tears posted:

we are currently seeing some pretty intense EU-USA tit for tat economic warfare

examples? i haven't been able to keep up wiht western european shit while paying attention to eastern europe.

The first chapter engages with the developments in the international imperialist system and includes assessments on the economic-social developments in the world at the end of the second decade of the 21st century. It identifies the arenas where the inter-imperialist antagonisms are sharpening, where there is an increase of local and regional conflicts and the dangers for a more generalized imperialist war in the conditions where the victims of war have increased the flows of refugees and immigrants. The adjustments-modernizations of the repressive apparatuses of the bourgeois states and their inter-state unions are being pushed to the fore on this terrain.

marlax78 posted:

The obvious limits to bourgeois internationalism are

catchphrase!

haha...but really, good thread. How do you think increasingly significant internal, commercial consumption and the more n more prominent haute bourgeoisie class in countries like India and China will affect this? (if at all.) thanks

Edited by herbsaint (March 19, 2017 02:52:19)

marlax78 posted:

random bump. i'm having my library get a hold (they dont have a sub to the journal it was in) of Cope's "Global Wage Scaling and Left Ideology: A Critique of Charles Post on the ‘Labour Aristocracy’" since it's behind a paywall and the link to the pdf online is dead. when i pick it up, i'll transcribe it 4 this thread.

@herbsaint if you're asking if shifts in the reproduction processes (greater or lesser consumption by the bourgeoisie) can cause a breakdown a la luxemburg, my intuition tells me no for the old reasons. i'm an idiot tho.

Basically, except what I meant (and didn't actually make clear) was rather than breakdown, how do u think increasing internal consumption in China, India etc among these demographics effects the final point you bring up in this post re: anti globalism backlash? Feels like it might significantly mitigate potential export losses

Exactly the same as they think about politics in general, the same as what the bourgeois think. There is no working class party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers merrily devour with them the fruits of the British colonial monopoly and of the British monopoly of the world market. (Engels quoted in Lenin, 1969, p. 65)

For Engels, 'opportunism' in the British Labor movement was a result of and is conditioned by the preponderance of two major economic factors, namely, in Lenin's words, 'vast colonial possessions and a monopolist position in world markets' (Lenin 1969, p. 65). As he wrote to Marx in 1858:

The British working class 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 as well as a bourgeoisie. Of course, this is to a certain extent justifiable for a nation which is exploiting the whole world. (Marx & Engels, 1955, p. 132)

Deny the existence of a Victorian-era labor aristocracy, Post (2010, p. 7) defines Marx and Engels' position thus:

Marx and Engels argued that British capitalists accrued higher-than-average profits from their 'industrial monopoly' in the world-market of the mid-nineteenth century. These super-profits allowed British capitalists to recognize the skilled workers' craft-unions and accept their respective apprenticeship-practices, which, in turn, enabled the labor-aristocracy to secure a role in supervising less-skilled workers, higher-than-average wages, and more-secure employment.

Post rejects this picture of embourgeoisement - detached as it is from Marx and Engels' emphasis on the division of labor established by colonialism - by asserting, firstly, that the supervision of unskilled workers by skilled workers was not universal (there being only weak evidence for skilled workers in textiles and mining acting as task masters). Secondly, he claims that 'craft-unions were able to secure stable, year-round employment for all of their members'. In the face of technological advancement and the parallel deskilling of labor, Post asserts, by the end of the nineteenth century it became increasingly difficult for the craft-based unions to maintain traditional restrictions over the training and supply of labor. Thirdly, Post underlines that the alleged ascendancy of the British labor aristocracy in the decades after 1870 actually coincides with the decline of Britain's domination of the world market and the rise of German and US competition. During this period, he argues, wages fell for the entire British working class. Finally, Post writes, 'the profits earned through the export of British machinery divided by the number of skilled metal-workers "would not have amounted to the average weekly wage of an engineer in Manchester in 1871"'. Overall, Post argues that the flexibility provided to the capitalist class by its receipt of super-profits cannot provide an explanation for the growth of the labor aristocracy from the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Rather, he suggests that it was the high productivity and skill levels of workers in certain Victorian industries that account for their high wages (Post, 2010, p. 18).

We may deal with each of these criticisms in turn. Before doing so, however, an important point to note about Post's critique of Marx and Engels is that 'every contemporary political commentator on the phenomenon of the classic, late nineteenth century labor aristocracy not only recognized its existence, but usually predicated part of their political activity on either fostering it (The Liberal Party, Disraeli (with his "one nation" conservatism - ZC), organizing it (the New Model Trade Unions), or fighting its bankrupt political standpoint (the revolutionaries)' (Clough, 1993). Clough considers in this regard the example of the Reform League, a British lobby set up in 1865 under the primary auspices of the First Working Men's International to agitate for universal male suffrage and a secret ballot. Its central committee was made up of six middle class Liberals and six workers. However, despite the efforts of Marx and others, the workers in the organization quickly gave in to the Liberals' pressure to qualify the demand for universal male suffrage to those men of a certain 'registered and residential' position. This property qualification quite explicitly excluded the mass of workers engaged in unskilled or casual labor from electoral representation. In fact, the new voting system agreed to by the Reform League was introduced in 1868 by Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in the clear understanding that the one in five workers it enfranchised would use their votes 'moderately' (ibid). In the general election the same year, the Liberal Party attempted to garner the support of the enfranchised upper stratum of English workers by paying them £10 a head to canvass for the Liberals. In response to the blatant bribery nurturing reformism within England's labor elite, Marx wrote:

The Trade unions are an aristocratic minority - the poor workers cannot belong to them: the great mass of workers whom economic development is driving from the countryside into the towns every day has long been outside the trades unions - and the most wretched mass has never belonged; the same goes for the workers born in the East End in London; one in 10 belongs to the Trade Unions - peasants, day laborers never belong to these societies… The Trade Unions can do nothing by themselves - they will remain a minority - they have no power of the mass of proletarians. (Marx & Engels, 1996, p. 614)

Moreover, Marx found to his chagrin that the leaders of the English working class were unwilling to lend the necessary political support to the Irish independence struggle being conducted by the Fenian movement of the time or even to the more distant Communards of Paris in 1871. It was the distinctly bourgeois politics of the burgeoning British labor aristocracy that finally convinced Marx (Marx & Engels, 1996a) that the overthrow of British capitalism depended, first and foremost, on the liberation of its colonies, in particular, its Irish one.

For a long time, I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime through English working class ascendancy… . Deeper study has convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland … . THe lever must be applied in Ireland.

Not only does Post show complete disregard for the evident realities of British politics in the nineteenth century, but his attempt to define the Victorian labor aristocracy out of existence is similarly quixotic. Post is certainly correct that the position of the labor aristocracy was, and is, precarious and in flux. Indeed, as reflected in hidebound theory, it has been a recurrent weakness of the Marxian position on the labor aristocracy to assume that what Marx, Engels and Lenin sometimes suggested in their fragmentary and century-old analyses were its major characteristics, in particular, its being a thin upper stratum of highly skilled and organized male labor in any given nation, must remain unchanged. In fact, application of the Marxist method demonstrates how the evolution of the labor aristocracy is intrinsically bound up with the historical development of the class struggle as waged internationally, in particular, with the increasing incorporation of super-exploitation into the circuit of capital.

After the depression of 1873, the restructuring of capitalist production signaled the rise of trusts, cartels, syndicates and industrial oligopolies, first in Germany and the United States an then in 'free trade' England and other capitalist nations (Nabudere, 1979, p. 21). By 1880, Britain's unique position as the 'workshop of the world' was being effectively challenged. Thus, while world industrial production increased seven times between 1860 and 1913, British production increased only three times and French production four times as against Germany's seven times, and the United States' twelve times (Stavrianos, 1981, p. 259). Bolstered by the second industrial revolution, Fordist production techniques and state capitalist intervention in the economy, the core capitalist nations sought to use their unprecedented power for imperial expansion. Amin demonstrates that it was during this period that unequal exchange resulting from a global disparity between the rewards of labor (at equal productivity) began to assume increased importance to the capitalist cycle. Between 1880 and 1930, imperialist capital obtained a higher output in the colonized countries by establishing modern facilities and intensifying the exploitation of low-wage labor power there (Amin, 1976, p. 131).

In its own heartlands, as Post highlights, the expanded mechanization of capitalist production displaced the traditional autonomy and organizational hegemony of craft union-based early-to-mid-Victorian labor aristocracy. At this time, labor organization became much broader and more anti-capitalist than it had been previously. However, Post obscures the extent to which capitalism has historically allowed for divisions within the working class to be reformed and recreated in new ways by those groups within it with the necessary sway to influence its development. As such, far from straightforwardly leading to the 'radical decline' of the traditional organizations of the labor aristocracy, the 'technological transformation of the labor-process' (Post, 2010, p. 16) in the mid-to-late nineteenth century established the basis for new forms of skilled labor and narrow craft organization. Thus, Gray (1981, p. 32) writes:

Attempts to rationalize production were limited by the strength of skilled labor, market conditions and the absence of managerial experience; the prospectuses of inventors and entrepreneurs might promise to eliminate independent and willful skilled men, what actually happened as machinery was introduced is another matter. To accept areas of craft control over production could also appear a more viable strategy than grandiose schemes of rationalization, especially with the limited character of managerial technique… . Although skill is partly a question of bargaining power and cultural attitudes, there were few if any groups of skilled workers whose position did not involve control of some specialized technique indispensable to their employers - that control was indeed the basis of their bargaining power.

Similarly, Davis (1986, pp. 42-43) shows how, in the United States, a corporate assault on the power of skilled labor beginning at the end of the nineteenth century 'broke the power of craftsmen and diluted their skills' but 'carefully avoided "levelling" them into the ranks of the semiskilled' through according them significant economic benefits and cultivating new social norms.

As the number of of organized craft workers acting as piece masters and subcontractors dwindled relative to the increasing size of the workforce, the coalition upon which what Hobsbawm (1951, p. 326) has called 'the Liberal-Radical phase of parliamentarism' also declined. Moreover, the extension of the franchise brought the looming prospect of the popular majority voting against the properties interest. Thus, there began a concerted effort by the British rulers to kill the working class party with kindness, that is in the words of British constitutionalist Sir Walter Bagehot, to 'willingly concede every claim which they can safely concede in order that they may not have to concede unwillingly some claim which would impair the safety of the country' (Bagehot, 2001 , p. 202). With this imperative to the fore, between 1907 and 1911, the British government introduced a series of welfare reforms (most notably the Liberal government's 1909 Finance Bill, the so-called People's Budget, and the 1911 National Insurance Act) that delivered real benefits to the British working class, benefits decidedly the indigenous subjects of Britain's overseas Empire.

The periodic unemployment and short-ranging mobility of workers in the late nineteenth century, contrary to Post, do not make it impossible to identify a body of relatively privileged workers. For example, whilst painters were a low-paid and casualized trade, 'joiners, bricklayers and masons, despite vulnerability to seasonal unemployment, often appear in the better-paid and more secure section of the working class' (Gray, 1981, p. 23). Clough (1992, p. 19) notes that, on average, unemployment was three times higher for the unskilled than for the skilled worker. Although there were both continuities and discontinuities within the labor aristocracy - based on geography, ideology, gender and ethnicity - there is no doubt that British trade and industry in the mid-to-late nineteenth century was characterized by specific groups of workers having divergent levels of pay, economic security and measures of control in the immediate work situation (Gray, 1981). It was these better-off workers who furnished the support base and leadership of the British trade union movement of the time. In 1885, Engels (1977) wrote:

The great Trade Unions are the organizations of those trades in which the labor of grown-up men predominates, or is alone applicable. Here the competition neither of women or children nor of machinery has so far weakened their organized strength. The engineers, the carpenters and joiners, the bricklayers are each of them a power to the extent that as in the case of the bricklayers and bricklayers' laborers, they can even successfully resist the introduction of machinery… They form an aristocracy among the working class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final. They are the model workingmen of Messrs Leone Levi and Giffen, and they are very nice people nowadays to deal with, for any sensible capitalist in particular and for the whole capitalist class in general.

How was the economic welfare and conservative political conformity of this most 'aristocratic' section of the working class afforded? Quite straightforwardly, the economic and political benefits accruing to the skilled working class of Victorian England were directly attributable to their exceptional position in the international division of labor at the time, that is to British colonial imperialism.

If we look at the sectors where skilled workers and their organization were strongest, we find them to be closely connected to Empire: textiles, iron and steel, engineering and coal. Textiles because of the cheap cotton from Egypt, and a captive market in India; iron and steel because of ship-building and railway exports, engineering because of the imperialist arms industry, and coal because of the demands of Britain's monopoly of world shipping. In a myriad of different ways, the conditions of the labor aristocracy were bound up with the maintenance of British imperialism. And this fact was bound to be reflected in their political standpoint. (Clough, 1993)

Post's apolitical and narrowly national explanation of the aristocratic traits of the leading craft-unions thus ignores their basis in Britain's global ascendancy. For it was not simply its skills, its productivity or the forms of its industrial organizations which afforded the upper stratum of British labor its middle class privileges, but its centripetal position in the labor markets and political apparatus established through imperialism.

Post's claim of an increasing immiseration for British workers in the last quarter of the is also open for challenge. In fact, during this period, as a corollary to vastly improved transpiration, increased primary goods exports and super-exploitative conditions in colonial markets, the wages of Britain's domestic working class improved. Thus, wages measured against prices rose by 26% in the 1970s, 21% in the 1880s, while slowing down to 11% in the 1890s (Clough, 1992, p. 19; Halevy, 1939, p. 133). Certainly, much of these improved circumstances disproportionately benefited the skilled upper stratum of workers, the labor aristocracy of the time. This subset of the British workforce earned perhaps double that of its unskilled counterpart, a large proportion of which was barely able to feed its families. Indeed, a study by Liberal economic theorist Sir Leo Chiozza-Money in 1905, Riches and Poverty, found that out of British population of 43 million, 33 million lived in poverty and 13 million in destitution (cited in Clough, 1992, p. 20). Yet even within the latter group, there were important gradations of income unconducive to working class unity. Halevy (1939, p. 133) highlights how the benefits of colonialism came not to be restricted only to a small section of British workers:

The fall in… current prices resulting from British monopoly capital's colonial trade had enabled a very large body to come into existence among the British proletariat, able to keep up a standard of living almost identical with that of the middle class. The self-respecting workman in the North of England wanted to own his own cottage and garden, in Lancashire his piano. His life was insured. If he shared the common English failing and was a gambler, prone to bet too highly on horses… the rapid growth of savings banks proved that he was nevertheless learning the prudent of the middle class.

The phenomenon of falling prices bringing middle class living standards, and hence, middle class aspirations to metropolitan workers was noted as early as 1903 by US sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen:

The workers do not seek to displace their managers; they seem to emulate them. They themselves acquiesce in the general judgment that the work they do is somehow less 'dignified' than the work of their masters, and their goal is not to rid themselves of a superior class but to climb up to it. (cf. Heilbroner, 1980, pp. 230-231)

At the dawn of the imperialist era, super-profits generated by imperialism trickled down to the broad urban masses of the advanced countries, stimulating new needs therein, including

soap, margarine, chocolate, cocoa and rubber tires for bicycles. All of these commodities required large-scale imports from tropical regions, which in turn necessitated local infrastructures of harbors, railways, steamers, trucks, warehouses, machinery and telegraph and postal systems. Such infrastructures required order and security to ensure adequate dividends to shareholders. Hence the clamor for annexation if local conflicts disrupted the flow of trade, or if a neighboring colonial power threatened to expand. (Stavrianos, 1981, p. 262)

Clearly, as Stavrianos suggests, and given the very public promotion of social-imperialist doctrines and practices, if the economy provided jobs, rising living standards and a strong sense of national identity to the citizens of the colonial powers, were not likely to passively accept rival countries affecting the flow of super-profits, hence the aforementioned clamor for annexation. The clamor was, of course, amplified to a deafening din by the imperialist politicians and ideological state apparati, then as today (Cope, 2012, p. 105; Diamond, 2006; Mackenzie, 1987; Schneider, 1982).

Post's claim of falling wages for the entire British working class in the last quarter of the nineteenth century is fallacious. Although wages were a diminishing portion of national income, measured in real terms, they improved for the British working class, especially for its skilled, unionized members (Stavrianos, 1981, pp. 266-267).

Whether the real wages of the British working class rose or fell during the early years of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries remains a disputed issue. A definitive answer is difficult because the large-scale urbanization accompanying industrialization altered the structure of worker consumption, as, for example, by the introduction of rent for lodging. But there is no question about the steady rise of real wages in the second half of the 19th century. The following figures show that between 1850 and 1913 real wages in Britain and France almost doubled. (4)

It may be argued that the rising purchasing power of wages depicted here merely indicates that British workers were receiving some of the benefits from the increased productivity of domestic labor employed in those industries producing workers' consumption goods (Table 1). Rising British wages are in this regard perfectly consistent with an increased domestic rate of surplus value or exploitation (this being the ratio between the necessary labor time required to produce workers' consumption goods and the surplus labor time workers expend beyond that) (see below). Yet it must be understood that greater productivity in industries producing workers' consumption goods may come from two distinct sources. First, it maybe the result of their more intensive exploitation, that is of their being paid less absolutely to activate the same materialized composition of capital. Second, it may result from their being paid proportionately less to activate a greater materialized composition of capital. Scientific and technical improvements lead to cheapened production costs for workers consumption goods and, hence, a decrease in the necessary as opposed to surplus labor. Capitalists will introduce new technological advances to the production process if the amount of labor expended on producing labor-saving machinery is less than the amount of labor displaced by its introduction.



Mechanization, however, involves substitution living (value-creating) labor for dead labor, and hence, constitutes a growing restriction on the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit. As such, capitalists must strive to increase productivity without proportionate wage increases. Nonetheless, if British workers were wholly responsible for producing their own consumption goods, it could properly be said that rising British wages in the Victorian era represented returns to British labor according to increased domestic exploitation, possibly as forced upon capitalists by working class militancy. This explanation for rising British wages, however, ignores the extent to which they were, in fact, afforded by an increase in the proportion of workers' consumption goods produced by colonial labor.

Between 1870 and 1913, merchandise imports to Britain increased from £279 million to £719 million, and with it the country's trade deficit from £33 million to £82 million (Clough, 1992, p. 18; Michell & Deane, 1962, pp. 828-829, 872-873). As Patnaik notes, the rising consumption of sugar, beverages, rice, cotton and what by West Europeans at this time depended heavily on the unpaid import surpluses from colonial countries (Patnaik, 1999). Thus, although the outsourcing of the production of workers consumption goods to oppressed nations occurred on a much smaller scale during the last three decades of the nineteenth century than it has during recent times, the rising real wage of British workers at that time is in no small measure attributable to their receipt of the colonial loot. A primary reason for nineteenth century British wages falling relative to gross domestic product (GDP) but rising in terms of purchasing power is that value was being transferred from colonial societies wherein the (then largely rural) workforce was on the losing side of the international class struggle.

Whilst most left theorists have for a long time fallen into the habit of gauging exploitation on a national(ist) basis, commonly examining wages in relation to profits in the rich countries (and thereby 'proving' that the most exploited workers in the world are those of the developed nations), in the context of global imperialism, value creation and distribution must be examined as an international process.

As Smith correctly argues, 'GDP, which claims to be a measure of the wealth produced in a nation, is in reality, a measure of a wealth captured by a nation' (Smith 2010. As such, GDP is expanded by surplus value extracted from workers in low-wage countries and is not a valid measure of 'gross domestic product', since it may rise of decline independently of (domestic) labor's share of it. Commodities produced by low-wage workers in the labor-intensive export industries obtain correspondingly low prices internationally. However, as soon as these goods enter into imperialist-country markets, their prices are multiplied several fold, sometimes by as much as 1000%. As Chossudovsky notes, 'value added' is thus 'artificially created within the services economy of the rich countries without any material production taking place' (Chossudovsky, 2003. p. 80). Jedlicki (2007), meanwhile, observes that 'value added' already incorporates those wage and capital differentials that some Western socialists aim to justify in the name of superior First World 'productivity'. In doing so, 'a demonstration is carried out by using as proof what constitutes, precisely, the object of demonstration'.

Post (2010, p. 24) observes that 'in the United States today, real wages for both union and non-union workers have fallen, and are about 11% below their 1973 level, despite strong growth beginning in the mid 1980s'. By measuring wages against GDP figures and reported profits, Post intends to convince his readership that the living standards of the US working class have been declining and that a renewed offensive against capital would entitle them to a greater share of the wealth they ostensibly create. However, there are at least two problems with the idea that US wages have fallen.

Firstly, whilst wages in the United States have indeed fallen since 1973 as a proportionate share of GDP, in real terms the poor in that country were better off in 1999 than they were in 1975. For example, Cox and Alm (1999) show that whereas in 1971 31.8% of allUS households had air-conditioners, in 1994 49.6% of households below the poverty line had air-conditioners. These authors also demonstrate that the United States poor in 1999 had more refrigerators, dishwashers, clothes dryers, microwaves, televisions, college educations and personal computers than they did in 1971. Wages decidedly did not shrink, then, relative to the purchasing power necessary to consume these items.

US economists Meyer and Sullivan (2011) had constructed a measure of consumption which challenges mainstream assessments of declining US living standards. They note that income-based analyses of economic well-being in the United States do not reflect the full range of available household consumption resources such as, for example, food stamps, or lessened marginal tax rates. Second, they demonstrate that official statistics account for inflation using a price index with reflects a cumulative upward trend based on substitution bias, outlet bias, quality bias and new-product bias. Third, official government income measures fail to reflect important components of economic well-being such as consumed wealth, the ownership of durables such as houses and cars or the insurance value of government programs. Thus, a retired couple who own their own home and live off savings, for example, are income-poor but may still be materially well-off. Taking into account the flawed methodologies of official reports on declining US household income, the authors construct a very different picture of US living standards:

Our results show evidence of considerable improvement in material well-being for both the middle class and the poor in the US over the past three decades. Median income and consumption both rose by more than 50 percent in real terms between 1980 and 2009. In addition, the middle 20 percent of the income distribution experiences noticeable improvements in housing characteristics: living units became bigger and much more likely to have air conditioning and other features. The quality of the cars these families own also improved considerably. Similarly, we find strong evidence of improvements in the material well-being of poor families. After incorporating taxes and noncash benefits and adjusting for bias in standard price indices, we show that the tenth percentile of the income distribution grew by 44 percent between 1980 and 2009. Even this measure, however, understates improvements at the bottom. The tenth percentile of the consumption distribution grew by 54 percent during this period. In addition, for those in the bottom income quintile, living units became bigger, and the fraction with any air conditioning doubled. The share of households with amenities such as dishwasher or clothes dryer also rose noticeably.

Not, indeed, dis US incomes decline relative to the costs of those items necessary in the reproduction of the worker as such (the 'value of labor-power' in Marxist terms). Thus, between 1970 and 1997, the real price of a food basket containing one pound of ground beef, one dozen eggs, three pounds of tomatoes, one dozen oranges, one pound of coffee, one pound of beans, half a gallon of milk, five pounds of sugar, one pound of bacon, one pound of lettuce, one pound of onions and one pound of bread fell so that it took 26% less of the workers' time to buy it (ibid pp. 40-41).

It may be argued that several of these items are almost exclusively produced within the United States and that, therefore, it is the increased productivity of US agriculture that accounts for the relative cheapness of these goods over time. Certainly, tomatoes, orange,s carrots, onions, milk, bread and other foodstuffs are produced in great quantities within US borders. However, it must be understood that US agricultural production is heavily subsidized by the government. Indeed, half of the value of all Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) agriculture, according to OECD estimates, consists of government subsidies (Patnaik, 2007, p. 44). As she explains:

Since these are rich industrial countries where the farm sector employs less than 5 percent of full time workers and correspondingly contribute 4 percent or less to GDP, they can easily afford to give budgetary support to the extent of 2-3 percent of GDP, which amounts to half or more of the total value of agricultural output. In India where agriculture employs two thirds of the workers and contributes over a quarter of GDP, a similar order of support would not be possible even if every single rupee of central government revenues went to agriculture alone. (ibid, p. 43)

Second, Patnaik (2007, p. 25) notes that as much as 60-70% of Northern food items have tropical or sub-tropical import content. Finally, the developed world's investment in agriculture, including in the fossil fuel, chemical and machine production which facilitates its great productivity, is in part made possible by the economic buoyancy guaranteed to the import of large quantities of surplus value form the underdeveloped world (Cope, 2012). More generally, it is the globalization of production which plays the major role in cheapening the costs of the reproduction of labor power in the developed countries and, hence, the apparent surfeit of surplus labor preformed by production workers therein.

According to the International Monetary Fund, although OECD's labor share of GDP decreased, the globalization of labor in the last three decades 'as manifested in cheaper imports in advanced economies' has increased the 'size of the pie' to be shared amongst citizens there and thus a net gain in total workers' real compensation (IMF, 2007, p. 179). Smith (2008, pp. 10-11) notes that

WEO 2007 estimates that between 1980 and 2003, real, terms-of-trade adjusted wages of unskilled workers (defined as those with less than university-level education) in the US increased by 14%, and that around half of this improvement resulted from falling prices of imported consumed goods… Broda and Romalis (2008) calculate that 4/5 of the total inflation-lowering effect of cheap imports is accounted for by cheap Chinese imports, these having risen during the decade of 1994 to 2004 from 6% to 17% of all US imports, and that the "rise of Chinese trade… alone can offset around a third of the rise in official inequality we have seen over this period". (5)

In the United Kingdom, declines in the cost of living during the past decade are similarly attributable to trade with China (6). The important point to note here is that a fall in wages relative to GDP does not by itself account for the purchasing power of said wage, nor, crucially, need it compensate for the transferred surplus value (super-profits) inhering in the average OECD wage.

To return to Post's critique of Marx and Engels, the author goes awry in claiming that the United States and German challenge to Britain's monopolistic position on the world market could only have led to lower standards of living for British workers. It is true that British capital's preeminence was profoundly challenged by the rise of monopoly capitalism in Germany and the United States between the 1870s and World War I (WWI). Furthermore, as Hobsbawm notes, the effective end of Britain's industrial monopoly eroded those 'economic devices which created a satisfied "aristocracy of labor" …automatically (that is, without the deliberate adoption of reformist policies)' (Hobsbawm, 1951, p. 328). However, British capitalism's inherent need to expand remained undiminished. On the contrary, to better compete with its imperialist rivals, Britain escalated its extraction of surplus labor embodied in colonial foods and raw materials but, crucially, never paid for in colonial wages. IN doing so, Britain was able to supplement the consumption of its own workforce, still at that time exploited in the main, at the expense of that in the colonized nations. By what means did British colonialism drain surplus from the colonial world?

State-guaranteed colonial investments made through qualified solicitors and bankers (largely self-financed in India where exports exceeded imports by some £4 million per year in the 1850s) had steadily increased throughout the 'classical' era of capitalism so that by 1870 36% of British overseas capital was in the Empire alongside half the annual flow (Barratt Brown, 1974, pp. 133-138). Later, Britain increased its level of foreign investment by an average of £660 million every decade between 1870 and the outbreak of WWI (Nabudere, 1979, p. 64). Its net annual foreign investment between 1870 and 1914 was a then unprecedented one-third of its capital accumulation and 15% of the total wealth of it Empire (cf. Edelstein, 1981, pp. 70-72; Hehn, 2002, p. 135). According to Elsenhans, the percentage of total capital exported to the world economy's periphery up to 1914 was as follows: Britain, 37.9%; France, 34.5%; Germany, 31.1% and United States, 54% (Elsenhans 1983, cf. Feis, 1930, pp. 23, 46, 70; Woodruff, 1975, p. 340). Later, in the highly protectionist interwar period when nearly half of Britain's trade was with its dominions and colonies and one-third of France's exports went to its colonies (Hehn, 2002, p. 145), the imperial powers (not including a Germany stripped of her colonies) could use super-profits to purchase social peace.

Overseas investment greatly facilitated Britain's capital exports. The £600 million invested in overseas railway building between 1907 and 1914, for example, created a captured market for iron, steel, and rolling stock. It also worked to cheapen the (transportation) costs of food and raw materials (Clough 1993, p. 17), thus reducing the costs of British constant and variable capital, and buoying profit rates (7). Moreover, enforced bilateral 'trade' with the colonies financed much of this capital export. The core nations of Europe and North America increased their purchase of raw materials and foodstuffs from the oppressed nations in the decades before WWI, maintaining a constant excess of merchandise imports over exports (Frank, 1979, p. 190). By 1928, Europe had a net export deficit of US$2.9 billion which was offset by the colonial world's merchandise export surplus of US$1.5 billion.

In 1913, the British government exported merchandises valued at £635 million and had imports totaling £769 million. In addition it imported gold worth £24 million and thus had an import surplus of £158 million in the movement of merchandise and gold. To offset this defect, the British had items totaling £129 million (from earnings of the merchant marine £94, earnings of traders' commission £25, other earnings £10 million). The British thus would have a deficit of £29 million, except for interest and dividends from their investments abroad, which amounted to £210 million. Addition of this item to the other 'invisible' exports reversed the balance of payments in favor of the United Kingdom, giving it a net surplus of £181 million. Theoretically, the British could take this balance in increased imports of merchandise and still have the balance of payments in equilibrium. Actually, they left the whole net balance abroad as new investment. In fact, in 1913, London advanced to colonial and foreign concerns long-term loans for £198 million - almost exactly the amount of the current profits from investments abroad. (Woytinsky & Woytinsky, 1955, p. 199)

Effectively, then, British imperialism's trade deficits with the colonies financed much of its overseas capital investment. British re-investment in foreign and colonial ventures of nearly £200 million in 1913 may thus be compared to its export deficit and import surplus of £158 million in the same year, representing pure profit of which India alone contributed two-fifths (Frank, 1979, pp. 192-193).

These sums may also be compared with the profit required to subvent the labor aristocracy. Let us assume that Britain's 1.5 million unionized workers in 1892, representing 11% of all British workers in trade and industry, constituted the core of the labor aristocracy of the time (with the very partial exception of miners, unskilled unions were then negligible) (Clugh, 1992, p. 20). Skilled workers in 1900 could expect an average weekly wage of 40s (£104 annually). Since these earned almost double that of unskilled workers, we will take the 'excess' annual wage of the labor aristocracy to amount to £52 annually, a total wage bill for the group of £78 million per annum. At £59.2 million in 1913 (Frank, 1979, pp. 192-193), it is likely that at least three quarters of this total can be accounted for by Britain's trade deficit with India alone. Post errs, then, in examining profits from foreign investments and machinery exports as the sole measure of British parasitism. More crucially, his narrow focus on profit levels is indicative of his glaring indifference to the extraction of surplus value, that is, to exploitation per se.

According to Marx, during the time they are employed, production workers spend part of their day reproducing the value of the goods necessary to their own reproduction, that is, the cost of their own labor power (or variable capital). Marx calls this necessary labor. For the rest of the working day, these workers produce value exceeding that of their labor power, what Marx called surplus value (the combined value of gross domestic investment, the non-productive or service sector and profits). The rate of surplus value (or of exploitation) is the ratio of surplus labor to the necessary labor or of surplus value to the value of variable capital. Fundamentally, however, capitalists are not interested in creating surplus value, but in generating profit. Profit, as the unpaid labor time of the worker appropriated by the capitalist as measured against total capital invested, must be properly distinguished from surplus value. In bourgeois accounting terms, profit is simply the excess of sales revenue over the cost of producing the goods sold.

Thus, the price of production of a commodity does not directly correspond to its value within a single industry or group of industries (Marx, 1977b, pp. 758-759). Rather, as capital is withdrawn from industries with low rates of profit and invested in those with higher rates, output and supply in the former declines and its prices rise above the actual sums of value and surplus value the industry produces, and conversely. As a result, competing capitals using different magnitudes of value-creating labor ultimately sell commodities at average prices. As a result, surplus value is distributed more or less uniformly across the branches of production. An average rate of profit is formed by competing capitals' continuous search for higher rates of profit and the flight of capitals' to and from those industrial sectors producing commodities in high or low demand. Overall, where one commodity sells for less than its value, there is a corresponding sale of another commodity for more than its value.

This equalization of profit rates under capitalism ensures that surplus value does not necessarily adhere to the particular industry (or territory, give international restrictions on the mobility of capital and/or labor) in which it was created. Instead, surplus value is transferred from those industries (or territories) providing less socially necessary labor to those providing more. Thus, even branches of production which may enjoy the same rate of exploitation, that is, the same underpayment of the workforce for the value produced by its labor, will have different rates of profit depending upon the organic composition of capital involved in the production process (8). Capitals equal in size yield profits equal in size, no matter where investment is made or how the capital is shared between constant and variable capital (or, indeed, between capitalists and workers).

As Marx (1977a, p. 238) recognized, though purely at the level of divergent international 'productivity' levels, super-profits derived from foreign trade enter into the rate of profit as such

Capitals invested in foreign trade can yield a higher rate of profit, because, in the first place, there is competition with commodities produced in other countries with inferior production facilities, so that the more advanced country sells its goods above their value even though cheaper than the competing countries. In so far as the labor of the more advanced country is here realized as labor of a higher specific weight, the rate of profit rises, because labor which has not been paid as being of a higher quality is sold as such. The same may obtain in relation to the country, to which commodities are exported and to that from which commodities are imported; namely, the latter may offer more materialized labor in kind than it receives, and yet thereby receive commodities cheaper than it could produce them. Just as a manufacturer who employs a new invention before it becomes generally used, undersells his competitors and yet sells his commodity above its individual value, that is, realizes the specifically higher productiveness of the labor he employs as surplus-labor. He thus secures a surplus-profit. As concerns capitals invested in colonies, etc., on the other hand, they may yield higher rates of profit for the simple reason that the rate of profit is higher there due to backward development, and likewise the exploitation of labor, because of the use of slaves, coolies, etc. Why should not these higher rates of profit, realized by capitals invested in certain lines and sent home by them, enter into the equalization of the general rate of profit and thus tend, pro tanto, to raise it, unless it is the monopolies that stand in the way. There is so much less reason for it, since these spheres of investment of capital are subject to the laws of free competition. (Cope's emphasis)

My own definition of super-profits, accounting for global divergences in the rate of exploitation at equivalent levels of productivity, is the extra or above average surplus value the metropolitan capitalist countries extort from workers in colonial or neocolonial countries by means of capital export imperialism, debt servitude, and unequal exchange (Cope 2012).

(4) Ibid. See 'Measuring Worth: Exchange Rates between the United States Dollar and Forty-one Currencies'. In 1900, the average real wage of Russian agricultural day workers, building, factory and railroad workers - the latter category paid almost twice as the previous two - was 251 rubles (Allen, 2003, pp. 38-42) or 49.5% of the average French real wage. Russian wages were very constant throughout the period of Russia's industrial capitalist boom (c. 1861-1913) and Russian workers, unlike their British, French and German counterparts,'did not receive rising incomes in step with the economic growth of the country' (Ibid, p. 37). Alongside miserable wages, another factor helping to explain the relatively militant ethos of Russian labor in the pre-war period is its higher socialization. In comparison to German workers, 70% of whom in 1895 were employed in industries employing 50 or less (Bernstein, 1961), nearly 50% of Russian workers worked in industries with over 1000 employees. Fully 83% of the Russian population was engaged in agriculture as compared to 23.8% of Germans in the immediate pre-war period (Kemp, 1985, p. 191).
(5) The IMF calculation was made by deflating nominal wages by the rate of inflation as reported by the official consumer price index (CPI).
(6) '"Made-in-China" helps make rich countries richer' in People's Daily, China, August 20, 2005.
(7) By 1925, the Caribbean, South Africa, Asia and Oceania (furnishing about 73% of colonial produce), produced some 54-60% of all oil seeds, 50% of all textiles, 34-35% of all cereals and other foodstuffs, 100% of rubber, 24-28% of all fertilizers and chemicals, and 17% of all cereals alone (an average increase of 137% of 1913 levels of raw material production) (Krooth, 1980, pp. 84-85).
(8) The term 'organic composition of capital' refers to the ratio between variable and constant capital, that is to the amount of value-creating labor power against technology and raw materials utilized in the labor process. A greater ratio between capital outlay and wages may result from the increased materialized composition of capital (i.e. fixed capital costs) or from the diminishing share of wages in total capital outlay. Whereas in the first case, the rate of profit is threatened by a diminution of the living labor involved in production, in the second case it may be buoyed by the diminution of necessary labor costs (rising surplus value). The latter is typically the result of the greater productivity of labor in those industries producing workers' subsistence goods. In the capitalist world system, reduced labor costs have always been associated with the extortion of subordinate peasantries and the (related) super-exploitation of dependent wage labor.

Edited by marlax78 (March 31, 2017 01:23:23)

Constantignoble posted:

however, it also alerted me to the fact that there's apparently a second (2015) edition of Divided World, Divided Class that's got more data

maybe i've been spoiled by software practices but it'd be cool as hell if publishers started including changelogs between editions of scholarly works

otherwise known as the preface to the 2nd edition

anyway, ima leave this here:

tears posted:

otherwise known as the preface to the 2nd edition

that's too many words, i need terse bullet points. twitter dot com, i live for this

(though thank you, this has alerted me to the fact that you can actually read the entire new preface via Amazon's "look inside" thing)

Constantignoble posted:

(incidentally, cope apparently also wrote a follow-up to his initial critique of Post)

i realized this a little while ago, but i appreciate the heads up. i'll have my library request it. annoyingly, this journal (research in political economy) is subscribed to by a university in boston, whereas i go to a different university in cambridge. so i have to wait for what i should be able to get immediately, lol.

tears posted:

marimite posted:

Night Vision is amazing. Written in 1993 but still feels cutting edge.

been meaning to read it for ages bu t kept getting distracted...until now and yea, it feels v good, wish more people wrote books in this type of writing

i really enjoyed night-vision too. there's a new edition out from Kersplebedeb, but i was informed in an email that towards the end of the year they'll be releasing a newer edition with additional material (the authors, however, are (fortunately) in no rush to complete it). i'm gonna buy that when it comes out.

the table you posted above from the book is indeed useful in quickly breaking down the qualitative transformation of imperialism with neocolonialism/globalization. however, for the purpose of clarification (re: im bored), there are several things one could point out about it*:

* the authors may be aware of these problems. i can't remember if and how they were dealt with.

a) "growing integration of world into one class structure" & loss of the settler aristocracy. i would place emphasis on the 'ing' in growing, as this is certainly what the neoliberal project seeks to accomplish (and hence the authors were very prescient in predicting the intensified settler versus imperialist antagonism), but we now know this project is breaking down, and thus a misreading could lead to something like kautskyite ultra-imperialism -- and with that to white guy identity politics ("national oppression? nah, it's all about the global working class").

i think one is justified in questioning whether or not this was even theoretically possible to begin with. one might think that if capitalism is able to overcome its current crisis, this neoliberal project will continue, the trumps and assads will disappear, and we'll eventually witness this projected one world class structure. but if a decline in the profitability of metropolitan industry is what caused neoliberal globalization to begin with, and the current capitalist crisis can only be overcome with a restoration to a higher rate of profit (some believe this is possible, others do not), does this mean the process of neocolonialism can be reversed, and the collapsing settler-aristocracy can be appeased? to ask it another way: what is the exact connection between neocolonialism and globalization?

b) 'spread of industry around the world' should be qualified. the authors write that this spreading of industrial production develops in a 'pathalogical' way, which i presume is a way of just saying uneven and combined development (industry in the third world is a 'distroted extension of the metropolis'), but this is a given. what the authors fail to mention, after themselves saying that the "Third world was restricted to producing raw materials" under colonialism is that there is uneven development within the third world itself. iirc, europe/north america were both home to the periphery & semi-periphery of the capitalist world-system under colonialism, but under neocolonialism we see a geographic shift of the semi-periphery outside of these continents. (of course, a major reason for this is that china isn't capitalist.) this is of importance in thinking of the long term trajectory of imperialism, i think. moreover, "spread of industry around the world" kind of obfuscates that manufacturing is not the most capital-intensive sector, and thus first world de-industrialization does not mean the end of the labor aristocracy, as high-paying white collar jobs replaced the high-paying blue collar jobs (i.e. does not signal a singular growing world class structure).

another thing with regard to the above 2 points. globalization is the globalization of production, the globalization of the capital-labor relation, but this does not signal anything other than a tendency towards a global class structure in the final instance, i think. vivek chibber's response to the claims of the postcolonial theories with regard to capital's universalizing tendencies would fit here. for instance, the wellknown lack of mobility in labor-markets is a major bulwark for first world labor - and this can co-exist with globalization, can it not? (i guess part of this depends on how you understand labor-power as a commodity, but there are other examples we could think of.) empirically, we know that the 90s saw massively increasing globalization (see OP graphs), but super-profits continued flowing throughout the system and thus there was no massive proletarianization in the first world (one can quickly check the poverty rate, for instance, and see it did corresponding increase).

c) the authors locate the primary tendency of neocolonialism with regard to the black nation as being "re-placed economically by new Third World population transfer". in other words, there is a tendency towards the lumpenization of the black nation. perhaps one could study this change empirically between 1975-2016? this is possible and shouldn't be hard.

a random offtopicish thought: while the causes are different for Third World pauperization versus black lumpenization, it would be interesting to attempt to develop a sophisticated analysis of pauperization vis-a-vis the capital-accumulation process. with this, uncovering what the 'sustainable' level of the lumpenproletariat produced endogenously by capital accumulation is, and whether it's getting 'too big' to the point where it jeopardizes the process itself (because the lumpenproleratiat cannot produce value - as only wage-labor can), and how this expansion to the point where it's 'too big' is endogenous to the process itself, and whether this has happened before in history. like, how do we bring amin's analysis of the high productivity of agribusiness + creation of a world-market of food causing falling food prices pauperizing millions into these basic economic categories?
something like:

capital accumulation -> expansion of the proletariat + concentration of capital -> centralization of capital + rising OCC -> creation of a lumpenproletariat -> fall in profitabiltiy -> further expansion of a lumpenproletariat = slumdweller commie revolution

...but cooler

d) the authors regard neocolonialism as the 'managed' form of captialism heading towards a chronic collapse , whereas colonialism was characterized by cyclical crises resolved by "periodic bloodletting". this is a little weird to me, as trustification & cartelization, regarded as having prevented crises of overproduction, and social democracy, regarded as having prevented crises of underconsumption, were supposed to be the end of cyclical crises, according to the revisionists. the authors are repeating this line, but for globalization instead, but with the caveat of having a theory of collapse. i think the correct posistion is that capitalism has always suffered from cyclical crises, and theories of collapse are bad because they encourage laziness.

other than that, the main issue with the book, MIM pointed out in their review of it, is that the authors could use a good reading of mao's on contradiction to avoid a kind of agnosticism whereby they see race/nation/gender/class as 'equal'.

but it's still a great book.

finally, since this is somewhat relevant, to whoever is unaware of it, i'd check out sam williams' ongoing serialized review of shaikh's magnum opus on capitalism, where he contrasts "real competition" with the 'updating' of marx's analysis by baran and sweezy on this the 50th(-51st) anniversary of monopoly capital, and will end with a contrasting john smith's analysis with shaikh's anti-leninism. presumably (if i understood smith correctly, and it would make sense given what i just said) he'll analyze smith's attempt to marxicize lenin's theory of imperialism.













Oligopoly and Global Wage Differentials

Post's third and final version of the labor aristocracy thesis is that presented by Elbaum and Seltzer. They argue that the severely limited competition faced by oligopolies and large-scale industrial concerns means that these can secure higher-than-average profits (the authors' singular definition of super-profits) which allow them to afford their unionized workers higher wages and benefits and more secure employment than their counterparts in the 'marginal' industries, in the retail and services sector, in agriculture and amongst the under- and un-employed.

In refuting this thesis, Post cites studies which demonstrate the absence of a strong correlation between industrial concentration and higher-than-average profits and wages. Instead, for Post, the lower wages of female and black and minority ethnic workers can be explained by capitalists' recruiting them into the more labor-intensive industries. The stratification of labor, then, is based on how 'competition and accumulation - not monopoly - continually differentiate in terms of technique, profitability, and wages and working conditions' (Post, 2010, pp. 27-28). As such, profit and wage differentials are rooted in differences in labor productivity. It is not, then, that workers in unionized capital-intensive industries share in their oligopolistic employers' super-profits, but that their higher-than-average wages may be accounted for by the lower unit costs of these industries and effective, militant union organization.

Tellingly, Post is entirely oblivious to the lower unit costs of non-OECD manufacturing. Smith (2010, p. 215) tabulates data from the World Bank (2006) showing value added versus labor costs between 1995 and 1999 for 64 countries. THis table demonstrates that unit labor costs (i.e. the average cost of labor per unit of output) are an average 1.6 times lower for non-OECD manufacturing workers than OECD manufacturing workers. Thus, if an OECD worker is paid $1 for an hour's work and creates #20 worth of output in that hour, a non-OECD worker paid at the same rate would create $32 worth of output in that hour. Obviously, OECD wages are greatly in excess of non-OECD wages, by around 1000%, so one hour of OECD labor appears to generate much more value added than one hour of non-OECD labor. Nonetheless, in purely price-based terms, terms abstracted from the ratios between what Marxists call necessary and surplus labor, non-OECD manufacturing workers are 60% more exploited (more 'productive') than OECD workers.

Post is certainly correct, however, in highlighting as he does how the technical division of labor as organized according to the uneven development of the productive forces is crucial to the issue of labor stratification. The national, 'racial' and gender hierarchies upon which social chauvinism is predicated are de- and reconstructed in the age of globalization (i.e. globalized imperialism). As Bhattacharyya, Gabriel, and Small (2002, p. 8) write:

Overall, several global developments have helped to reconfigure old patterns of ethnic relations and create new forms of racial privilege and politics. These include: economic restructuring in the West, including the demise of heavy industries, the rise of the new technologies, and the expansion of old and new service industries; the growth in significance of transnational and multinational operations; the emergence of new global divisions of labor and, finally, the rise of international agencies and global economic blocs, all of which have surfaced to transform 'national' production forms and processes and their corresponding social relations. These relations have been racialized in a number of ways; the role assigned to migrant labor in the new service economy; the shift of production sites from inner city areas, where migrant communities have traditionally resided, to greenfield (high-technology) sites, where they traditionally have not, and finally internal patterns of migration within the Third World and the use of female labor in the production of microchips and the manufacture of designer sportswear.

The facts of racist workers' and labor organizations' responsibility for the exclusion of black and minority ethnic workers from particular industries, occupations and countries are largely beyond the scope of the present essay. Suffice it to note that global wage differentials are politically grounded in such a way that the conservative political behavior of the metropolitan working class must be taken into account.

Just as serious an issue is Post's dismissal of the role of oligopoly, alongside its political, military and cultural supports, in sustaining wages differentials on a global scale. By focusing on critiquing the possibility of super-profits derived from the uneven development of (1) branches of industry, Post misses the greater significance of super-profits generated via the uneven development of (2) countries and (3) regions of the world economy (Strauss, 2004). Amin (2000, pp. 4-5) cites five major sources of monopoly super-profits through which the imperialist countries constrain competitive production in the developing world and ensure that value is transferred sui gratis from the global South to North.

• Technological monopolies sustained mainly by state control, military spending in particular. Metropolitan 'defense' systems, as afforded by taxing the affluent Western public, function as a massive fund for research and development in 'private' industry;

• Financial control of worldwide markets ensuring that national savings are subject to international banking interests based largely in the developed countries. The US trade deficit currently swallows fully 80% of all global savings in the form of foreign purchases of US municipal, state and government bonds;

• Monopolistic access to the planet's natural resources. 'Petrodollar warfare', for example, enables the transfer of surplus value from the global South to the global North, as the militarily secured denomination of oil sales in US dollars forces countries to maintain large dollar reserves, creating a consistent demand for dollars and upwards pressure on the dollar's value, regardless of economic conditions in the United States;

• Media and communication monopolies provide developed countries with a crucial means by which to manipulate political events. The corporate and government media monopolies, largely based in the metropolitan countries, present a picture of the world perfectly suited to their own anti-social agenda; and,

• Monopolies of weapons of mass destruction, particularly by the United States, ensure that Third World states are literally forced to comply with imperialist diktat, upon pain of terrible war (Amin, 2000, pp. 4-5).

The dominance of OECD-based monopolies in non-OECD markets entail for the latter: (1) a constant drain on available capital, (2) deteriorating terms of trade and (3) massive surplus value transfer resulting from unequal exchange. To pay for the product of OECD-based oligopolies, non-OECD countries must send abroad a greater amount of socially necessary labor time than they would were their own industries free to develop according to the demand of their own peoples. Developing countries are compelled under capitalism to compete with one another for access to the capital, electronic and military goods monopolized by the OECD. This ensures that each must drive down wages to gain comparative advantage over the other, hence contributing additional surplus value than would result simply from unequal exchange based on divergent materialized compositions of capital.

Post on Labor Aristocratic Militancy

Post (2010) misunderstands the significance of the labor aristocracy thesis when he ascribes to it the notion that bourgeois workers are politically quiescent, in his words, unable to 'play a leading role in radical and revolutionary working-class organizations and struggles'. He thus sets up a straw man version of the labor aristocracy thesis which he attempts to then refute by citing examples of the economic struggles of relatively well-paid, skilled and securely employed workers, both in the developed world and elsewhere, against their employers. Indeed, besides the examples cited by Post, it may be noted that the English trade union movement has always been the strongest in those trades wherein workers were most independent, most in demand and best paid. The wool combers, for example, were the first group of English workers to organize against the common exploitation of their employers (Mantoux, 1970, p. 78). More generally, there is some sociological truth in the idea that it has been mostly skilled workers and intellectuals who have been members of the Communist parties in Europe. That does not, however, change the reality that these have been small in numbers or that the main policy they have pursued has been narrowly economistic and at least tacitly social-imperialist.

Proponents of the labor aristocracy thesis do not assert that the interests of the haute-bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy are identical or entirely congruous. There is a conflict of interest between rich workers and capitalists and this may at critical moments manifest itself in widespread strikes and social turmoil. In South Africa, for example, where th white working class per se constituted a labor aristocracy (Davies, 1973), there were frequent conflict between it and the state over the impact of the job color-bar system on production costs, outputs, and profits (Phakathi, 2012, p. 283). The labor aristocracy thesis affirms, however, that workers in the major imperialist countries cannot and will not overthrow the capitalist system so long as a system of super-exploitation existst to maintain lagging profit rates and guarantee them high living standards.

Post is distinctly disingenuous, therefore, in disregarding the pro-capitalist-imperialist tendencies of the metropolitan working class in the twentieth century and beyond. As Sassoon (1997) has amply demonstrated, the effective parties of the left in the imperialist countries have functioned as vehicles to enforce the partial regulation and socialization of capitalism, as opposed to having posed any serious threat to its replacement. Indeed, those parties and organizations that the metropolitan working class has supported throughout the twentieth century and beyond have certainly been no less imperialist or militarist than their 'conservative' counterparts. It is demonstrably absurd to meekly attribute the reformism of the working bourgeoisie to 'false class consciousness', job insecurity ('precarity') or Stalinist or social democratic 'betrayal' as is typical amongst Western Marxists.

Yet whilst independent parties of the working class, distinct from the two or three main imperialist parties, have had practically zero electoral significance for the past century, that situation is changing today. That Western 'workers' are today fascism's major constituency has been shown by Oesch in his survey of literature showing an 'increasing proletarianization (sic) of right-wing populist parties' electorate' since the 19990s' (Oesch, 2008, p. 350). In particular, studies show that workers have become the core electoral base of the Austrian Freedom Party, the Belgian Flemish Block, the French National Front, the Danish People's Party, and the Norwegian Progress Party. At the same time, 'working class' votes for the Swiss People's Party and the Italian Lega Nord are only surpassed by those of small-business owners, shopkeepers, artisans and independents. It seems reasonable to suggest, then, that during the 1990s, right-wing populist parties constituted a new type of working-class party. Oesch queries why persons 'strongly exposed to labor market risks and possessing few socioeconomic resources', 'located at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy', might vote for right-wing populist parties and finds the answer in popular cultural protectionism and deep-seated discontent with the functioning of the 'democratic' system, as opposed to 'economic grievances' per se (Oesch, 2008). In fact, it is a mistake to postulate a rigid dichotomy between the racist authoritarian nationalism of metropolitan labor and its socioeconomic position. The degree of core-nation workers' exposure to labor market risks and their possession of socioeconomic resources are directly related to their location, not at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy but, at the level of the global economy, right at its top. As such, the political intent to oppress, disenfranchise and exclude 'non-white', non-Christian people from state boundaries is not only based on actual or potential competition for jobs. Rather, it is an expression of 'working class' support for an imperialist system that more and more openly subjects entire nations in order to monopolize their national resources and capital. That global imperialism has found it necessary to admit persons from neocolonial states ac cross its border for economic, diplomatic, political and other reasons has consistently met with the disapproval of the metropolitan workforce. This has only intensifies as Keynesian social democracy has been replaced with neoliberal economic restructuring and the accompanying growth of the racialized police state. The super-wages of metropolitan labor do not only depend upon militarized borders and job market discrimination but also on the degree to which workers can influence state policy in their own favor. In the absence of trade union vehicles (appropriate to an earlier, social democratic phase of labor organization), First World democracy, based as it is upon the oppression of more than three quarters of the world's population, finds its sine qua non in racist national chauvinism. As such, it is not uncommon for brazenly national-chauvinist parties to gain support from groups of persons considering themselves politically left-wing. With 20% of its members considering themselves 'left', Jean-Marie Le Pen's fascist Front National, for example, did well in the 1995 French elections wit hthe slogan 'neither right nor left, but French', garnering 30% of the working class vote and 25% of the unemployed vote (Weissmann, 1996). More recently, a 2011 poll found that while 48% of Britons would vote for a far-right anti-immigration party committed to opposing so-called Islamist extremism with 'non-violent' means, 52% agreed with the proposition that 'Muslims create problems in the UK' (Townsend, 2011).

None of the above testifies to the labor aristocracy constituting what Post refers to as 'the revolutionary and internationalist wing of the labor movement' (Post's emphasis).

What is the Labor Aristocracy?

Post castigates sections of the left for writing about a 'labor aristocracy' for which 'there is no single, coherent theory'. To clarify my position, I will attempt to outline the fundamentals of such a theory.

The labor aristocracy is that section of the international working class whose privileged position in the lucrative job markets opened up by imperialism secures for it wages approaching or exceeding the per capita value created by the working class as a whole. As such, the class interests of the labor aristocracy are bound up with those of the haute-bourgeoisie so that if the latter is unable to accumulate super-profits, then the super-wages (wages supplemented by super-profits) (Edwards, 1978, p. 20; Emmanuel, 1972, pp. 110-120) of the labor aristocracy must be reduced.

The labor aristocracy provides the major vehicle for bourgeois ideological and political influence within the working class. As highlighted above, for Lenin, these conditions allow for ever-greater sections of the metropolitan working class to be granted super-wages.

As it has developed over the course of the last century, the labor aristocracy was first transformed from being a minority of skilled workers in key imperial industries to a majority of core-nation workers dependent on imperialist state patronage. From WW1 to the 1970s, social-democratic politicians and trade union bureaucrats were the reputable middlemen in the social partnership forged between globally ascendant oligopoly capital and metropolitan labor. Even as the Keynesian social contract was systemically dismantled under the ensuing neoliberalism, however, the massive proletarianization and super-exploitation of Third World labor in the final decades of the last century provided that unprecedented standards of living and the widespread introduction of supervisory and circulatory occupations further insulated metropolitan labor from the intrinsic conflict between capital and labor (10). Nineteenth century restrictions imposed by labor aristocratic unions on membership for the mass of workers have today been entirely substituted for restrictions on immigration from the Third World which are national in scope and allow the maintenance of profound global wage differentials.

Divergent global rates of exploitation have profound consequences in terms of the amount of wealth workers in different countries consume. Fig 1. compares total contribution to global production to the share of total working class and middle class household consumption for the world's population, ranked in order of income. In the Lorenz curve used to depict global income equality, where the χ-axis is cumulative population and the Υ-axis is cumulative income, perfect income equality is expressed in a diagonal straight line. The reality of income distribution, however, shows a curve that is more or less flat for the first two-thirds of its trajectory, but rises ever more steeply towards the end. The definition of the 'Gini Inequality Index' is the ratio between the area bounded by the curve and the straight diagonal, and the total area under the straight line. Plotted according to international income distribution, we refer to this as the 'world consumption curve'. Smith has suggested that generating a 'world production curve' by plotting each country's production of social wealth and superimposing this on said consumption curve can illustrate much in regard to global exploitation (11). In a world without exploitation, the two curves would be identical, that is each person/household would produce what they consume. In fact, however, the global production curve diverges greatly from the consumption curve. In Fig 1., the area bounded by the two curves to the left of their intersection ought to be the same as the bounded area to their right were the world's workers to consume what they themselves produce. The ratio between this area and the area under either of the two curves (by definition identical, since total production = total consumption) might be called the 'global exploitation index'. The countries closest to the point of intersection are those whose total contribution to global wealth is closest to their total consumption of it. All countries to the right are net exploiters, that is imperialists, and all countries to the left are net exploited.



According to mainstream economic doctrine, since markets equalize the income of workers, capitalists and nations with the value of their product, the production curve must be identical to the consumption curve; any deviation of one from the other being the result of the interruption of market forces. As neo-classical marginalist economist John Bates Clark put it:

Where natural laws have their way, the share of income that attaches to any productive function is gauged by the actual product of it. In other words, free competition tends to give labor what labor creates, to capital what capital creates, and to entrepreneurs what the coordinating function creates. (Clark quoted in Baran, 2012, p. 29)

As Smith notes, 'Marx pointed out the fundamental error in this view: workers are paid not for what they produce, but for what they consume' (12). As such, the two curves described and depicted above directly juxtapose neoclassical and Marxist value theory. Moreover, by graphically illustrating the great disjuncture between contribution to global production and share of global consumption, Fig. 1 refutes the views of Post and others on the left who persist in denying the effects of global labor segmentation and stratification on the transformation of the global class structure.

For Post's non-Marxist, marginalist, view of income distribution, global wage differentials are the result of productivity differentials conditioned by differences in the level of the productive forces at different societies' disposal. However, as Marx argued, it is only living labor and not machinery or constant capital which adds value. According to Marx (1977a, p. 53), an hour of average socially necessary labor always yields an equal amount of value independently of variations in physical productivity, hence the tendency for labor-saving technological change to depress the rate of profit. Although increased productivity results in the creation of more use values per unit of time, only the intensified consumption of labor power can generate added (exchange) value. Since wages are not the price for the result of labor, but the price for labor power, higher wages are not the consequence of (short-term) productivity gains accruing to capital. Rather, in a capitalist society, the product of machinery belongs to the capitalist, not the worker, just as in a feudal or tributary society part of the product of the soil belongs to the landlord, not the peasant. As Engels (1995, pp. 181-182) wrote:

Marx demonstrates that machinery merely helps to lower the price of the products, and that it is competition which accentuates that effect; in other words, the gain consists in manufacturing a greater number of products in the same length of time, so that the amount of work involved in each is correspondingly less and the value of each proportionately lower. Mr. Beaulieu forgets to tell us in what respect the wage earner benefits from seeing his productivity increase when the product of that increased productivity does not belong to him, and when his wage is not determined by the productivity of the instrument (i.e. the machine - ZC)

In Fig. 1, the economically active population (EAP) is defined as all persons who furnish the supply of labor for the production of goods and services. As such, the EAP includes hundreds of millions of persons engaged in private, so-called subsistence farming in the Third World. WE have favored Eurocentric assumptions that subsistence farmers contribute nothing to global production (even though most contribute money to capitalist landlords and supply goods for sale on the market), and assumed that only wage labor capable of generating surplus-value is considered productive. Total global production is defined as the working hours of full-time equivalent production sector wage employment in all countries (13). The total production workforce was obtained by multiplying the EAP in each country by the rate of full employment for its correspondingly global income quintile (Kohler, 2005, p. 9) and then by multiplying this total by the percentage of each country's workforce in industry and agriculture. The figure thus obtained was then multiplied by 133%, since I define 'underemployment' as being employed for only one-third of the hours of a full-time worker. To calculate capitalists' share of household income expenditure, Piketty and Saez's (2004) measure of the income share of the top echelons of the US income distribution has been used as a global benchmark. Capitalists typically earn more than they can possible consume, and much of their household consumption is reinvested. Since accumulated wealth is almost entirely in the hands of capitalists, the share of wealth of the top 10% of the population has been subtracted from total household consumption expenditures figures for each country. Doing so allows a morel focused comparison of relations between the world's working and middle classes, the major bone of contention between exponents and opponents of the labor aristocracy thesis. Rather than adjusting each country's figure by the ratio of its Gini index to that of the United States (so that for countries with more unequal income distribution like Brazil or Pakistan, a larger portion of its national income would be subtracted), I have assumed a flat rate of 42% for capitalist household income expenditure in all countries.

To suppose that these stark inequalities are purely the result of superior economic efficiency and skill levels of the part of the core capitalist nations, or that they are the reward of a section of the global working class for its exceptional militancy, is to stretch reality to a breaking point (Cope, 2012, pp. 221-251).

Conclusion

The failure on the part of the left to rigorously examine the structuration of the international class structure by imperialism, as evidenced by the global contradiction between production and consumption highlighted above, has in no small measure added to the serious difficulties facing the socialist movement, both historically and today. Socialist movements in the metropolitan countries have tacitly accepted the global division between imperialist and exploited nations by obfuscating and divaricating from the issue of international surplus value transfer. Working class internationalism and the struggle against racism and colonialism within the imperialist countries are both sacrificed at the altar of narrow appeals to material self-interest on the part of the wealthiest sections of the inelectuably global workforce. Historically, such economism has its corollary in a deeply conservative reformism and chauvinist acceptance of the status quo ante, such that imperialist governments have been and are permitted to carry out virtually any act of aggression and penal repression against foreign countries and minority communities without fear of widespread national opposition.

Metropolitan labor's dependence upon imperialism for its existence as such - that is as labor whose affluence is predicated upon the maintenance of the core-periphery divide - clearly precludes the possibility that its conservatism is based purely on intellectual myopia. However, to paraphrase Noam Chomsky, intellectuals have the responsibility to expose untruth wherever they see it. This is all the more imperative when disclosing that the reality of vested interests can only assist conscious workers and their representatives, those really committed to socialism, to combat working class acquiescence in the creeping fascination of the body politic associated with the ascendancy of the neoliberal police state.

Understanding how the 'labor aristocracy' is formed means understanding imperialism, and conversely. Those socialist organizations which do not understand the embourgeoisement of labor typically play down the significance of imperialism, so that even those ostensibly opposed to imperialism very often miss their target. Thus, some socialist organizations prioritize peace work and opposition to militarism, equating imperialism with the exercise of brute force against one or more sovereign nations. Their foil may be a particular administration, tis foreign policy, or even the military-industrial complex tout court. Alternatively, imperialism might be opposed as befitting only a handful of ultra-rich bankers and foreign investors (or even, at a stretch, a handful of very well-paid union bureaucrats and highly skilled professionals). In this case, only the richest 1-5% of society is seen as upholding the rule of monopoly capital.

The approach recommended here to readers, by contrast, is to treat imperialism as essentially involving the transfer of surplus value from one country to another and an imperialist country as a net importer of surplus value. This approach allows us to gauge the size and boundaries of the labor aristocracy and, hence, to work out the logistics of mounting really effective opposition to capitalism and its military, legal, financial and political bulwarks.

(10) Class struggle pivots around the exploited section of the working class' retention or otherwise of the surplus value it creates at the point of production. Since the fundamental class antagonism in capitalism is thus between the producers of surplus value and the capitalists who receive it in the first instance, unproductive laborers receive what Resnick and Wolff (2006, pp. 206-220) call 'subsumed class income' from the distribution of already appropriated surplus value. As imperialism comes to form the central core of the capitalist system, the physical toil needed to produce surplus value is increasingly the sole preserve of super-exploited Third World labor.

(11) The idea for Fig 1., a graphical comparison between global consumption and global production, was suggested to me by Dr. John Smith in private correspondence. I am indebted to John Smith for the use of the idea herein.

(12) Private correspondence from John Smith.

(13) For a Marxist view of productive and unproductive labor, see Amin (1976, p. 244); Marx (1968, p. 157); Marx (1977a, pp. 518-519); Resnick and Wolff (2006, pp. 206-220); Shaikh and Tonak (1994, p. 24)

Edited by marlax78 (April 20, 2017 16:06:47)

marlax78 posted:

i realized this a little while ago, but i appreciate the heads up. i'll have my library request it. annoyingly, this journal (research in political economy) is subscribed to by a university in boston, whereas i go to a different university in cambridge. so i have to wait for what i should be able to get immediately, lol.

i might could save you a little time, for look what i have just found via an imperialism study group:

Cope - Global Wage Scaling and Left Ideology: A Critique of Charles Post on the ‘Labour Aristocracy’ (2013)

Post - The Roots of Working Class Reformism and Conservatism: A Response to Zak Cope's Defense of the "Labor Aristocracy" Thesis (2014)

Cope - Final Comments on Charles Post’s Critique of the Theory of the Labour Aristocracy (2014)

Bagchi - A Comment on the Post–Cope Debate on Labour Aristocracy and Colonialism (2014)

maybe the real Secret PDF Subforum... was the friends we made along the way

Edited by Constantignoble (April 21, 2017 22:17:43)

Edited by Constantignoble (July 25, 2018 22:29:19)

https://anti-imperialism.org/2018/08/09/practical-notes-concerning-service-workers-productive-and-unproductive-labor/ posted:

09/08/2018 — Amber B.
Practical Notes on Service Work: Implications of Unproductive Labor

As of 2016 more than 80% of active workers in the united $tates are employed by the service—or tertiary—sector, a large variety of jobs which are defined primarily against the traditional backdrop of “productive” labor employed in agriculture, industry or resource extraction. This is where a bulk of the so-called “unskilled” workforce is employed, particularly in retail and trade jobs, as salespersons, stockers and cashiers. With such prevalence—more than 15 million people being employed in retail trade alone—it demands more than just a stereotyped explanation of conditions and tasks. Even in the First World, we cannot, nor should we, rule out the importance of transforming workplace struggles into revolutionary ones. That said, we must understand exactly what peculiar relations exist here, to say the least, and what problems they pose/how we might solve them to transform the everyday cycle of economistic struggle into revolutionary class struggle on the side of the global proletariat.

There are a number of important factors to consider about the type of work and the environment when approaching the question of struggle among service sector workers. On its face, we must consider what their relationship to production is and how it is important to the politicization of their conditions. Service work is locked firmly in the tertiary sector, or that sector that Marx described as primarily involving the realization of commodities, rather than their production, wherein industrial capital sacrifices part of the surplus-value extracted in the production process to the sphere of circulation as the profit of the “merchant”. This ranges from the hourly waged workers in retail, to self-employed professionals who contract with advertising firms (although these are sometimes lumped into a quaternary sector dealing with information, nevertheless, they are parasitic outgrowths on productive capital). Of course these two jobs have little in common despite the sectoral similarity. Nevertheless, it is clear that those in the service sector are not productive of surplus-value, but simply aid in its realization as profit. Therefore, despite being generally organized in a capitalistic setting, these workers are not productive in a capitalist sense, that is, of surplus-value.

This may appear on its face to be a pedantic point, since to a low-wage service sector employee, their conflict with management remains constant. However, the division between unproductive and productive labor has a fundamental impact on our political practice. The problem is twofold: (1) Since the workers do not produce surplus-value, their contribution to the concentration of capital and the expansion of the capitalist system is external, indirect. Productive capital surrenders part of the surplus-value to pay for circulation, and their wages are mere faux frais of that sphere of distribution. (2) Since they do not produce surplus-value, they are not exploited in the strict Marxian sense, and therefore the politics of their contradictions with management are put into a different politico-economic context. So what does this mean for the reality of class struggle in a service/retail environment? Before we can answer this question more exactly, we must more precisely locate that section among which it would be valuable to agitate. There is very little to be done at this moment for the upper echelons of this sector—some self-employed, all comfortably petty bourgeois. These are the individuals employed as artists, proprietary salespeople, skilled craftspeople and consultants.

Rather, for the purposes of this analysis we are interested in those employed regularly in a capitalistic setting, receiving a wage as the primary payment for their work. These are the cashiers, sales associates, fast food workers, janitorial staff, etc. who still have a contradictory relationship with a bureaucratic structure above them. Even still, a number of challenges face us in actually mobilizing these workers politically, and away from the economistic self-interest that tends to define most unconscious (or petty bourgeois-conscious) workers’ struggles. In the united $tates and the First World more broadly, one of these is certainly the relatively high wages of the workers employed in this sector. Many workplaces now pay far above the minimum wage, with Walmart (the united $tates’ largest private employer) offering a starting rate of $11 per hour to all its associates, and even higher depending on one’s department. Not extravagant by any means, but they certainly aren’t revolting any time soon.

The recent increases in wages, and the promise of further increases, have severely hampered the development of worker organization and class struggle in these firms. Simply put, high wages in some firms have placed negative incentives on struggle, even around serious issues, as workers simply do not see the cost of struggling for their resolution as “worth it” when measured against these high wages. This is by no means the deciding factor, but clearly it does play a role, especially when so many are living above just mere subsistence. The overall condition of the workers is not reducible to wages, but at the same time we cannot discount them. The ability for workers to live in relative comfort and security has a huge impact on the impetus for class struggle, and so long as imperialism functions as it does, emphasizing the consumptive power of First World people over their productive power, this is not likely to change. Even across sectors, we cannot deny the impact that high wages have had in diminishing the support for class struggle, and qualitatively changing the standard of living enjoyed in the First World in comparison to the global majority in the Third World.

But even for those low-wage service workers, who live significantly less comfortably, what impact does their unproductive status have on the prospects for struggle? Does the technical lack of exploitation mean anything in the face of the hardships they experience? We must answer yes, in fact it does. The bourgeoisie will always, in the last instance, move to protect production over the unproductive sectors in society, on the basis that it is only production which can lead to accumulation. So follows the old saying, reiterated by Smith and Marx, that one grows rich from workers, but poor from servants. In a general crisis, the heights of bourgeois society would rather terminate a vast majority of those employed in the tertiary sector than allow permanent damage to the productive chain. This is why Marx says that it is ultimately the proletariat, who produce all surplus-value in society, that has the power to destroy class society by first seizing the means of production. For service workers, their status in the eyes of the bourgeoisie as unproductive workers makes their labor much more expendable.

It is inevitable that some will read “unproductive” as a moral categorization. That is unfortunate. It does not mean that these workers are unimportant in society, but rather that they have been rendered “unproductive” in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, who place primary importance on surplus-value extraction as the engine of accumulation. For us, the support of these workers is still important when it can be developed. However, their position is not the same as those in the industrial or even the agricultural sector, and therefore we cannot approach their predicament in the same way. The wages of productive workers are pegged, in many ways, to the values they create, as well as the historically determined reproduction cost of their labor, however the wages of unproductive workers are instead pegged only to this historical determination, hovering alongside or below the wages of the productive sector, and are dependent upon surplus from the productive sector. So in terms of concrete political work, this complicates our demands. For productive workers in the abstract, it is greater control over their production and underscoring the deviation in compensation and the value they produce. For unproductive workers, the issue is more complex.

Even so, there are many vectors through which revolutionaries can insert themselves at the forefront of workers’ grievances. The bourgeoisie in core countries, even while it pursues an overall policy of maintaining social peace, still comes into conflict with workers in their own countries on a regular basis. Class contradiction is restrained through the concessions to the First World working class. Its results are often greatly maligned by the bourgeoisie, but they have not been eliminated. One of the larger and more serious claims against the oppressive relations in the service sector is the outright theft of wages or guaranteed compensation. Even in the First World, this is extraordinarily common, and is one of the prime examples of ways in which management repays their privilege through strict service of the bourgeoisie’s interests.

There still remains a serious limitation, however. The propensity for these struggles to inform an economistic strategy is born out of the fact that capital makes no legal claim on stolen wages. Ultimately, bourgeois rights enforce the rights of individuals to be paid for their work, and it is one of the fundamental realizations of Marx that people can be exploited even while they are paid for their work. This is not truly the case with service workers and the petty bourgeoisie at large, so the issue of wage theft is further magnified in their political demands. The problem is that legal struggles can return the stolen funds, plus damages, and no higher ideological point is necessary. This is not the case with the general exploitation present in the capitalist system, and capital certainly does make legal claim on the surplus-value produced by the workers who have no legal right to demand it returned to them in any bourgeois court. So on the question of wage theft alone, a very serious campaign must be waged against simple “fair trade” appeals, that stop at the demands for compensation. We must illuminate to the workers what forces provide the impetus for wage theft among the management, who oftentimes do not directly pocket the money owed to their workers, but do so on behalf of the big bourgeois, who cycle down privileges to them.

Drawing further from this realization, another possibility for revolutionaries is underscoring the fact that the division between mental and manual labor that—especially in larger firms—is oftentimes practically irrelevant and serves a primarily political purpose. For the most part, there is no specific task performed by management which even “unskilled” workers cannot do, especially when combined with the relative high-technology in most of these firms. Most of the complicated tasks handled by management are automatically performed by computers, and for the most part the skill level needed to interact with this technology is seriously overstated. For instance, Walmart’s “point of sale” software automatically reorders items when they are sold, tracks sales, inventory and other statistics useful to the operation of the store. What’s more, these figures are available to any worker who cares to look at them. Primarily, the division of labor and abundant bureaucracies of these firms play a political role, providing the corporation overall with loyal representatives to carry out their interests against those of the workers. Their role is more to do with discipline than distribution.

This is definitely something that could be explored as the basis for the transition from economistic demands to something more revolutionary, but it is still dependent upon the leadership and solidarity of productive labor to push toward a final conclusion. This is for two reasons: firstly, despite handling the final distribution of commodities, they do not occupy the strategic engine of capitalist accumulation that is production. The takeover of the centers of distribution alone cannot suffice to actually put society in the hands of the proletariat. Only productive capital in the hands of revolutionaries is capable of transforming society in such a fundamental way, and this is not something which can be annexed by workers of the tertiary sector without leadership fundamentally emanating from it. In addition to this, there is the ideological gap existing between them, with the ideological impulses of retail workers especially more resembling that of the petty bourgeoisie and proprietor. Territory won by them in control over their firms put them in greater charge of capital not produced by them, and profits earned through the sale of commodities produced elsewhere. Were the unproductive mass of First World workers elevated into control over their industries, they would merely oversee, collectively, value-chains beginning in south, east and southeast Asia, and ending in their own consumption. Their livelihoods, still dependent upon productive capital, help to build loyalty to the bourgeoisie without direct leadership and solidarity with the proletariat.

This is true even in moving away from retail to other service work—like cosmetic and medical work, for instance—the dependency upon productive labor is the same. It is clear that a direct link must be formed throughout the process of struggle directly to workers in the productive sector, and in the First World that means emphasizing those links to the proletariat in the Third World, whose sweat produces the commodities First World workers consume, and whose surplus-labor forms the greater part of the wages that cycle down through the processes of super-exploitation and imperialist rent. That does not mean immaterial and esoteric calls for symbolic international action, but deep and serious work that ties labor action in these sectors to the productive sector.

In actuality, workers in distribution especially can have a tremendous effect in amplifying the consequences of strikes in the productive sector. Yet this cannot be merely coincidental. It must be the focus of our work, and we must continue to stress to the workers the necessity in actions organized across sectors, rather than confined ones that aim themselves only at the distinct (and in many cases petty bourgeois) interests of workers in only one sector. This also implies conflict between nativist, loyalist and racist workers, who are the majority, and progressives/revolutionaries. This is merely the microcosmic expression of internationalism, which takes the macrocosmic form of active national/land and anti-imperialist struggle. Building international ties, as well as uniting all who can be united, will be difficult. We do not discount the power of the subjective element.

Overall, the greatest single challenge to overcome in organizing workers in the service sector on a truly revolutionary basis is their relationship to imperialism and the international division of labor. Any effective struggle within this sector must be solidly linked to proletarian leadership in the productive sector, without question. In the First World this is complicated by the sheer size of the service sector in comparison to the productive sector, as the imperialist campaign for super-profits has lead the largest deliberate “deindustrialization” project in history.

The productive sector that remains in the First World has been fragmented by the labor aristocracy and their broad class control over the spheres of struggle among those still trapped in horrid working conditions, and even still this sector has been greatly reduced in size. Steadfast work must be done to counter labor aristocratic consciousness and class influence in the productive sector, work that can only be carried out by communists. If an organized and politically conscious working class in First World countries cannot be united with their Third World counterparts—that is, transformed from a parasitic enemy contingent into an active accomplice—then the effort has been wasted, and vital communist energies diverted to a deleterious project.

These notes by no means exhaustively answer the question of what deeper issues lay in organizing the service sector, it serves only to open discussion on the topic. Still many more peculiarities in class need to be discussed and further elucidated to fully grasp the overall problems in organizing within the service sector. What has been underscored here, however, is the need to firmly weld the movement of service workers to the broad movement for social and internationalist control over production. It remains true that only the proletariat is capable of leading the whole of humanity to communism, therefore the leading role of the proletariat and its vanguard—as well as the its location geographically—cannot be minimized.

my thoughts are that i feel that it lacks a discussion of how women fit into this great contraction of wages in the service sector (i.e. less surplus value sacrificed to the sphere of circulation) since a cursory glance over the gendered occupation structure shows that men maintain a stranglehold on productive jobs (and other traditionally high paying non-productive jobs), excluding women while avoiding non productive jobs themselves - what will this mean now and in the future?

Edited by tears (Aug. 20, 2018 07:32:09)