Sorry about the long post (shortest leftist wall of text be like)
When it comes to the “labour aristocracy” in the first world, I feel like many leftists wildly exaggerate both its size and wealth. This is often done to the point of erasing class conflict in the first world, as this article does. I might be totally wrong here, but i feel like these authors are making anti-marxist errors. The following points are emblematic of what I am talking about (emphasis mine):
The class interests of the labour aristocracy are bound up with those of the capitalist class, such that if the latter is unable to accumulate superprofits then the super-wages of the labour aristocracy must be reduced. Today, the working class of the imperialist countries, what we may refer to as metropolitan labour, is entirely labour aristocratic.
This is just completely wrong when one considers just how many poor people live in the first world who obviously don’t receive super-wages. US poverty rates alone are always above 10%, and that poverty line is widely known to be inadequate. The US also is significantly more wealthy than Europe, where the calculus is even worse. And that doesn’t even account for the wild wealth disparities that exist in the first world.
When … the relative importance of the national exploitation from which a working class suffers through belonging to the proletariat diminishes continually as compared with that from which it benefits through belonging to a privileged nation, a moment comes when the aim of increasing the national income in absolute terms prevails over that of improving the relative share of one part of the nation over the other
What it is saying is that when the working class share of national income becomes high enough, they start to want to exploit other nations as that becomes beneficial. However, the expansion of imperialism in the neoliberal era is also the reason for the stagnation of living standards in the imperial core. By accessing a larger pool of labor in the south, the position of northern workers is threatened. That’s why Northern workers have fought against outsourcing, the very fundamental imperialist measure.
Thereafter a de facto united front of the workers and capitalists of the well-to-do countries, directed against the poor nations, co-exists with an internal trade-union struggle over the sharing of the loot. Under these conditions this trade-union struggle necessarily becomes more and more a sort of settlement of accounts between partners, and it is no accident that in the richest countries, such as the United States—with similar tendencies already apparent in the other big capitalist countries—militant trade-union struggle is degenerating first into trade unionism of the classic British type, then into corporatism, and finally into racketeering
I am not too familiar with the history of the trade union, but wasn’t the degeneration of the unions largely a result of state and corporate action against the unions? They engage in union busting, forced out radical leaders, performed assasinations, etc. This seems like an erasure of the class struggle to the point that the unions are depicted as voluntarily degenerating.
I feel like these kinds of narratives, which are popular amongst liberals as well (liberals will often admit that weak nations are exploited. Example - America invades for oil meme) tend to justify imperialism to westerners. I have on more than one occasion seen westerns outright say that they don’t want to fight against imperialism because they benefit from it. I think that’s how a lot of westerners justify supporting imperialism. This kind of narrative ironically cements the power of imperialism
Consumers in the US are getting a worse deal due to inflation, corporate greed, and the inability of bourgeoisie governments to make concessions to the masses in the imperial core. The utter insanity of unstoppable unpopular neoliberalism is what drives people away from the status quo. It is the job of Marxists to explain that another world is possible and to their benefit to lead them away from the foolish answers of fascism. Attempts to reform like Roosevelt did were insufficient to make capitalism work for the proletariat of Turtle Island.
As democracy gets eroded by the Republicans and as the Democrats do nothing to stop them. I don’t see an electoral way out of this.
Marxists must be seen as the solution to people’s very real problems so that the easy answers of blaming trans people, ethnic minorities, women, and foreigners are less appealing. The trade union movement is coming back for the most exploited of the first world. The Indigenous sovereignty movement is also becoming more mainstream.
These are things that I think marxists can do on Turtle island:
Expand the use of permaculture with indigenous knowledge. Get the local tribes on board with this if they are not. Join them if they are currently doing this. Find ways to make this scale enough to feed the current population of your reigion. Obtain as much land to expand these practices and/or encourage current farmers to do this. This combats soil erosion, fossil fuel consumption and acknowledges in a real way that the best managers of this land are not the settlers, but the indigenous peoples.
Expand anti consumptionist practices in communities enough for people to opt out of capitalism. Capitalism encourages consumption and people feel like they have no choice but to consume. Create institutions to help people share items that are often owned but not used often. This is beneficial to the would be consumer because it it would cost less than owning and storing these items. This is better for the environment becuase it requires less production. This is also undermines imperialism because the need for cheaply produced goods from exploited nations can be replaced with durable quality goods, locally produced, perhaps of recycled materials, open source design, and designed in a manner that it is easy to repair for the good of all of us.
None of this shit is controversial, nor asking for someone to accept a worse state of affairs for moral reasons.
This is the inherent contradiction of capitalism.
It alienates them, but it doesn’t drive them away, it entraps them further. No one is being driven away from jobs, on the contrary they are clamoring for jobs so they can get health care.
Yes, that’s absolutely true. It is our job. No one has figured out how to do it yet.
There never WAS an electoral way out of it.
Yes, but it’s not and we’re still struggling to figure out how to achieve this.
We’ll see. The unions were infiltrated by the CIA a long time ago. It’s unclear whether they can be the vehicle for revolutionary change. Even in Russia Lenin exposed the problems of trade unions as the revolutionary vehicle, because their economic incentives were tied to heavily to partnership with the bourgeoisie.
Yes, but even the PSL says “landback doesn’t make sense”. And the reality is, this is a schylla/charybdis problem. Indigenous sovereignty is the end game, but you can’t get the working class onboard with that because they would literally lose their right to decide how the land is ultimately used unless they adopt indigenous ways of knowing and being. This is exactly how reactionary movements generate fascism.
This is literally impossible. Every thing you can possibly do to help people gain power to opt out will be co-opted, destroyed, or obviated. The bourgeoisie are not blind. They have been disrupting this anarchist mutual aid work for decades.
I think lots of it is controversial to the American working class. But worse, I don’t think it’s actually effective. As far as I can tell, the empire needs to lose a lot more before revolution is possible, and then there will be years of bloody conflict between the forces of reaction and the forces of liberation, and they will be confused for each other constantly as the propaganda war advances to far beyond what it was 80 years ago when fascists first donned the socialist moniker.
And they’re the vanguard? I’m sure a good bit of the rank and file disagrees. Most people I know are either apathetic petty bourgeois, people who are done with electoral politics and know there are great injustices against indigenous people to be rectified in the least, or functionally fascist.
Anarchists don’t centralize things enough or enforce the politicization of their mutual aid. They were scared of the BPP and we repeat their successes while dodging cointelpro.