A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
I think bourgeoisification was something that happened when the empire was at its peak, and even then, the imperial core contained its own internal colonies where workers were superexploited for superprofits.
I also don't think it's necessarily useful to think of first world workers as bourgeoisified anymore. The superprofit are running out.
Hinterland is a good book on this, though biased against China.
There hasn't really been a labor aristocracy since the 1970s; everything changed then.
There hasn’t really been a labor aristocracy since the 1970s
I think the primacy of the labor aristocracy (in the U.S., at least) has only really started to degrade much more recently. There was a fairly strong (though changing) economy in the 90s, the first dotcom boom, then the early tech boom, then the consolidation of the tech companies into 4-5 giants in the 2010s (after the Great Recession).
Now that even those jobs are drying up, and now that multiple generations are seeing the twin crunch of that + the cost of living explosion (in education especially), you're finally seeing widespread, lasting pessimism about the economic future.
Yeah, definitely don't underestimate the cost-of-living crisis; it's developing rapidly at a rate that's historic, at the very least.
I'm not saying the effects of the stagflation crisis and the economic reconstructing of the 1970s had an immediate effect, but certainly in the long-run, it did, and only accelerated during the 1990s with Bill Clinton.
I would believe it when i see it, when the working class of the imperial core decide it's enough and overthrow the goverment instead of joining the army to get their share of spoils abroad that is.
The working-class in the imperial core has a police-state boot on their necks and it's been there for a long-ass time and it isn't going away and will only increase... Give it time.
It's a lot easier to start Naxalbari (and even that lost its goodwill in the few areas they control or controlled, up to now) in a place like India or do a coup in Africa.
It's a lot harder to topple a government like what happened with France in 1968 and even then it was just a bourgeois change of leadership in the long-run, albeit somewhat shaky in the case of Mitterand.
Latinx, Black, Asian, some poor whites, etc. don't want the racist police and prison boot on their neck and that just makes it harder to organize; we need more organization more than anything.
We have too many activist groups and movements strewn all over the country if you check, say, Instagram (and whatever they'll show on Facebook) in the local and maybe state level.
But barely any unity or collaboration.
This is straight up my problem, western leftists act as if they are the most oppressed people on earth and downplay the sacrifices other peoples had to make.
It’s a lot easier to start Naxalbari (and even that lost its goodwill in the few areas they control or controlled, up to now) in a place like India or do a coup in Africa.
insane statement, the life of a person is worth absolutely nothing in these places. In rural India cops or thugs straight up murder your entire family if they think you stole something from an employer/master, and you think you have it rough because cops use rubber bullets on you.
"act as if they are the most oppressed people on earth and downplay the sacrifices other peoples had to make."
I agree, some do think this, it's true.
The problem is that Africa and India are less industrialized; there are places to hide.
The fact that Americans and Canadians are strewn about but also mostly coagulated in the same areas doesn't help matters either.
Did you know that the USA has the highest prison population in the world?
Look i don't want to keep talking about this because i will get pissed off.
The people from the US won't have a revolution because there is no political will by the working class, it's as simple as that. And i won't change my views until the american working class does something to prove me wrong.
They've done near-mass uprisings, at least, like 1918 to 1919, but yes, no real socialist revolution, it's true.
I suspect that as the USA and Europe lose more of their grip on Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, we will see more strife in the imperial core (well, I certainly hope they lose more of their grip, but I'm cautiously optimistic!)
Hopefully, we agree on that, at least.
Army recruitment is down, unionization is up. Support for the government has fallen and support for imperial adventures has also fallen. Wages have been stagnant when measured against inflation for decades. This all means something, don't you think?
Maybe it's premature to say the first world workers have been fully debourgeoisified, but I think the process has begun.
The AFL-CIO have had two leaders so far to the left, one of which was enthusiastic about Evo Morales and even supported him during the coup.
Not saying much because it's the AFL-CIO, but it speaks to a growing radicalization within its ranks.
From the early 1970s onward, things have been getting worse for the U.S. and Canadian working-class.
Third worldism, as i understand it, the position that the working class in the imperial core is inherently reactionary and thus an enemy, is a completely natural position to take for a global south person. Western marxists feel personally attacked for this position and end up rejecting it and discrediting it. This is not to say that there are no good comrades in the West, but simply that the vast majority are not.
Honestly it's a good way to lure out the chauvinism of western marxists.
Domenico Losurdo has written extensively on this on "Western Marxism".
From what I've heard though, Perry Anderson's work on Western Marxism is a good read and I have it on my list.
Wait, from the perspective of a Third Worldist, isn’t Perry Anderson’s Western Marxism precisely the problem? That’s at least what I gathered, without having read Losurdo specifically, from reviews of his work such as this one https://monthlyreview.org/press/201187/
I've heard mixed things, good and bad, and that's why I (partly) intend to read it, but keep in mind that Monthly Review, while good, isn't the only authority on Marxism-Leninism.
I will give you my thoughts and report back on the book; at the very least, Perry Anderson has been quite critical of Western Marxism.
yes, it's precisely that. its like recommending kautsky after mentioning lenin.
heard from whom? Perry Anderson is literally the embodiment of western marxism.
We talking about the same one?
The book i mentioned by Losurdo is literally a reply to Perry Anderson, and you are here recommending me his work! 😂 This is as if after recommending you to read Lenin, you replied me with saying that i should read Kautsky ffs.
I was not, I think. I was just saying that I heard good things about Perry Anderson's work.
But I see that you weren't referring to Perry Anderson's work, but Domenico Losurdo's here.
Read the things before recommending them, you're here throwing trotstkyist anti-AES writers as recommendations.
I am not and I read everything, even Hinterland, which is anti-AES to a degree, but that's not the point of the book, and it's observations cannot be denied and are well-argued and researched.
I've read Domenico Losurdo, but honestly, I've also read Hinterland, and frankly, most people in China aren't "good comrades" either; most aren't communist and neither was it with the Soviet Union.
You don't need everyone to be a communist and anti-imperialist; there are more anti-imperialists in the USA, judging by the orgs, than there are outright anti-imperialist communists (excluding the fucking PatSocs).
Western marxists feel personally attacked for this position and end up rejecting it and discrediting it.
This is certainly part of it, but there are at least three other reasons western marxists hold some reservations:
Western Marxists are a blight to be honest.
These arguments are all framed in the western individualist mindset. Just because there is no hope of seeing success in your lifetime is not a reason to help the process forward. Communism will come regardless of what any westerner does. The tides of history don't depend on any one person but that doesn't absolve people choosing to do their duty being part of the tide.
滴水穿石! 👍
Water droplets drill the rock.
I don't think it's baseless at all. But things aren't binary nor static, they're flows and tensions in a constant state of flux.
Western individualism takes third worldist thought and transforms it into "there's no hope, only options are escapism or adventurism". Rather than taking it to mean class consciousness isn't a given in the imperial core, it's something we must fight for and cultivate.
It's also a good temper to the Trotskyist chauvinism I'm growing ever more tired of.
I really appreciate this comment. It basically puts my general direction into words. I have constant discussions with healthy white folks with a bachelors degree and nearly six figures who say socialism is a nice idea but... It makes my skin crawl. I have lived through starvation and homelessness. it is incredibly hard to stay friendly in the face of such privilege.
I mean, the Global South is already doing our labor for us. Must they do our revolution too?
I have never considered it that way. Although, to be fair, Stalin did comment on the need for each country to have their own revolution done by themselves without direct intervention from socialist states.
"You see, we Marxists believe that a revolution will also take place in other countries. But it will take place only when the revolutionaries in those countries think it possible, or necessary. The export of revolution is nonsense. Every country will make its own revolution if it wants to, and if it does not want to, there will be no revolution. For example, our country wanted to make a revolution and made it, and now we are building a new, classless society. But to assert that we want to make a revolution in other countries, to interfere in their lives, means saying what is untrue, and what we have never advocated." —Joseph Stalin, Interview Between J. Stalin and Roy Howard
yup i enjoy this quote a lot, at the end of the day each nation should work around its determinate conditions, if there is no political will to do a revolution there won't be a revolution and western marxists have no right to downplay the struggles revolutionaries in AES have went through.
Lots of people already in the west use it to justify sitting on their ass because everyone else is "inherently reactionary" ignoring the relative downward trend of the wages and living standards of the most oppressed classes in the west, the growing social unrest, protests, street actions, etc every year. I think understanding super-profits and the labor aristocracy is an important part of our analysis that needs to be considered, but westerners using it as a reason to pre emptively give up so they can be online armchair communists who have arrived at the Correct Positions that just so happen to require no action on their part to organize since it's already a lost cause by their view is frustrating, pointless, and defeatist
While I partly agree I think you are underestimating the importance of agitprop. Most western leftists can't do much other than agitation and doing so online is a valid method.
Much of the global north is still a long way from popular uprising and at this stage the actions that are needed often don't look much like work compared to the situation in usa where there are physical direct actions are needed.
Pushing the "correct positions" is an important job to avoid people falling to ultras or social fascists.
The working class in the imperial core is chock full of labor aristocrats. They are our enemies. Just ask them about the ukraine war and watch then turn into white supremacists live
Responding through abridging the chapter on MTW in JMP's 'A Critique of Maoist Reason'.
First, the outline of MTW:
in short, [MTW] claimed that the working class of the imperialist countries had become an ally of the ruling class due to its privileges in the context of the global capitalist system. Its objective interests were closer to those of West- ern capitalists than to those of the exploited and oppressed masses of the Third World. Therefore, the Western working class could no longer be considered a revolutionary subject. Only the masses of the Third World posed a threat to global capitalism by rebelling against the exploitation and oppres- sion they were suffering.
Critique: what is the value of First World workers to capital if they are not exploited?
So what if these abstract exercises supposedly “prove”, with statistics and positivist equations, that there is no proletariat at the centres of capitalism? Bourgeois economists can also “prove” that the third world is not being underdeveloped, or that capitalism is working, by making recourse to the same analytic toolkit––a toolkit that every major Marxist revolutionary has recognized as unscientific since the time of Lenin.
if the revolution can only happen else- where, and agitating for revolution in the first world must always fail due to an intrinsic counter-revolutionary tendency that overdetermines praxis at the centres of capitalism, then the third worldist living within the “belly of the beast” (where, to be clear, third worldism generally finds its home) is justified in failing to mobilize the masses around a revolutionary strategy––the masses are in the third world and it is thus impossible to practice the mass-line in the first world
Main Critique: The core contradiction of Maoist Third Worldism is the fact that it is primarily a first world phenomenon that attempts to speak for third world revolutions. That is, third worldism is intrinsically first worldist. This contradiction is not a dialectical contradiction (it does not produce motion/change or even exhibit the relational unity of opposites) but is a formal contradiction and thus, when excavated, reveals an unsettling logical incoherence. The fact that there may be some MTW organiza- tions at the global peripheries, their activities and influence only appear on third worldist websites and thus seem to be as significant and organ- ically “third world” as the third world branches of the average Trotskyist organization. Generally speaking, the theoretical development of third 88Critique of Maoist Reason worldism remains a first world phenomenon. The reason the first worldist origin and hegemony of third world- ism is a troubling contradiction is because it undermines the theoretical basis of MTW. If the first world is primarily a counter-revolutionary context where the proletariat, due to net-exploitation, does not exist, then how can anyone develop a proletarian revolutionary theory? Such a theory can only emerge in a proletarian context; it cannot be imposed by would-be revolutionaries who remain within a petty-bourgeois con- text––and yet first world third worldists, who are responsible for devel- oping this theory, live within a social context that according to their own theory is bourgeoisified. So did they glean their theory from third world revolutions? Well, aside from the way in which they understand the Chinese Revolution (specifically through a Lin Biao hermeneutic), it appears as if third worldists are opposed to the theoretical line espoused by those third world Maoist organizations who have attempted to launch revolutions. MTW groups even go so far as to deride, as noted in the previous section, third world revolutionaries for not understand- ing the problem of “first worldism”––as if a revolutionary organization engaged in an oppressed third world nation cannot understand first world chauvinism as well as the first world third worldist whose entire ability to conceptualize the problem of “first worldism” is premised on their privileged existence at the centres of capitalism. None of this is to say that theories that originate from first world contexts cannot be useful for third world revolutionaries, or that a rev- olutionary movement must only draw upon the ideology it sponta- neously develops in the course of its particular struggle. To make such an argument, after all, would be to reject Marxism due to its European origins. The theory of third worldism, however, since it is precisely con- cerned with autonomy of the third world and the problem of first world chauvinism cannot help but experience its exportation as a contradic- tion because it is an ideology that is precisely about the revolutionary status of third world revolution in the face of first world chauvinism, the latter being the “primary contradiction” of world revolution. Another possible way to escape the contradiction of first worldist 89Chapter 5 - Oe Dogmato-Eclecticism of “Maoist Oird Worldism” third worldism is to argue that Marx and Engels, in their historical context, were able to develop a proletarian ideology despite originating from petty-bourgeois and bourgeois social positions. But such an argu- ment fails to appreciate the emergence of Marxism and, in this failure, treats class as an unchangeable essence. There is a significant difference between the philosophy of the young petty-bourgeois Marx and the Marx who embedded himself in proletarian struggles: the former only produced, at best, a radical liberalism typified by the Economic and Phil- osophic Manuscripts; the latter, though on a continuum with the former, is the Marx who would eventually produce Capital and who wrote, along with Engels, the Manifesto in the context of a proletarian organi- zation. We know that Marx not only went to the masses in order to eke out the broad brushstrokes of proletarian science, but that he also sank to the level of the proletariat by the time he wrote Capital––so much so that he had to continually pawn his winter coat and rely on monies received from Engels’ bourgeois family. So where is the moment that the first world third worldists have embedded themselves in those pro- letarian masses that, according to their theory, exist only at the global peripheries? It is clear that the third worldist academic intellectuals of yesterday and today (the Emmanuels and the Wallersteins) have not embarked on such proletarianization; I think it is also safe to assume that MIM, LLCO, and RAIM have also not pursued this process of declassing––they cannot, without leaving the comfort of the first world, and it is clear that the most significant third world Marxist revolutions are disinterested in their insights. The upshot of MTW’s core formal contradiction is terribly chau- vinist: first world third worldists will perform the mental labour of theory, third world revolutionaries will perform the manual labour of actually making revolution according to this theory. The former group, after all, cannot make revolution since they are not in the third world, they can only provide the guidelines and prepare for world-building revolutionary activities of the global proletariat. The latter group, being the authentic proletariat, is historically destined to kick-off the global revolution but only if they accept the perspective of the first world 90Critique of Maoist Reason third worldists––after all, if they reject the theory that “first worldism” (as conceptualized by MTWs) is the primary contradiction, they are doomed to revisionism. To be fair, there are third worldist organizations that have attempted to theorize creative ways in which to approach revolutionary praxis despite the fact that they operate within a first world context where there cannot be, according to the theory of net exploitation, a viable proletarian class. The Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Network, for example, uses the metaphor of a 21st Century John Brown51 so as to argue that “behind enemy lines... [we] consider our circumstances and focus on areas where we can effectively contribute to revolutionary struggle.”52 Elsewhere, RAIM speaks of preparing certain elements of the petty-bourgeois first world masses for their future dissolution into the ranks of the proletarian by organizing them around “wedge issues”, such as patriarchy and national oppression, with the aim of “a revolu- tionary class alliance for proletarian revolution.”53 Here the praxis is one of “class suicide”, an attempt to sabotage imperialism from behind enemy lines, but with the goal of some united front between these 21st Century John Browns and the international proletariat of the third world. Such a strategic line is rather vague, however, and relies heavily on the revolutionary heavy lifting being done by other. In fact, the only viable revolutionary practice for third world- ism is the practice embarked on by Denmark’s Manifest-Kommunis- tisk Arbejdsgruppe (M-KA) that split from the aforementioned KAK in 1978. Eventually known as “the Blekingegade Group”, cadre of the M-KA went underground to carry out armed expropriations so as to provide material support for third world revolutionary movements.54 51 John Brown was a white settler abolitionist in the US who, during the height of slavery, betrayed the slaveocracy and, in coordination with Harriet Tubman, sought to bring about a revolutionary overthrow of slavery. He was executed for treason in 1859. 52 Program of the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Network (anti-imperialism. org/2009/11/26/program-of-the-revolutionary-anti-imperialist-movement/). 53 How Would Marx Organize First Worlders for Revolution? (anti-imperialism. org/2013/04/02/how-would-marx-organize-first-worlders-for-revolution/). 54 Earlier, when this faction was still with the KAK, they embarked on some soft 91Chapter 5 - Oe Dogmato-Eclecticism of “Maoist Oird Worldism” Reasoning that there was no proletariat in the first world and the only authentic proleta
I have seen it as some sort of fringe and mostly online behavior within the communist movement.
I'm active for what I think can be considered one of the more serious and successful communist parties within the west, without wanting to sound like I'm bragging. And I don't see how we would be off any better by being maoist third worldist compared to how we are operating now. We are organised trying to better our own country while at the same time recognizing the unequal exchange between north and south, trying to improve it from our own position by, for example, lifting sanctions, handing out sanctions to Israel, seeking cooperation with other movements around the world.