An organization calling itself: "Institute for National Revolutionary Studies" published an interesting article which I would like to make some comments on. It seems like INRS is influenced a great deal by revolutionary socialist nationalism, anti-colonial nationalism and national bolshevism. The latter would be a turn-off for most Leftists but I think the degree to which revolutionary nationalists are anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist should determine the level of support. I am sure many would be quick to label this organization right-wing but the degree to which it reps revolutionary socialist nationalism makes me think "eclectic" might be a better term. They certainly seem more revolutionary than the insufferable SJWs that make participation in Left Wing politics in the United States not only frustrating but near impossible. Perhaps it would be better to avoid labels for an organization that seems to be just getting started and whose core principles seem mostly sound.
The author comprehends Leninist and "Third Worldist" theory (for lack of a better term) fairly well and even covers some points that I think are not well-handled by labor aristocracy theorists. On the phenomenon of welfare austerity and de-industrialization the author writes: "First World welfare states, funded in part from the profits of Third World exploitation would seem to justify this analysis. However, in an age of austerity this critique is proving increasingly antiquated. In the United States and Western Europe vast swaths of once vital industrial territory rust away. The welfare state that once provided for the victims of outsourcing has been shredded over the past 30 years. There are no 'labor aristocrats' in Detroit and Appalachia, nor in Glasgow or Languedoc-Roussillon." This seems to be an accurate description of many de-industrialized regions in the West; as anecdotal as it maybe, certain family members of mine think parts of Birmingham remind them of Mexico. These "sacrifice zones" as Chris Hedges calls them seem to be expanding in the US heartland as the economic priorities of the more prosperous regions in neoliberal America take precedence over what many conservatives like to call: "the real America". The response to this by some labor aristocracy theorists, at least when it comes to the white working class, in some ways precedes Kevin Williamson who recently wrote of the white working class: "They need real opportunity...they need U-Haul." Aside from the obvious that that is easier said then done, especially when you have no money, increasingly there are fewer prospering places to load up a U-Haul and drive to. Certain regions of the US will not fully recover from the Great Recession, if current trends continue, until the 2020s. And that assumes there won't be another crisis which is unlikely both given the state of America's bubble economy and Marxist theory of recurrent crises cycles. Government statistics are often adjusting to create an artificial picture of prosperity, whether its through "reforming" price indexes to hide inflation or counting out discouraged workers, the US government, and perhaps Western govs in general, have many ways of making things look better than they are. For instance, real unemployment is estimated at 23% by some but given the U-6 figure it isn't less than 10%. That's double the phony 5% figure given by the Obama administration. For the most part, labor aristocracy theorists usually take US government statistics at face-value in economic analysis and there is really no reason to do so.
Likewise, the costs associated with de-industrialization cannot be completely figured in wage-terms--it means lower taxes available for government revenue, falling property values from increasing crime and reduced economic prospects, communal/demographic collapse from the "U-Haul" phenomenon. Successful industries typically have knock-on effects for the broader economy which means greater economic stimulation and increased quantities of goods and services produced as a result. Even by the reckoning of bourgeois economists, productive capital, such as industry, usually adds a far greater amount of value-added to the products they produce than service jobs such as waitressing and hair-dressing. Against the post-modern sophists of finance capital, Paul Craig Roberts raised the question if Industry doesn't matter (since allegedly money is money no matter how its earned) then how did China get rich? That is clearly inexplicable to the neoliberal mind--unless China is merely at an immature stage, and it is hard for any sane person to see how being the world's greatest industrial power is an "immature stage". The lack of thriving industry means that any subsequent booms are unlikely to reach the working class in quite the same way it did in the 1950s when workers proximity to the means of production and productive work gave them real leverage in negotiation along with the knock-on effects of higher productivity to help capitalists pay for it. That was a question that Michael Hudson raised when he noted that wage compensation was stagnant despite exploding productivity (at least according to bourgeois statistics) according to economic futurists in the 19th to early 20th century we should be living in a luxury economy of short hours and very high wages. The observation itself is not groundbreaking but the answer is, in fact the productivity gains have been bled from both productive capital and the working class in the form of debt and other costs imposed by finance capital.
That leaves the question of defining where we are at, and on that note I have a post on finance capital coming so stay tuned. I have pointed out the issue of declining life-expectancy among uneducated whites in a previous post and if that isn't a sign of what some theorists call "re-proletarianization" than I don't know what is. At the same time, most Americans are not employed in what would traditionally called productive work, e.g. industry, agriculture, construction etc. Depending on how you tabulate the figure it would seem about 9-12% of Americans are employed in the productive sector; a stark contrast to 1950 when 30% of the workforce was employed in production. I have read that some rich nations like Germany and South Korea still boast employment proportions like 1950s America but even they have not escaped the restructuring and labor precarity/flexibility demanded by neoliberalism. There is no doubt that American industrial workers are much more productive than they were in the 50s but it is quite unlikely that they produce enough to pay their own relatively high wages (on a world scale) and pay the wages of every non-productive service sector worker in America plus the income that accrues to American millionaires and billionaires, hence the necessity of imperialist theory. A Third Worldist Marxist sees American manufacturing wages are a little over 20 dollars an hour (some figures put the median at $13) while Chinese wages are between $1.50-$4 dollars per hour and Mexican wages are about five dollars an hour etc, etc. Of course, this leaves aside certain underpaid positions in American, some of which are sub-minimum, such as the $4.35 minimum in the garment industry or the approximate two dollar an hour minimum in agriculture. That these startlingly exploitative wages are much better than the satanic garment mills of Bangladesh or the condition of farm workers in Indonesia really does not need much comment.
The existence of worse conditions does not prove a lack of exploitation; in fact, Marx assumed in his model in volume one that the worker would at least earn enough to reproduce his existence and also showed a worker could be more exploited under conditions of rising or high wages if productivity was far beyond the worker's compensation. Exploitation is not reckoned merely in long hours or low wages but also in the intensity of work and output and the types of technology applied. To be sure, industry in the developing world or NIC nations are often by no means primitive, the notion that they usually are, even in the past, is an oversimplification, but an overlooked factor in moving to developing countries is that there is far less pressure to modernize a plant or upgrade safety standards.
So far we have only looked at a relatively small portion of the American workforce but doing so allows us to explore both a major selling point in Third Worldist theory and a major conundrum. The fact of the decline of the productively employed portion of the American workforce and many other Western economies proves the parasitism of the US and the wider West without a doubt. But if we adjust the minimum wage according to inflation we find that during the 60s when far more people were productively employed the real minimum wage adjusted for inflation was about $11 dollars an hour, as opposed to the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 with individual states having minimum wages between $8-10 and with one major city like Seattle setting the wage at $15. So the average hourly compensation is less and it by no means follows that welfare services or employee benefits are superior and larger in order to offset this-- if anything the high rate of per capita government spending is mostly attributable to military spending. There are other ways that the working class could benefit from the global system, such as cheaper prices for bananas, coffee, shoes. foreign cars/electronics etc. but this is by no means clear when US industry could've filled the role in several places and commodity indexes are doctored to hide inflation. The notion that the working class is spoiled by foreign luxuries and trinkets goes at least back to t views expressed in the Economist in the 1850s that Marx critiques in Volume One--that is not to say that there wasn't a labor aristocracy in his time either, but it was also a time of rampant super-exploitation even in England. Overall, the conundrum we face is that by any standard the American economy taken as a whole is more parasitic than in the past but the American worker is doing worse, at least in dollar terms, than his grandparents and subject to new and volatile forms of precarity.
The financial capitalists could theoretically raise every working American's standard of living up to that of the American middle class but choose not to for reasons we will discuss in a later post. It would certainly build up greater social support for imperialism but the lack of interest in doing this suggests that either entrenched interests are too powerful and/or the system has reached an unreformable stage. Which would seem to justify the author when he says the era of the social democratic compromise 1945-1975 are gone for good. While a 15 dollar minimum wage would entail a full doubling of wages for low-waged workers it can easily be pissed away by inflation caused by rampant money printing and weakening dollar hegemony, and that will probably happen. I guarantee that a significant rise in the minimum wage will not be enough to curtail rampant inequality because it does not focus issues like debts and the vast pools of money accruing to creditors. Every "progressive" tax-plan in America entails raising taxes on upper-income brackets when wage inequality is not the most significant cause of inequality. These plans largely aim to saddle the middle and upper-middle class with the tax burden as the vast majority of 1% wealth is received in the form of profits, dividends, and assets--not wages or salaries. Debt exploitation is an under-theorized concept in Marxism and hence most labor aristocracy theorists downplay or dismiss it outright; it seems clear that debt has exploitation overtaken waged exploitation in the developed world. Even workers getting paid "super-wages" in Third Worldist parlance can be exploited by the debt weapon therefore the issue of "net exploitation" maybe irrelevant if the debt relationship is usurious enough.
The "net-exploitation" measure has an interesting history as MIM's work was perhaps the first body of labor aristocracy theory to actively reject the classical leninist notion of a bribed working class that was still exploited. They viewed it as "dogmatism" on Lenin's part but Lenin's view is actually a more fluid and holistic view of reality then that of an arbitrary line of net-exploitation. A manufacturing worker in an imperialist country could produce say 30,000 dollars in value per year and earn 25,000 dollars per year. That worker is in the privileged position of being allowed to earn back such a large portion of what he produces in comparison to other workers globally. The global exploitation of others does allow his boss or the state to give back far more. At this point he is likely not being starved or shot, so 5,000 dollars a year might not be worth fighting a revolution for; he may reason that it isn't even worth striking for. There are other ways he could conceivably get it back from investing in home ownership as an asset (if he can sell it in the black), working towards career advance/career change or from state social expenditure (depending on how anti-labor the tax code is). Or if he is brainwashed by the media or unaware of the Marxist concept of exploitation he maybe uninterested in it altogether. Bromma argues that there is a morale/dignity factor that plays into the formation of a worker elite not merely a monetary one. Unfortunately, the concept of privilege has been so degraded and worn out thanks to the identity liberals that it is almost of no use and it is understandable why some would prefer to go with a narrow "exploited vs. exploiter" view in assessing the balance of forces.
Zak Cope gave $20,000 per year as the output figure for manufacturing globally in 2012 that is his estimate for what an average global manufacturing worker should be entitled to earn. But that is an average so it leaves out that in certain situations it could be more like 30,000-40,000 for example. We leave aside the issue of distribution to the wider working class. But there are still productive workers making less than 20,000 in First World manufacturing so it follows there is some sort of exploited working class and there are at least 120 million manufacturing workers in the developed world. Cope tallied up the collective profits of the OECD and found estimated 97% of OECD profits to be the result of imperialist profits. You can pick at his methods, for this or that reason, but at least there is the singular an advantage that his estimate is not likely to be an underrestimate. Lastly, the issue of tax havens which house trillions upon trillions and illicit profits (such as the drug trade) rarely enter into Third Worldist political economy, for two reasons 1. they are a kind of financial black hole, as no one knows their true extent 2. published legitimate profits are a lot easier to tally up. That may make the profits extracted from the developed world working class seem smaller than they really are meaning that often for the employer there is little balance sheet average profit in employing first world workers. And not all surplus-value will end up on a corporate balance sheet in the neat form of profits, some of it will naturally end up expressed in rising asset prices, which may or may not be sold down the line. Oxfam's new study would seem to prove that the profits accruing to the oligarchy are much greater than many critics assume.
The question of what Westerners do at work and what to do with the Western working class is still an open one. It is still undefined. Marx seemed to have two minds about unproductive/service workers: 1. that they are largely parasites since they rarely produce a tangible commodity 2. they can be exploited if their compensation falls below the average of the working class. Now whether this is a national or global standard we are talking about might be an open question as different countries have different standards of living which are historically determined. Since a Western worker employed in service takes home a wage far above global standards many labor aristocracy theorists reason that that worker cannot be exploited. But service work in the neoliberal era is a strange mix between production and service, for instance a fast food chain mixes the affection associated with emotionally catering to the consumer with the production of finished meals on a semi-industrial scale. The food, as critics correctly note, is not produced on-site, but more fair-minded critics concede that assembly and processing is still part of the production process. Real knowledge of First World working conditions is perhaps confined more to certain Marxist authors who might be called "revisionist" such as Berardi, Perelman, Hudson and liberal authors like Ehrenreich, Mark Ames (along with the conservative exception of Edward Luttwak). It is understandable why that is, there is a certain tendency which seems to believe that First World workers will not be free until they make 80,000 dollars a year working five hours a week. No matter what they get, it will never be enough for some critics, even if it prolongs global suffering. The logic of counting service workers as "productive" can also be taken to ludicrous extremes like counting the action of a butler in dropping sugar cubes into a hot cup of tea as "productive" labor because it counts towards the "assembly" of a product. If the focus on economic production is dropped altogether than a maid, even if overpaid, or a housewife are imminently revolutionary since they produce the "product" of a clean house. There can arise an extortionist logic that consumers (whether workers or not) justly resist such as when a waitress looks askew at bill leaving "only" a 25% tip for taking orders and carrying food and drinks. Perhaps this where Bromma goes astray looking at housewives as revolutionary agents or de facto proletarians simply because they clean houses without receiving a direct wage. Cope is correct that this "feminist" line merely aims the "Left" search for a stand-in proletariat as he terms it, and legitimizes work that should be abolished. I would add that it deliberately confuses and distorts the line between productive and unproductive labor.
Marazzi sees the growth of the service economy as being the natural corollary of a digitalized financial economy and compares the complaint against service to the physiocrats complaint against industry on the grounds that "you can't eat machines." Putting aside the fact that the physiocrats did not make that critique in good faith as their emphasis on agriculture was something of a scheme to get the landlords to pay the taxes instead of the Third Estate, they were at least correct that an agricultural surplus was necessary for the industrial sector to exist. Marazzi argues that is natural that one part of the World (e.g. the West) would be placed in the primary position of offering services to the rest. This is only natural for imperialism and is by no means some sort of "natural" condition befalling Western humanity independent of anyone's will. Likewise, IT or live-music maybe services that the West provides to the rest of humanity but it is not the case that the flow of services provided is one way (as Indian telecom/IT services show).
Most service workers do not produce hamburgers, stock shelves, or cut hair for people thousands of miles away, many contemporary services are only exported with great difficulty. Speaking of hamburgers, a factor rarely taken squarely into account is that the Big Mac Index (a notable index for international purchasing power parity) is half for a worker in China then it is in the US--meaning that a Chinese workers wage package maybe smaller but it goes further, even if that fact still doesnt make up for the large inequality. Hudson points out that the FIRE sector and its policies raises the cost of workers standard of living effectively pricing US manufacturing out of international competition in many realms. According to Hudson a typical American worker may pay 75-85% of his paycheck to the FIRE sector and to the employer there are a great many direct and indirect costs associated with financial dominance. Although a final conflict between bosses and workers is inevitable, it is clear that when critically assessing the current state of American (and broadly Western) economy that the cost of a workers standard of living and a manufacturers cost of doing business could be significantly lessened just by cracking down on the rentier sector of the economy. The benefits of financial imperialism are often tabulated by critics but rarely are the costs that impact even the oppressor nations.
It should be noted that an avant-garde model for capitalist exploitation in the developed world is the development of "labor-free" models of capitalist expansion on the part of Tech companies. It has reached an extraordinary height with the take-off of Uber which exploits both its drivers and customers alike through the rent it collects via its ownership of the app that connects drivers and passengers. Pricing is often determined by algorithms that determine price-surges based on supply and demand--an automation of the rentier's interest, moving along neo-liberal supply models without having to justify price increases or decreases in even a cold bureaucratic way. Uber, is in fact, difficult to imagine without the policies of neoliberal finance capital aimed at "starving the beast" of government in order to leave more interest available for collection; broken and decaying public infrastructure itself, such as woeful or non-existent public transport makes Uber possible. Once more we see the high-costs of privatizing what classical economists once referred to as the public good. But going further, although the Uber model may herald a more dystopian manner of exploitation and business, it is not in fact new in itself. From the beginning of the Tech industry's rise with with the popularization of personal computers in the late 70s and early 80s it depended on the unpaid labor of "hobbyists" and marketed itself as something of a hobby along these lines. Whether its beta testers of video games or other products, amateur software programers, "freeware" tinkerers, unpaid internships, or even social media users, the tech industry has always relied on the unpaid labor of volunteers. Even the platform I am currently using gains revenue from writing that would otherwise have been paid for before the invention of blogging. Youtube and Facebook largely do the same thing as unpaid labor forces and volunteers for data-farming and collection. Crowdsourcing can also be considered another veiled form of exploitation, for instance in the case of a crowdsourced documentary the consumer may play the double-role as both a lender of capital (with no return) and as a paying customer when the film is released. The kickstarter capitalist in essence is a failed capitalist as he makes profit without fulfilling his traditional social role as either a hoarder and investor; he often invests nothing and earns profits. It is the social media equivalent of the financial bailout where monetary costs are increasingly transferred onto society, with or without their consent. Crowdsourced begging, where individuals ask crowds to finance their dreams involves shifting costs traditionally borne by governments and employers onto society at large. These trends may seem marginal to the global economy now but it seems almost certain that they will continue to lay deeper social roots and become more sophisticated and rapacious in the future. These attempts to extract unpaid labor and surplus-value will continue to proliferate and while the First World Left is well-known for its dramatics, it isn't too dramatic to say that the result of this model in its highest incarnations will be a form of high-tech neo-slavery or neo-serfdom. Not surprising for an industry that kicked off (at least in the US) by privatizing the tax-payer subsidized fruits of technologies developed in the military-industrial complex.
Taking all these new factors into account, the author would seem justified in making the statement, even if it is at this time somewhat premature that: "...the rentier-state has been reduced, in the age of neo-liberalism, to the rentier city, and perhaps the rentier neighborhood (Wall Street and the City of London)." this statement can be doubted: "Moreover, this situation is impacted by the mass importation of immigrants form the Third World in order to undercut the wages of the First." Not to deny supply and demand like some pro-immigration advocates but immigration does not effect all of the working class equally, ironically it can suit the portion oriented towards upward mobility and actually advance "white privilege"--contrary to the stated intentions of its advocates. Certain portions of the class may not be affected one way or the other. Closed borders is often billed as the main cause of inequality by advocates for open borders and the major cause for inequality on the part of the anti-immigration advocates. But if the more perceptive critics of finance capitalism are correct than finance is the major cause of global inequality. I will have more on the discourse of the "moral Left" around immigration in a later post.
Contrary to anyone's best intentions de-Industrialization has not resulted in a working class that is more radical or revolutionary and therefore a better ally for internationalist struggles. Part of that can be ascribed to the extreme hegemony of bourgeois culture and media in the West but we must honestly say the miseries inflicted on the Western working class has brought mainly lumpenization instead of a revival of radical class politics. Many lumpen are great revolutionaries and allies of the cause but they do not necessarily make for consistent allies with consistent politics--they can just easily turn to nihilism, criminality, dependency and criminal intrigue. Ironically, the US working class was far more likely to fight for socialism during the halcyon days of the 60s than they are today. But the ease with which "anti-establishment" candidates trounce their opposition and win affection maybe an indicator that a socialist renaissance, perhaps beyond the limits of the politics of that era, may not be far off. The author is certainly correct that without a fluid and holistic view "Third Worldist" theory is very quickly becoming antiquated. The study of the condition of Western workers must be deepened.
