tpaine posted:its you
how are you gentlemen
A lot of the time this concept is deployed by Maoists it's to imply that western working classes were very complicit in imperialism. So I find it important to counter this Maoist idea when I stress the fact that, after the war, western workers were more pro-Soviet than ever (CPs were blooming everywhere, and postwar social-democracy was built because the capitalist establishment feared the threat of communist takeover electorally), and working people were overwhelmingly anti-empire, even in the US and UK. Imagining Internationalism in American and British Labor, 1939-49 dissected everything I yearned to know about the subject.
Of course, these 1940s working people were still superficially racist and #problematic in manifold ways, but that doesn't mean that a 21st century Maoist should get to ahistorically call them "pro-imperialist" in her latest Facebook rant when in fact they were pro-communists who were successfully pacified by social-democratic strategy and then the strategy of tension in the 1960s-70s.
Edited by COINTELBRO ()
the truth hurts sometimes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay9BWM8lwOA
it's just a term to describe the class of people who, while not owning the means of production, definitely would not benefit from it being socialized. this is the trusted class the bourgeois can draw on to be their technicians, police force, propagandists, etc.
your not 'guilty' or 'culpable' in any way, but you can't really be a american communist without accepting that the average level of decadence americans have access would decrease in a socialist world.
Scrree posted:the answer to your question is: what do you call the guy who whips the master's slaves when the master is away? or, what is a kulak?
it's just a term to describe the class of people who, while not owning the means of production, definitely would not benefit from it being socialized. this is the trusted class the bourgeois can draw on to be their technicians, police force, propagandists, etc.
your not 'guilty' or 'culpable' in any way, but you can't really be a american communist without accepting that the average level of decadence americans have access would decrease in a socialist world.
The average level of decadence? There are tens of millions in the US who are in poverty, millions homeless, millions in prison, many millions in debt - honestly, on average I sincerely believe the American working class has everything to gain from socialism. That's why I bother organizing here as opposed to plotting a coup or something from abroad.
and MarianneSadd i completely agree the vast majority of americans would materially benefit immeasurably from the transition to a socialist economy. but like, right now i could decide to eat only a diet of only red meat for the rest of the year. the fact that i couldnt do such an unnecessary thing under socialism, and that many others who had no access to red meat would gain it, is what i view as 'lowering the level of decadence'.
COINTELBRO posted:It was a term used by Lenin in a specific context. Its meaning as of now is unclear, much like "imperialism", which initially meant new developments of the capitalist economy in the early 20th century but now is a vulgar term for all empire-like invasions, warfare and colonial relations. However, whether one accepts the concept or not, you should keep in mind that laborers in first world countries are in the top 90% of wages, which is obviously a position of supremacy. At the same time, I have to say that Charles Post made a strong case against labor aristocracy as a concept and its misreading by contemporary Maoists here, but I wouldn't go as far as he did.
A lot of the time this concept is deployed by Maoists it's to imply that western working classes were very complicit in imperialism. So I find it important to counter this Maoist idea when I stress the fact that, after the war, western workers were more pro-Soviet than ever (CPs were blooming everywhere, and postwar social-democracy was built because the capitalist establishment feared the threat of communist takeover electorally), and working people were overwhelmingly anti-empire, even in the US and UK. Imagining Internationalism in American and British Labor, 1939-49 dissected everything I yearned to know about the subject.
Of course, these 1940s working people were still superficially racist and #problematic in manifold ways, but that doesn't mean that a 21st century Maoist should get to ahistorically call them "pro-imperialist" in her latest Facebook rant when in fact they were pro-communists who were successfully pacified by social-democratic strategy and then the strategy of tension in the 1960s-70s.
please dont troll
glomper_stomper posted:i think the labor aristocracy for the most part is a class composed of skilled laborers who, while engaged in productive work, have transformed themselves into a social abscess. basically, this is an upper section of workers who have won the right to be superficially petty-bourgeois, reproduce the political structures that secure their extraction of social wealth from the more exploited workers, and have largely rejected proletarian class consciousness though their relationship to capital has only slightly changed.
I thought this was just the entire petit bourgeoisie, not specifically labour aristocracy.
I pictured labour aristocracy as people who put on the pretense of organizing labour but then collaborate with capital to ensure essentially zero progress, and then continue to exist as nullifying parasites on labourers. i.e. bad unions.
I don't know how to read and invent Marxist terminology definitions in my head. hth
Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism – V.I. Lenin, 1916; quoting Imperialism – Hobson, 1902 posted:“There is first the habit of economic parasitism, by which the ruling state has used its provinces, colonies, and dependencies in order to enrich its ruling class and to bribe its lower classes into acquiescence.” And I shall add that the economic possibility of such bribery, whatever its form may be, requires high monopolist profits.
Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism – V.I. Lenin, 1916 posted:within the working-class movement, the opportunists, who are for the moment victorious in most countries, are “working” systematically and undeviating in this very direction. Imperialism, which means the partitioning of the world, and the exploitation of other countries besides China, which means high monopoly profits for a handful of very rich countries, makes it economically possible to bribe the upper strata of the proletariat, and thereby fosters, gives shape to, and strengthens opportunism
Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism – V.I. Lenin, 1916 posted:And in speaking of the British working class the bourgeois student of “British imperialism at the beginning of the twentieth century” is obliged to distinguish systematically between the “upper stratum” of the workers and the “lower stratum of the proletariat proper”. The upper stratum furnishes the bulk of the membership of co-operatives, of trade unions, of sporting clubs and of numerous religious sects. To this level is adapted the electoral system, which in Great Britain is still “sufficiently restricted to exclude the lower stratum of the proletariat proper"!
Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism – V.I. Lenin, 1916 posted:Imperialism has the tendency to create privileged sections also among the workers, and to detach them from the broad masses of the proletariat.
Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism – V.I. Lenin, 1916 posted:Marx and Engels traced this connection between opportunism in the working-class movement and the imperialist features of British capitalism systematically, during the course of several decades. For example, on October 7, 1858, Engels wrote to Marx: “The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.” Almost a quarter of a century later, in a letter dated August 11, 1881, Engels speaks of the “worst English trade unions which allow themselves to be led by men sold to, or at least paid by, the middle class”. In a letter to Kautsky, dated September 12, 1882, Engels wrote: “You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general. There is no workers’ party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies.”
Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism – V.I. Lenin, 1916 posted:This clearly shows the causes and effects. The causes are: (1) exploitation of the whole world by this country; (2) its monopolist position in the world market; (3) its colonial monopoly. The effects are: (1) a section of the British proletariat becomes bourgeois; (2) a section of the proletariat allows itself to be led by men bought by, or at least paid by, the bourgeoisie.
Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism – V.I. Lenin, 1916 posted:“General” enthusiasm over the prospects of imperialism, furious defence of it and painting it in the brightest colours—such are the signs of the times. Imperialist ideology also penetrates the working class. No Chinese Wall separates it from the other classes. The leaders of the present-day, so-called, “Social-Democratic” Party of Germany are justly called “social-imperialists”, that is, socialists in words and imperialists in deeds; but as early as 1902, Hobson noted the existence in Britain of “Fabian imperialists” who belonged to the opportunist Fabian Society.
Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism – V.I. Lenin, 1916 posted:The receipt of high monopoly profits by the capitalists in one of the numerous branches of industry, in one of the numerous countries, etc., makes it economically possible for them to bribe certain sections of the workers, and for a time a fairly considerable minority of them, and win them to the side of the bourgeoisie of a given industry or given nation against all the others. The intensification of antagonisms between imperialist nations for the division of the world increases this urge. And so there is created that bond between imperialism and opportunism, which revealed itself first and most clearly in Great Britain, owing to the fact that certain features of imperialist development were observable there much earlier than in other countries. Some writers, L. Martov, for example, are prone to wave aside the connection between imperialism and opportunism in the working-class movement—a particularly glaring fact at the present time—by resorting to “official optimism” (à la Kautsky and Huysmans) like the following: the cause of the opponents of capitalism would be hopeless if it were progressive capitalism that led to the increase of opportunism, or, if it were the best-paid workers who were inclined towards opportunism, etc. We must have no illusions about “optimism” of this kind. It is optimism in respect of opportunism; it is optimism which serves to conceal opportunism. As a matter of fact the extraordinary rapidity and the particularly revolting character of the development of opportunism is by no means a guarantee that its victory will be durable: the rapid growth of a painful abscess on a healthy body can only cause it to burst more quickly and thus relieve the body of it. The most dangerous of all in this respect are those who do not wish to understand that the fight against imperialism is a sham and humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism.
Still mostly loyal to capital in their minds despite changing conditions?
Meanwhile would it be fair to say that conditions for people with jobs (as opposed to careers) even in wealthy empire cities are becoming more comparable with those in third world cities, and therefore we should revise the mlm-mayhem analysis in our conception of the world?
2. On a personal level the state of the U.S. worker has been trending downwards for 45 years or whatever but it's not like the status of people in the developing world has been rising as a result. In fact, that has also been going down!
3. If there was an earth quake in your town tomorrow, 100,000 people would not die. You do not have to bribe people in your everyday life. You probably aren't living directly on a big pile of toxic chemicals. You can buy pork for a dollar a pound. You have a shower. Crime isn't very high and even when it was high it wasn't really all that high. You use an insane amount of energy in your everyday life. Even if you aren't making much money or have a pension or whatever, you're currently reaping a shitload of systemic benefits.
4. There's people in the us for whom these kind of things aren't true. When I was 16 I worked at burger king and there was a guy there who worked full shifts and on the weekends had another job. I saw him this year, working at taco bell. I don't want to say how old I am but that's a decade minimum with no improvement or change what so ever. That guy is not a labor aristocrat. If you, personally, have to work right now to pay your bills that just makes you a normal American. If you've worked the same entry level shit labor job for your entire adult life with no improvement or path of advancement or educational change or really anything at all just the same thing over and over till eventually you're dead, maybe you're not a Labor Aristocrats. If gorsh you got student loans and apartments are expensive ;_; then you probably are. That's my feeling.
5. That's ok. It doesn't make you Hitler. But you should probably understand where you're at and what impacts you and people like you have, on the world, and the ways you're propagating the system just by existing.
6. The buzz feed cracked dot com list format makes it easier to write even if it adds nothing to the writing and in fact makes the flow worse.
Edited by Keven ()
also you know nothing about the family background of the posters you reference and have no reason to make the assumption you do
thirdplace posted:"you're not really poor if you don't move from a particular city I think is expensive" is the gooniest thing I've seen go unchallenged on this forum for months. (besides my posting)
Oh yeah I forgot Marxs formal classes, rich, poor, and trans gender.
Now excuse me while I go walk past a bunch of homeless dudes who will definitely not be putting me against the wall today, to purchase my lunch of mixed nutritious fresh food from a clean, sanitary restaurant or cafe for a fair and reasonable price which I can afford without effort, as its market value amounts to approximately the same quantity of labor time as I will expend traveling there and waiting for service. Just another day in the struggle for a working proletarian peasant like myself.