and efficient reactors in the world, with no need for water cooling; in 2022, for example, the first “fourth-generation” reactor came online in Shandong.

… In fact, proportional to their share, the US contribution was 0.05% of China’s in 2021.

Energy is only one aspect of the climate solution, though; China is ALSO far and away the world leader in EVERY OTHER aspect.

Since 1980, China doubled its forest coverage, planting more new trees than the rest of the world combined.

Per the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, between 2010 and 2020 China had an average annual net gain in forest area of almost 2 million hectares, over 4 times as much as Australia’s (2nd-largest) and nearly 20 times as much as the United States’.

In 2021, the government set a new target rate of afforestation of 36,000 square kilometers per year—or 3.6 million hectares, nearly double its previous rate, or enough new trees to cover the land area of Belgium.

China's shift to a green economy isn't just happening fast—it's still accelerating.

From 2016-2018, EV sales in China jumped from 1% to 5%. They reached 20% in 2022—three years ahead of schedule. (The US finally reached 5% in 2022.)

As of 2022, 98% of all electric buses in the world were deployed in Chinese cities.

China's electric high-speed rail network is longer than every other country's combined, and continues to expand. In 2007 China had virtually no HSR; today, if they had been placed in one line, China's high-speed railways could wrap around the circumference of the Earth.

According to the Paulson Institute in Chicago, when accounting for not just revenue but passenger time and airline trips saved, China's HSR had generated a net surplus of nearly $400 billion as of 2022.

No other country is forcing China to lead the world in the conversion to a sustainable economy—in fact, the United States government has been trying to STOP it, for example by placing sanctions on China's photovoltaic manufacturing.

China's goal was peak emissions before 2030 and carbon-neutrality by 2060. Given how much Chinese renewables have overperformed recently, the peak will likely come sooner rather than later—maybe within the next two years. It may even already be passed.

China's emissions are mainly from coal. But Chinese coal-fired power plants are much different from Western plants.

Chinese coal plants have set the world record for efficiency, approaching 50%, compared with a typical Australian plant’s 30% efficiency.

The PRC’s clean air policies not only cut air pollution almost in half between 2013 and 2020, but also drove a global decline in air pollution. (I.e. if China’s contribution were tallied separately, the overall rate would have increased, not decreased.)

Violating China's environmental policies can lead to real punishment. In March 2021, four major steel mills in Hebei were caught falsifying records to evade carbon emission limits; the next year, dozens of executives responsible were sentenced to prison.

In contrast, though the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe killed several workers and was the largest marine oil spill in history, no one from BP spent even a day in jail.

As of this tweet, Norfolk Southern faces no criminal charges for the East Palestine train disaster in February.

Last summer, after weeks of struggle, the wildfires besieging Chongqing were driven back and extinguished; not just by water, sand, chemicals, or controlled burns, but by community.

Twenty thousand civil servants and volunteers climbed or biked up and down the mountain in the sweltering heat to deliver supplies and construct fire barriers; through their collective action, the cities were saved.

The solutions to the climate apocalypse are collective and mundane—economic planning, technological development, and the redistribution of resources—but the freedom to pursue those solutions is very rare and very dear.

Presently, China alone seems to have this freedom.

Also in China is the largest economic engine in history controlled by a Communist Party and a workers' state, that is not required by class interest to seek profit above all else.

Probably just a coincidence or something, idk.

Someone curious asked:

Do you know of any resources where I can hear the options of average Soviet citizens during the time of the USSR?

I linked Dessaline's GitHub page: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/socialism_faq.html#did-the-citizens-of-the-soviet-union-dislike-their-government.

And I suggested Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds but I don't think it quite fits the description.

Can anyone think of other resources, maybe a peoples' history kind of thing?

I was unsure where to cross-post this. But maybe we should discuss this to make sure Lemmygrad users are staying safe? Similar to the unspoken rule that we strongly discourage people using their real names or giving away too many personal details.

cross-posted from: https://mylemmy.win/post/89871

Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)...

What you see via the UI isn't "all that exists". Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see "under the hood". Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won't normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.

Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.

I've wanted to go over to Linux for a long time but I have no idea how to go about it. I hear about incompatibility problems with hardware and all the different options for different Linux OS's and that's it, I forget about it for a while to avoid the headache.

So where do I start? I don't even know how to choose hardware or what to look for. The number of options with Linux makes things a little confusing.

And although others here have answered the question before, I'm unsure what I have to do to stay 'safe' on Linux. Are there extra steps or is it just the standard, don't open dodgy links and turn off Java script in the PDF viewer kind of thing? Does Linux come with a trustworthy firewall/antivirus/malware detection? Is there a chance of Linux e.g. sending my passwords, etc, to someone or just letting someone into my harddrive? I hear that 'open source' means people can check the code but how do I know if someone has checked the code—I wouldn't know what to look for myself.

I followed the Linux subreddit but the users the can be rather… enthusiastic, which is great, but I need something far more basic to get started lol.

Is there a good step-by-step guide somewhere? Or can anyone give me some pointers/tips/advice?

I mainly browse, type, and read pdfs and other text files. No gaming, although I wouldn't be opposed to it. No need to be mobile; laptops are terrible for my back so I always use an external monitor, anyway, so I won't be using it 'on the go'.

Edit: Thanks for all the advice. I got a machine up and running from a bootable USB.

Any others who read the comments here because they're interested in trying out Linux – if you have Windows installed and want to keep it on your HDD/SSD, partition your drive within Windows. Then boot from the USB. You can partition your drive (and keep Windows) from the bootable USB but it's a bit more complicated and it makes it harder to create a swap partition and a storage partition. I had to go back and forth a few times to figure this out.

Omg I've been here for a year today!

I just wanted to thank everyone for making this place what it is. I've never been much of a poster elsewhere because I can't stand much internet drama. But here, where good faith is the starting point, I feel that I can talk as I wish and have meaningful conversations and interactions.

Take care, everyone.

This isn't intended to close the debate on what counts as socialism. It's a comment I wrote in one of the federated instances that I suspect will be deleted. So I'm posting the text here as I thought it might generate some good discussion:

It's okay for us to disagree on our assessments of AES, but these disagreements must be based on some common understandings. I don't think we're there at the moment. Partly this comes down to the way language has shifted in the last 200 years.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is to be contrasted with a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It means 'dictatorship' in the way that liberal democracies are dictatorships because they are governed by consistent (class based) institutions that hold executive, legislative, and judicial power.

The meaning of dictatorship has changed. Back then it more clearly meant something like 'governance by', and Marx's contemporaries would have inferred this meaning.

A dictatorship of the proletariat means the workers, not the capitalists, control the state and the means of production. In the words of one scholar, it means something like:

… either state-controlled [where the state is controlled by the proletariat] or private-but-worker-controlled economy with a democratically elected government and not necessarily single party.

The idea being that capitalism is a class-based political economy, and communism is the abolition of classes. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the stage of history where the workers have control of the state/means of production. Once the workers have such control, the distinction between bourgeois and proletariat falls apart. At that point we have reached communism.

You might even challenge the way that this has been tried so far. I would say to look again, if so. But either way, it doesn't change the theory. One can detest the way that an idea has been put into practice without rejecting the theory. As Kwame Ture advises, an ideology should be judged by it's principles, not it's practicioners.

No state has yet reached communism. The very idea is an oxymoron as communism is stateless. What some few states have begun to achieve (but no state has quite got there yet, as the class struggle is ongoing, although China, at least, is close) is socialism.

Marx used different terms in different works to discuss all this. As primarily a critic of capitalism, he didn't really flesh out a theory of socialism or communism in the way that you suggest. For that, we must look to Engels and to Lenin's State and Revolution. Nonetheless, a birds eye view of Marx's work reveals that he advocated for socialism (a dictatorship is the proletariat) as a stepping stone to communism. The logic of this progression grows directly out of an historical materialist analysis of class society.

At the same time, there is another sense of the Marxist concept of communism, but I don't think this is the one you mean. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote:

We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. Further, in the Communist Manifesto, they wrote: Communists everywhere support any revolutionary movement against the existing social and political conditions.

In this sense, Marxist-Leninists are 'literally communists' but Marxist-Leninist states cannot be 'literal[] communism' but they are socialist (or trying to be).

If you want to read a short text about socialist governance, you might enjoy Roland Boer, Friedrich Engels and the Foundations of Socialist Governance. His Socialism with Chinese Characteristics may also be of interest for giving a detailed analysis of governance in China.

You can still disagree with MLs, AES, and the above definitions and propose other definitions, but that would involve speaking at cross purposes. It might also involve idealism because throughout history the only revolutionary socialist projects to have succeeded for a significant time have been guided by Marxism-Leninism. It's okay (albeit idealist) to have a different concept of socialism but a definition based on concrete examples must look to Marxism-Leninism.

And one cannot simply dismiss the experience of the attempt of billions of people trying to build socialism as not socialism because it doesn't match an esoteric and contrasting definition of socialism.

Edit: the scholar referred to in the text is the person I was replying to, who criticised the DotP but gave a definition of socialism that could describe a DotP.

Often, when we discuss the labour aristocracy, the focus turns quickly to the US, the core of the imperial core. A problem then arises because there is a lot of poverty in the US, which can be taken as representative of the whole imperial core, and that poverty is used to discredit (aspects of) the labour aristocracy thesis.

We can look at Germany for another example, to see how workers' interests become aligned with the capitalists', and create an incentive for them to work together at the expense of the periphery. A relevant quote from the linked article:

What is particularly interesting about the participation of labour interests in capital is the way in which these interests have been united in the period of the so-called social-democratic consensus.3 Alexander Hicks … argued … social democracy in the second half of the 20th century, coupled to the interests of large-scale capital, led to the creation and consolidation of a form of government known as corporatism ….4 The leading corporatist or fascist idea was that class and all other disagreements in capitalism would be resolved by allowing participation of groups in society seen as integral to decide on the direction in which society would develop – that is, class collaboration. Workers, capitalists, bankers, craftsmen and others were to work together to make these decisions. … [I]t is essential that social unity is always maintained and that compromises are made. Corporatism as the leading ideology in the West is accepted by large capital, the social-democratic parties, and the major unions.

The most significant example for this rise of corporatism is again Germany. … [S]ince the 1980s, an unprecedented wave of economic integration of labour and capital in Germany began, with the same program taking place in many of the core countries. By the end of the 1990s, pension funds became the most important investors on stock exchanges in the United States, and after the unification of Germany, the same process was seen.5 Laws have been passed that allow pension funds to invest significant capital (which has been collected for decades from the payment of pensions to workers) on the stock exchange in the shares of large corporations.6 The argument was that a quick inflow of money into corporations would enable large profits and stock market growth, and that funds would increase their capital through dividends or payments that all shareholders receive when a company records profits.

After … the unification of Germany, the infusion of capital from pension funds … created a sufficient amount of money in German corporations to carry out the privatization of the industrial giants from the former DDR and not destroy them – as they were destroyed in Serbia and many other post-Soviet nations – as it was politically important to undergo a smooth transition to capitalism in Germany in order to forestall social unrest. Soon afterwards, the same capital was used in the privatization of industrial companies throughout Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. German firms were most likely to pick up all the strategically important companies in a short period of time. For example, Wolkswagen bought the Czech Škoda and integrated it into its automobile conglomerate, where it still operates successfully today.

The best example of this economic trend, however, is the German telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom, which is partly owned by the state (holding 32% of shares), and a large part of the remaining shares then held by various pension funds.7 This company, whose ownership structure represents the embodiment of corporatism, is owned by the German state, German big capital and German pension funds. In addition, it is part of the world’s telecommunications cartel and has a significant share in the ownership of British Telecom and major US telecommunications companies., Operations of Deutsche Telekom are of great importance to Serbia and other countries created by the breakup of the communist republics. Deutsche Telekom has purchased near the entirety or a significant part of the telecommunications giants in Slovakia, Hungary, Albania, Montenegro, Croatia, Romania and Greece. The Greek OTE (Greek Telecommunications Organization), which is largely owned by Deutsche Telekom, held 20% of Serbia Telekom shares by 2012, and then sold the company back to the Serbian state for 380 million euros in preparation for the complete privatization of Serbia Telekom. It was said at the time that Serbia Telekom could reach the price of approximately one billion euros, and Bloomberg wrote that Deutsche Telekom was the main contender for the purchase.8 A simple calculation shows that the state of Serbia bought 20% of its shares of Serbia Telekom for 38% of the sum for which it planned to sell the company. For now, this malversation has not been realized, but we are aware that the sale of Serbia Telekom is one of the most important obligations of the Government of Serbia towards European, primarily German, capital.

We see that Deutsche Telekom owns the most important telecommunication companies across a large section of Europe, as does Wolkswagen, which bought Audi, Seat, Porsche, Bentley, Bugatti and other smaller companies in addition to Škoda. It is clear that this is a matter of forming unprecedented monopolies in the region’s key and most profitable industries. This entire project was made possible by the infusion of additional capital by pension funds. In Germany, pension funds now account for over 200 billion euros in stock market investments.9 By comparison, this is four times more than the total economic production of Serbia, which amounts to less than 50 billion euros. Even just one pension fund, BVK, which has a portfolio of 55 billion in shares of various corporations, is more powerful than the entire Serbian economy.10

German pension funds are now in the hands of the most qualified investors, and capital is so diversely distributed in shares of various companies that the losses of individual companies cannot significantly damage it. In other words, as the stock market grows, the capital accumulation of these funds grows, and thus the interests of workers whose pensions are found in these funds are structurally linked to the interests of capital. The higher the accumulation of capital, the higher wages can these workers expect. When all this is added to savings, which is an inevitable item of almost every traditionally generous German household, and which was made possible by the extremely high salaries of past decades, the question of the real interest of German workers for any changes other than those favouring capital is starkly raised.

When the German state, German capital and the German banks sit parasitically on the back of the European (and world) periphery, and German workers reap tremendous benefit from this parasitism, there is no concrete possibility of revolution in that country – such a possibility does not exist! Germany is only taken here as an example of a dominant European economy, and its role here is largely played out by the United States at the global level. In structural terms, it is clear that one cannot speak of an international solidarity of the working class emerging evenly from all regions of the world. The class struggle has completely shifted to the level of global conflict between the core and the periphery.

The linked article is worth reading in full if you have the time. It's short and to the point.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/497897

This is a contentious subject. Please keep the discussion respectful. I think this will get more traction, here, but I'll cross-post it to !Communism, too.

Workers who sell their labour power for a wage are part of the working class, right? They are wage-workers because they work for a wage. Are they wage-labourers?

“They’re proletariat,” I hear some of you shout.

“Not in the imperial core! Those are labour aristocrats,” others reply.

So what are the workers in the imperial core? Are they irredeemable labour aristocrats, the inseparable managers and professionals of the ruling class? Or are they proletarian, the salt of the earth just trying to get by?

It’s an important distinction, even if the workers in any country are not a homogenous bloc. The answer determines whether workers in the global north are natural allies or enemies of the oppressed in the global south.

The problem is as follows.

There is no doubt that people in the global north are, in general, more privileged than people in the global south. In many cases, the difference in privilege is vast, even among the wage-workers. This is not to discount the suffering of oppressed people in the global north. This is not to brush away the privilege of national bourgeois in the global south.

For some workers in the global north, privilege amounts to basic access to water, energy, food, education, healthcare, and shelter, streetlights, paved highways, etc. As much as austerity has eroded access to these basics, they are still the reality for the majority of people in the north even, to my knowledge, in the US.

Are these privileges enough to move someone from the ranks of the proletariat and into the labour aristocracy or the petit-bourgeois?

I’m going to discuss some sources and leave some quotes in comments, below. This may look a bit spammy, but I’m hoping it will help us to work through the several arguments, that make up the whole. The sources:

• Settlers by J Sakai
• Corona, Climate, and Chronic Emergency by Andreas Malm
• The Wealth of Nations by Zac Cope
• ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’ by Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang.

I have my own views on all this, but I have tried to phrase the points and the questions in a ’neutral’ way because I want us to discuss the issues and see if we can work out where and why we conflict and how to move forwards with our thinking (neutral to Marxists, at least). I am not trying to state my position by stating the questions below, so please do not attack me for the assumptions in the questions. By all means attack the assumptions and the questions.

This is a contentious subject. Please keep the discussion respectful. I think this will get more traction, here, but I'll cross-post it to !Communism, too.

Workers who sell their labour power for a wage are part of the working class, right? They are wage-workers because they work for a wage. Are they wage-labourers?

“They’re proletariat,” I hear some of you shout.

“Not in the imperial core! Those are labour aristocrats,” others reply.

So what are the workers in the imperial core? Are they irredeemable labour aristocrats, the inseparable managers and professionals of the ruling class? Or are they proletarian, the salt of the earth just trying to get by?

It’s an important distinction, even if the workers in any country are not a homogenous bloc. The answer determines whether workers in the global north are natural allies or enemies of the oppressed in the global south.

The problem is as follows.

There is no doubt that people in the global north are, in general, more privileged than people in the global south. In many cases, the difference in privilege is vast, even among the wage-workers. This is not to discount the suffering of oppressed people in the global north. This is not to brush away the privilege of national bourgeois in the global south.

For some workers in the global north, privilege amounts to basic access to water, energy, food, education, healthcare, and shelter, streetlights, paved highways, etc. As much as austerity has eroded access to these basics, they are still the reality for the majority of people in the north even, to my knowledge, in the US.

Are these privileges enough to move someone from the ranks of the proletariat and into the labour aristocracy or the petit-bourgeois?

I’m going to discuss some sources and leave some quotes in comments, below. This may look a bit spammy, but I’m hoping it will help us to work through the several arguments, that make up the whole. The sources:

• Settlers by J Sakai
• Corona, Climate, and Chronic Emergency by Andreas Malm
• The Wealth of Nations by Zac Cope
• ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’ by Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang.

I have my own views on all this, but I have tried to phrase the points and the questions in a ’neutral’ way because I want us to discuss the issues and see if we can work out where and why we conflict and how to move forwards with our thinking (neutral to Marxists, at least). I am not trying to state my position by stating the questions below, so please do not attack me for the assumptions in the questions. By all means attack the assumptions and the questions.