The Labor Aristocracy: Is This Theory Bananas?¶
The theory of the labor aristocracy – the idea that some workers share in the profits of imperialism and as a result have diminished revolutionary potential – is a controversial one among the US left. Major national organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America try to implement socialism through working within reactionary trade unions. Other organizations such as the Revolutionary Marxist Students push the absurd line that the “israeli” proletariat and the Palestinian proletariat simply need to unite in a fairytale-like end to zionism. The CPUSA incorrectly states, “settler-colonialism as a system began to shrink. The amount of land-relations to be destroyed and exploited became increasingly small.” Freedom Road Socialist Organization recently argued that “To put it as plainly as possible, if the proponents of the U.S. settler-colonialism theory are correct, then there is no basis whatsoever upon which to build a multinational working class communist party in this country.” These organizations find themselves opposed to the member organizations of the All-Empire Worker’s League, who view failure to correctly address the question of the labor aristocracy as one of the central errors of the US left. This confusion desperately needs to be clarified and corrected.
The truth of the matter is that the labor aristocracy is a real, material class dynamic. In the US, it is upheld by imperialism, settler colonialism, and their superstructural shadow: the ideology of white supremacism. It is one of the primary reasons that the only notable revolutionary movements in the past century of US politics belong to the nationally oppressed, with white workers largely on the sideline if not an active part of the fascist opposition. The labor aristocracy is not, however, an excuse to stop organizing in the imperial core. Rather, as scientific socialists, accurately understanding the labor aristocracy sharpens our analysis and shows us who the revolutionary subject really is: the nationally oppressed and the sections of the working classes that are excluded from the spoils of empire.
What Exactly Is the Labor Aristocracy?¶
Labor Aristocracy
The labor aristocracy is a subclass within the broader first-world proletariat which emerges from the disparity between workers in the global north and global south due to imperialism. This disparity takes the form of a value transfer, which the imperialist bourgeoisie use to subsidize the artificially inflated wages of the first world proletariat.
What this value transfer demonstrates in practical terms is the creation of a global subaltern class of servants whose labor power is all directed at satisfying the consumerist lifestyles and appetites of the first world to the detriment of their own. This has the effect of ‘bourgeoisifying’ the consciousness of the first world proletariat through a kind of bribery. The imperialist bourgeoisie say to the first world proletariat, “Shut up and don’t shake things up too much, and we’ll provide you with an offshore class of servants to cater to your every whim. They’ll be out of sight and out of mind, so you never need to think much about them. And we’ll build a big border wall with fearsome guards to keep this riffraff out of our country club.” This is the bargain at its core.
...The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.
—Friedrich Engels, Letter to Marx, October 7, 1858
Engels’ “bourgeois proletariat” is precisely what is meant by a labor aristocracy. The specific context here is in a discussion concerning overproduction of cotton within the British colonies of China and India. Engels comments about how the French and British factories are making phenomenal profits from processing the cotton which is overproduced in the colonies. Engels ties this overproduction to the increase of wages in European garment spinners.
Historical developments in the following one and a half centuries have only compounded this effect. The Marxist economist and scholar Immanuel Wallerstein spent his entire career documenting this project. He explains it best in his brief 1995 paper titled Response: Declining States, Declining Rights?:
After 1848 and up to 1968, roughly, the privileged classes tried the road of appeasing the working classes by the institution of a liberal state combined with doses of economic concessions. This strategy was politically successful. They only reversed this strategy when the bill became too high, which was only recently.
—Immanuel Wallerstein
While Wallerstein correctly points out that the trend creating the labor aristocracy has begun a process of reversal, this doesn’t mean it simply goes away overnight, or even that it is destined to cease entirely. Large swathes of the US working class – particularly in fields that revolve around the imperialist military like tech workers, longshoremen, defense contractors, and arms factory workers – are still gainfully employed and make extremely generous salaries. Even those who exist outside of such industries still indirectly profit.
If there is a “bourgeois proletariat” as Engels calls it, where is the non-labor aristocratic proletariat? The most immediate example would be undocumented and migrant laborers in the United States. They are often employed in agriculture, slaughterhouses, warehouses, and construction sites. Their legal immigration status (or in the case of undocumented workers, their lack of such status) actually makes it entirely lawful to pay such workers below the minimum wage. Dr. Colin Bodayle documented the myriad ways in which immigrant labor, particularly among the undocumented, is subjected to brutal forms of exploitation.
How Does Imperialism Create A Labor Aristocracy?¶
It boils down to two things: labor and commodities. The labor of the global south is the principal aspect, and the commodities they produce are secondary. The average exchange-value of a given commodity is determined by the labor-power expended in its production. The global south pours a disproportionate sum of their labor-hours into commodities, and then those commodities in turn are consumed or refined. It is the disproportionate sum of the hours of global south labor which enables the labor aristocracy in the imperial core to live in a parasitic fashion. Imperialism creates a subaltern class of workers who serve the tastes of the first-world consumer lifestyle.
Important
**The labor aristocracy is not about ‘treats’ or commodities, but rather about the distribution of labor-power and what it’s geared towards. The three ways that the global north consumes these labor-hours are through access to cheap commodities, inflated wages, and home ownership.
Imperialism and global value transfers¶
Bananas are one of the most labor intensive agricultural crops in the world. Thousands of labor-hours are invested into each banana plant from seedling to finished produce. The banana tree can only bear fruit for one harvest, so they must continually be replanted and grown. Child labor is widespread on banana plantations to keep costs low. Between 4-9% of the total value of the global banana crop is paid as wages to the workers, whereas 40% of the total value is pocketed by retailers in the first world.
In terms of workplace hazards and conditions, the laborers on banana plantations also endure exposure to harsh pesticides without adequate safety equipment. Banana plantations exist in some of the hottest and wettest jungle locations in the world. Plantation workers have also historically endured brutal repression from Western-funded and armed death squads as a punishment for trying to organize. The most famous example of this is in Colombia, where Chiquita Banana funded right-wing paramilitary death squads to hunt down and murder labor organizers.
These crops also require a very specific tropical habitat and climate to grow in. Even the sunny Caribbean island of Cuba has an inadequate climate for banana growing. Therefore, the production of bananas for export is concentrated within the countries of Ecuador, Philippines, Costa Rica and Guatemala – all of which are exploited as neo-colonies of the United States.
Additionally, because of the complex logistics involved in transporting the banana from plantation to supermarket, the banana-as-commodity must be harvested in an extremely under-ripened state. The “refining” of the raw banana is simply the process of letting them ripen.
The transfer of value, and therefore the exploitation, happens in the following manner. The labor-intensive raw material – in this case, an under-ripe banana – is harvested in the global south and transported to the imperialist metropole, where it is refined, consumed, and sold at a profit.
Quantifying Exploitation: A Case Study¶
To quantify precisely how exploitative banana plantations are, consider the Finca Tropical S.A. plantation in La Lima, Honduras. According to a study by the Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics at the University of Hawai’i, the average banana farmer markets about 30,000 pounds of bananas per acre of land per year. The average farm worker also provides about 2500 labor-hours per year. The Finca plantation has 578 acres of arable land and 217 employees. By the university estimates, 17.34 million pounds of bananas are harvested per year. This requires 542,500 labor hours per year. A pound of bananas in the United States retails for 63 cents a pound. Thus, we can assume that the bananas from La Lima will realize $10.92 million in gross revenue upon being sold in the United States.
Plantation worker Norma Gomez testified that she and her coworkers are paid by piece wages. At the absolute highest, they make \(14 per day. The working day of a plantation worker starts at 5 a.m. and ends at 7 p.m. This translates to an hourly wage of \)1. Therefore, the cost of variable capital for the La Lima plantation amounts to approximately $542,000 per year. And this is assuming that the workers piece wages pay out the maximum rate every day! In reality, this number is lower. As a percentage of gross revenue, variable capital expenses are 5.24% of revenues.
Capital resources account for 18.1% of the gross revenues of a banana plantation, and the land resource expense (property taxes, insurance, costs of leaseholding, etc) make up 2.7% of gross revenue. Therefore in Marxist terms, we can consider the cost of constant capital as a sum of these values, totaling 20.8% of gross revenue or $2.27 million.
The average US grocery store worker earns \(17.64/hour. A pound of bananas in the US [costs](https://www.statista.com/statistics/236880/retail-price-of-bananas-in-the-united-states) \)0.63 on average. If we compare the ratio of periphery wages to core wages, we get \(1/\)17.64=0.057. Similarly, the ratio between the final retail value and production value is \(10.92 million/(\)0.5425m + $2.27m) = 3.89. The ratio of unequal exchange can therefore be calculated as price ratio / labor value ratio, which is 3.89/0.57=68.25. In other words, 1 hour of labor in the imperialist core can purchase 68.25 hours worth of peripheral labor.
Calculating the “Fair” Price¶
What would a pound of US bananas need to cost to reflect equality of exchange? Marx wrote that the value generated in the production process is the sum of constant capital c, variable capital v and surplus value s. In other words:
We can rewrite as s = value - c - v. Hence, we see that the surplus-value is equal to \(10.92m - \)2.27m - \(0.5425 = \)8.1 million. Therefore, to measure the rate of exploitation we calculate s/v. In our case, that amounts to \(8.1m/\)542,500 or 1493%.
Warning
Rate of exploitation: 1493% – For every \(1 in plantation wages, the plantation owner profits \)14.93.
If we paid workers in the periphery the same wages as first-world proletarians, then we would get v’ = 542,500 × \(17.64 = \)9.6m. Therefore, to maintain a rate of exploitation of 1493%, the capitalist would need to realize a new surplus value of 14.93 × \(9.6m = \)142.88m**.
With this information, we can finally calculate the necessary gross revenues to maintain an equal rate of exchange. Let gross revenue equal x. Then we get x = 0.208x + \(9.6m + \)142.88m. Solving for x, we get a new gross revenue of \(192.48m. Finally, to determine the 'fair' retail price of a pound of bananas, we divide gross revenue by total output to get \)192.48m/17.34m lbs = **$11.10/lb**.
Note
The price of 1 lb bananas would need to increase by a factor of 1762% to maintain parity with first-world wages.
The mechanic described here is not something unique to bananas. This unequal exchange is a structural feature of capitalism, and it’s the reason for this imbalance of exchange values between labor inside the imperialist countries and labor external to the empire in the global south.
Internal Colonies¶
Internal colonies are also subjected to this exploitation. The Navajo Nation has uranium illegally expropriated from its mines by US corporations, which causes severe health effects to the Navajo people. The uranium is refined into cheap and plentiful energy for the US settler state.
So-called ‘israel’ also extracts olive harvests from the Palestinian Nation it actively colonizes, so that the ‘israeli’ corporations can export Palestinian olive oils on the global market to fetch high profits. Settlers also gain access to a cheap and plentiful gourmet olive oil, which is reputedly the highest quality in the world.
Prior to the abolition of chattel slavery, the enslaved people of the Black Nation were forced to harvest cotton. Settler workers refined this cotton into clothes and garments which were either worn or sold at a mark up. As Engels pointed out in his letter, the byproduct of this garment manufacturing is not only fine clothes, but also good paying jobs whose compensation is so generous as to bourgeoisify the proletariat. Even after the abolition of slavery, this exploitative relationship continued for over a century due to the phenomenon of sharecropping. Although it is true that the rate of exploitation relative to chattel slavery decreased, the exploitation still existed and the labor aristocrats benefited from it. Settler colonialism is intrinsically linked to the development of the labor aristocracy.
The relative abundance of cheap and plentiful commodities, a surplus of caloric intake (which social scientists have statistically correlated with a decrease in the probability of a revolution), and other factors all demonstrably lead to a decrease of labor militancy and an overall passive and docile workforce. In other words, not everyone’s life is perfect, but the unequal exchange of imperialism means most labor aristocrats‘ situations are good enough to disincentivize them from rocking the boat.
Settler Colonialism and the Bribery of Home Ownership¶
In the third quarter of 2023, 44% of all single-family homes were purchased by financial corporations such as Blackrock. Many people have drawn the incorrect conclusion that the US is now suddenly a nation of tenants, and that home ownership is obsolete. What does the actual data say about home ownership?
As of 2024, 65.6% of USians are homeowners. The rate of home ownership has completely recovered from the temporary drop during the pandemic, and is in fact above the historical average rate. It is also increasing, so it is difficult to make the argument that homeowners are being dispossessed en masse into the perils of tenancy. Although there are racial disparities among home ownership rates, the Census Bureau states that “In the 4th quarter of 2023, the homeownership rate among non-Hispanic White Americans was 73.8%, followed by Asian Americans (63%), Hispanic Americans (49.8%), and Black Americans (45.9%).” Even among Black people who have the lowest homeownership rate, it still floats at almost 50%.
If the goal of a capitalist is to maximize and extract as much wealth as possible, how can it be that the historical trend of home ownership has been to increase? How is it that in a nation of exploited and immiserated proletarians, that 70% of the population owns such a valuable asset? Home ownership is engineered by the bourgeois state as a means to pacify the masses and combat communism. Nancy H. Kwak, in her book A World of Homeowners, details the links between the Cold War and federal housing policy. Jose Luis de Arrese, the housing minister of fascist Spain during the Franco regime, summarized this mode of thinking quite succinctly when he said:
We want a nation of homeowners, not proletarians.
—Jose Luis de Arrese, Housing Minister of Fascist Spain
Besides the psychological effect of pacification – a key ingredient in a broader counterinsurgency strategy – ownership of a home itself represents a transfer of wealth from the colonized to the settlers. As an economic system, settler colonialism is fundamentally about the ownership and control of land. Settler colonialism seeks to eradicate Indigenous peoples through genocide and forced displacement, so that the emptied land can be repopulated by foreign settlers. The settlers are then tasked with “improving” the land, building on it, and extracting from it in such a way that it is brought into the process of capitalist circulation. In exchange for both the labor of settling the land as well as murdering the Indigenous nations, the settler population is given a small slice of the overall land as a reward for their hard work.
Note
Although the process of settler colonialism in the US and Canada is the most mature and advanced among settler colonies in the world today, it is not and never will be completed. Indigenous people and their nations still exist, and they actively struggle against the eradication of their people and the continued expropriation of their lands.
One need only take a look at the mass struggles in Standing Rock over the Dakota Access Pipeline, in Hawaii over the US Navy poisoning of Pearl Harbor, and in the Navajo nation resisting settler miners illegally smuggling uranium to see modern and contemporary examples of anti-colonial struggle by oppressed Indigenous nations. However, it is quite true that there’s not a western frontier as there was in the 1800s. So how does modern home ownership scientifically facilitate the transfer of wealth to the US labor aristocracy, when the Department of the Interior is no longer auctioning off “fine Indian lands” to the highest bidder at a bargain price?
The answer is that the mortgage, which turns housing from a socially necessary use-value into a financialized commodity, represents the vector through which settler colonialism bestows the settlers and to a lesser degree members of the internally colonized nations, with a share of the spoils. Generally speaking, there are two ways that Americans tend to view a mortgage. Some think “I’m safe, I’ve finally bought myself rent control for the rest of my life.” Others of a more petty-bourgeois orientation view the home itself as an endless faucet of highly liquid capital. Do you have a great idea to start a business? Why not fund it by taking out a reverse mortgage with your home as collateral? This represents the essence of the settler bargain in its modern form.
The Superstructure¶
White Supremacy: The Superstructural Glue¶
Material forces alone do not explain why the labor aristocracy has willingly decided to collaborate with the bourgeoisie. There’s a realm of ideas in the superstructure that breathe life into this bargain by way of ideology. And the name of that ideology is **white supremacy. White supremacy is the justification that settlers in the US bought into which allowed them to murder Indigenous people in the most brutal ways, and to reduce Black African people – human beings with diverse cultures, histories, traditions, faiths, emotions, etc – into chattel slaves; a mere resource to be exploited for the maximization of profit in the same way one tries to squeeze all they can from a wet towel. It’s the same ideology that encourages zionists to vaporize Palestinians and throw living babies into ovens to be burned alive. Despite the differences in window dressing – Christianity for the US and Judaism for the Zionists – the pattern of thought operates exactly the same.
The ideology of white supremacy accomplishes this goal by constructing a quasi-nationhood out of an arbitrary and ever-changing amalgamation of European nationalities and smoothing them over into the monstrous abstraction known as whiteness. The Minneapolis-based rapper Brother Ali summarized it best in his song Before They Called You White.
Similar to how the ruling class can construct a false national identity to rally around the mutual bond of the spoils of exploitation, the nationally oppressed can also find solidarity over the shared bond of how they’ve been defined by their oppressor. In order for white supremacy to construct the exploited as objects to be exploited, it has to create an identity that it imposes upon them. Thus, the enslaved African peoples who came from myriad nations in Africa became the Black Nation. Similarly, the myriad Indigenous nations and their peoples were squashed together by white supremacism into the category of “Indian”. Because this is the identity under which these peoples are exploited, they can rally around it as a common grounds to overcome ethnic, cultural, linguistic, religious, and even class differences to unite in opposition to a common enemy: the white supremacist bourgeoisie and their running dogs of the labor aristocracy.
Solidarity of the Oppressors¶
Imperialism and settler colonialism makes possible a type of class collaborationism that gives reason for groups with antagonistic interests, such as the bourgeoisie and proletariat, to work together in the exploitation of the colonized other. One of the very best examples of this dynamic on an international level exists in the sacred bond between the United States and its bastard-child, the Zionist Entity. At the outset of the war in Gaza, American cowboys volunteered to deploy to ‘israel‘ to assist the Zionist settlers in their genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
Why might this be? The answer is because the western frontier of the US and the Zionist Entity were both founded upon a bloody legacy of Indigenous corpses. The seasoned, mature settler colony’s veteran shock troops naturally want to jump to the aid of their baby brothers across the Atlantic. When viewed in this light, the fraternal camaraderie between the cowboys and the Zionists makes a whole lot more sense.
The way that the international bonds of fascist solidarity allow zionists and Americans to unite over their shared interests in maintaining the global settler order, the labor aristocracy and the bourgeoisie which exploit them hold a similar unity around divvying up the spoils of exploiting the global south. This perverse solidarity is so powerful that to this very day, it is a principal aspect to the contradiction of labor exploitation.
Important
**While it may be true that the US bourgeoisie exploits the US labor aristocracy, the US labor aristocracy is happy to tolerate this because of the material benefits derived from the value transfers of unequal exchange created by imperialism. This material bond is solidified and strengthened by the superstructural glue of the white supremacist ideology.
When put in this context, the theoretical confusion discussed earlier by those comrades who mistakenly advocate for a unity between colonizer and colonized becomes readily apparent. There is a material and ideological foundation which discards the principal status of the class contradictions between bourgeoisie and proletariat. While the exploitation of the working class exists in the US, only a part of that working class has their exploitation soothed by being given a slice of a much larger, world-wide imperialist swindle. Thus, the dominant aspect of the class contradiction in the US becomes the divide between those who are allowed by capital to tap into the surplus value of the global south, and those who are excluded from it. For this reason, any kind of call to treat the proletariat as a homogeneous entity who can simply be united is erroneous.
Solidarity Because of a Common Oppression¶
Important
**Just as the exploiters can set aside various differences to unite around a shared bond of profiting from exploitation, so too can the exploited set aside their differences to unite around being exploited by a common enemy.
In the specific case of the US, this unity takes the form of a unity of oppressed nations. Although as we showed above, in some ways even the oppressed nations do benefit indirectly from imperialism, what separates their situation from whites and the labor aristocracy more broadly, are the additional particularities of the oppression they suffer from, which labor aristocrats don’t.
Perhaps the most glaring example would be in police treatment. The police in the US are notoriously brutal and violent against members of oppressed national minorities, such as Black and Indigenous people. They are also incarcerated at wildly disproportionate rates. And as we saw with the examples of home ownership discussed above, even when it comes to reaping the spoils of living within the US empire, oppressed national minorities still benefit far, far less than their white counterparts do. Black and Indigenous life expectancies trail behind those of whites. There are extreme disparities of education achievement and literacy between whites and oppressed national minorities. For Indigenous people in particular, reservations have been compared in many ways to having a lower level of development than many third-world countries; the same can be said of the majority Black ghettoes created by decades of structural racism. This added layer of oppression and its impacts can give the nationally oppressed a progressive quality when it comes to revolutionary potential.
The Guilty Conscience¶
Due to theoretical confusion among US communists, several criticisms of the labor aristocracy concept arise. They stem from petty-bourgeois tendencies to personalize the analysis rather than view it through a class-based lens. Comrades must overcome these personal reactions to maintain theoretical clarity.
When we discuss the dynamics of a labor aristocracy, we are talking about dynamics on the level of classes. Individual members of these classes can consciously choose to align whatever way they want. History is full of working-class people who chose to side with the forces of reaction. US police officers, for example, have traditionally drawn their recruits from the ranks of the working class. History also contains many examples of the occasional petit bourgeoisie, or even bourgeoisie proper, who consciously chose to adopt a proletarian outlook and firmly commit to revolution:
**Karl Marx was raised in an upper-middle class household where his father worked as a prominent attorney
**Friedrich Engels was a factory-owning bourgeoisie and a commissioned British Army officer of the field artillery
Vladimir Lenin held a career and studied to become an attorney, prior to taking up the Bolshevik cause
**Mao Zedong came from a wealthy peasant family in China
Zhou Enlai came from a family of wealthy Chinese bureaucrats
These are just a few examples of famous revolutionaries who came from the ranks of the petit-bourgeoisie and upper peasantry while still living dutiful lives in service of the revolution.
“Education Can Solve It”¶
“Well if it’s an issue of class consciousness, why can’t it be solved through political education?” The issue here is that this framing of the labor aristocracy as an issue of pure superstructure fails to account for the dialectics at play. The superstructural ideology of white supremacy absolutely plays a role in creating the labor aristocracy, and political education absolutely has a role to play in educating away the false consciousness of white supremacy. But this framing completely neglects to address that the labor aristocracy has a material basis to it. The dynamics of unequal exchange caused by world imperialism structure US society in such a way that everyone who lives inside of the US borders, whether they consciously choose to or not, has their way of life subsidized by the extracted labor-power from the third world. Honduran farmers spend thousands of hours bringing you bananas and mangoes. Congolese children toil away hours of their lives laboring away in cobalt mines. Indigenous Bolivian peasants are forcibly displaced off their land, condemned by market forces to slave away in lithium mines. The global south as a collective must spend their labor and time sustaining the Western appetite for consumption, instead of using their talents and skills to help improve their own peoples‘ quality of life.
“Inflation and Quality Decline”¶
“Inflation is increasing, and planned obsolescence means everything we buy is of a lower quality. How can you say that workers are being bribed, when the quality of the bribes keeps on degrading?” To be fair, this is a valid observation: the price of everything keeps going up, at a worse quality and in a lower quantity. So given the truth of that observation, if the labor aristocracy can be bought off by treats then doesn’t it follow that they’ll snap out of it eventually once the treats become unaffordable and unenjoyable?
This argument’s logic reflects a flawed misunderstanding of the dynamics of unequal exchange, however. The labor aristocracy derives its aristocratic character not because of what imperialism lets them consume, but because of the value transferred created through its mechanism of unequal exchange. In other words, the structure of imperialism is such that the collective pool of labor-time in the global south is coerced into servicing the economy of the developed first world. Oppressed people all across Africa, South America, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands have their entire lives structured by market forces into serving the fancies and whims of the market. Sometimes, this does look like articles of consumption. After all, it’s only because of Bolivian lithium miners and Congolese cobalt miners that anyone in the US can go buy a top-tier smart phone. Imperialism gives rise to inflated wages created by the jobs refining raw materials into finished products. Even Marx and Engels were privy to this dynamic way back in 1858. The modern empire also necessitates a leviathan high-tech mechanized military. This creates tons of tertiary jobs programming spyware used by intelligence agencies, manufacturing tanks, engineering war planes, piloting drones, creating munitions, and so on. There are also entire ancillary industries to sustain these defense contractors, military personnel, and their families. For example, where I live in Kansas our entire economy revolves around Fort Riley, the local military base. Everything from the public school system, to the transportation infrastructure, to the entertainment and nightlife, is all tied at the hip with the economic livelihood of the base.
Manhattan isn’t the only town like this: there are at least 100 “base towns” all across America. And these base towns have a habit of churning out high-paying labor aristocratic jobs with good wages. Even if the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac reaches $10, do you think you‘re going to convince a worker that the war machine which pays to keep a roof over his family’s head is the great Satan who exploits him? The answer is no, you won’t succeed for so long as the empire funds his job.
“Fatalistic Pessimism”¶
J. Sykes of the FRSO echoed a common criticism when he wrote:
To put it as plainly as possible, if the proponents of the U.S. settler-colonialism theory are correct, then there is no basis whatsoever upon which to build a multinational working class communist party in this country. Indeed, such a view sees the “settler working class“ as instruments of colonialism, hostile to the interests of the colonized people, rather than viewing all working and oppressed people as natural allies in the struggle against imperialism, our mutual oppressor.
—J. Sykes, FRSO
Among less developed and ideologically firm Marxists, the realization that the class dynamics of the United States aren‘t cut-and-dry causes these amateur Marxists to become despondent and pessimistic. For these individuals, the issue doesn’t lie with the theory of a labor aristocracy. Rather, the issue lies in their understanding of Marxism. I find that such people who take the fatalistic approach to Third Worldism commit the errors of book worship and dogmatism.
Whatever is written in a book is right – such is still the mentality of culturally backward Chinese peasants. Strangely enough, within the Communist Party there are also people who always say in a discussion, “Show me where it’s written in the book.”
…
The method of studying the social sciences exclusively from the book is likewise extremely dangerous and may even lead one onto the road of counter-revolution. Clear proof of this is provided by the fact that whole batches of Chinese Communists who confined themselves to books in their study of the social sciences have turned into counter-revolutionaries. When we say Marxism is correct, it is certainly not because Marx was a “prophet” but because his theory has been proved correct in our practice and in our struggle. We need Marxism in our struggle. In our acceptance of his theory no such formalisation of mystical notion as that of “prophecy” ever enters our minds.
—Mao Zedong, Oppose Book Worship
Just as Mao described, people who become sour with despondency feel this way because they fail to apply the science of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought in a creative way.
To this, we look to the words of Comrade Kuusinen of the Soviet Union. In the introduction to his textbook Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, he wrote:
But the Marxist-Leninist theory is not a dogma, it is a guide to action. Like life itself, this theory does not stand still but develops and becomes richer as the historical conditions alter and new tasks arise in the struggle of the progressive forces of mankind. Genuine Marxism-Leninism is always living, creative Marxism-Leninism.
—Otto Kuusinen
The takeaway from the theory of labor aristocracy isn’t to give up or surrender in despondency. Rather, as scientists we need to conduct a careful analysis of our precise historical conditions. We need to look at our material reality and social conditions to apply the living, creative science of Marxism and come up with a solution.
This will require a social investigation of immense breadth and scale. Thankfully there are many smaller independent local Marxist organizations popping up all across the empire. I cannot think of a better task than to have each of these orgs conduct their own investigation into the peculiarities of their own environments and historical contexts. Perhaps the All-Empire Workers League can undertake it as a task to orchestrate this kind of effort, and synthesize it into a robust analysis that can be used by comrades all across the empire.
Conclusion¶
Communists need to further investigate which kinds of workers and even non-workers can be included in the revolutionary subject. In this essay, I discussed the specific examples of the Black nation of New Afrika, as well as the myriad Indigenous nations. Arguments can be made that strongly suggest queers, and more specifically transgender people, in the US constitute another group subject to special forms of oppression. While a rigorous scientific analysis of the transgender question is outside the scope of this essay, an investigation into the revolutionary potential of transgender people (despite them not constituting a nation proper) and queers more broadly would be a massively fruitful theoretical undertaking. The same can be said of the disabled.
The lumpenproletariat also merits consideration and study. While not every lumpen will be won over to the side of revolution (for example, the foot soldiers of drug cartels are pretty clearly aligned with the forces of capitalism and reaction), how does this break down? Which portions of the larger lumpenproletariat have revolutionary potential? Who amongst them can be won over to the revolution, and on what scientific basis? What role do they have to play in a revolution, if by definition they find themselves removed from the typical capitalist production process? Can they be proletarianized through mass work? All of these would be fine questions to conduct a social investigation over.
Finally, there is always international solidarity work. International comrades such as the Communist Party of the Philippines, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), the Communist Party of Swaziland, Ansar-Allah, the Palestinian Resistance, and the Zapatistas to name just a few, are always appreciative of anything that anyone in the imperialist core can do to further advance their cause.
See Also¶
On the Revolutionary Potential of Amerikan Soldiers – Revolutionary potential of military personnel
Functional Illiteracy and Political Education – Barriers to political education
The Three Types of Police in Amerika – Intelligence policing and counterinsurgency