Once again I have a Chunka Luta book recommendation: Indigenous Paleolithic by Paulette Steeves

Archeology as a discipline in the West functions as a Colonial tool to deny the history of Indigenous peoples. The biggest example is the “Clovis First Theory” (debunked) that posits all Indigenous peoples of the Americas descend from migrations across the Bering Strait during the last glacial maxim. Archeologists who made their careers on this study have bullied and physically harmed opponents to their hypothesis. US settlers over and over have destroyed archeological sites intentionally (and many unintentional as well) and this has been used to deny how long people have been living in the western continents. (Another example is the “genetic testing” and other racism that posits European settlers are “more indigenous” than Arabic-speaking Palestinians).

This is once again, a projection onto China what the Whites have been doing all over the world.

Relevant snippet from Palo Alto:

Safiyo Mohamed immigrated from Somalia only three months before she started as a stower at an Amazon warehouse in Minnesota. After three days of training (only in English), she began emptying incoming boxes from the conveyor belt into boxes from which the pickers picked. The system had a strict quota: 2,600 items sorted for every 10-hour shift, or a consistent average of less than 14 seconds per object. To fit in any kind of break you had to go faster, so as a beginner, Safiyo tried to avoid taking any breaks. Still, after her first week, her manager told her she was too slow and made more mistakes than the acceptable number: one per shift, an inhuman error rate of .04 percent. What help she got concerning strategies for improvement came from the other Somali workers who filled the warehouse. (As in the Hoover-era gold mines, white English-speaking managers boss groups of nonwhite workers, whose ethnic composition depends on the location; in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, a high proportion of them are East African immigrants.) “After my shift, I couldn’t even cook for myself. I barely had the energy to take a shower and often went to bed with an empty stomach,” Mohamed recalled in an essay about her experience for Sahan Journal. “I had nightmares about getting fired, disrupting the little sleep I was getting. They treated me and every other warehouse worker like a machine, not a human.” Feeling like she had no other way to support her family, Safiyo lasted longer than most, 30 months. In Amazon’s numbers, she turns up as an unqualified success. That’s how it’s supposed to work; that’s how Amazon came to dominate retail and how Jeff Bezos became the world’s richest man.

A detailed 2020 investigation found that Amazon’s warehouse workers have a serious-injury rate nearly twice the warehouse industry average. And the more robotized the distribution center, the higher the injury rate. “If you’ve got robots that are moving product faster and workers have to then lift or move those products faster, there’ll be increased injuries,” an Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspecting physician with experience in the company’s facilities told reporters. Racing to catch up with machines rigged to run hot hurts people. Efficiency causes injuries, which is another way of saying that, for Amazon, injuries are efficient. Amazon’s delivery must be very efficient, because drivers get injured even more—a lot more. And unlike warehouse workers, Amazon delivery drivers don’t technically work for Amazon, even if they’re wearing Amazon uniforms delivering Amazon packages in their Amazon vans following Amazon’s directions to Amazon customers.

For most of its existence, Amazon got its packages to customers’ doors just as everyone else does, contracting with the U.S. Postal Service or the big private shippers UPS and DHL for the dreaded “last mile” delivery. But as part of Operation Dragon Boat, the company planned to bring shipping inside the Amazon tent, or at least next to it. Driving trucks around is dangerous—for drivers, for the other people on the road, and for the legally liable employers. Trucks kill people, especially when you drive fast. Amazon drivers, unsurprisingly, have to drive fast if they want to keep their jobs, and their trucks do kill people. But when it comes time to hold someone responsible, Amazon is nowhere to be found. Patricia Callahan’s 2019 investigation for ProPublica and the New York Times couldn’t establish exactly how many deaths Amazon drivers were responsible for because they are all contractors, hired through the Delivery Service Partner program.

Amazon has absurd injury rates while they get a lot of great press for their “automation”, but what such “automation” is actually doing is setting a dangerous pace for the human bodies. With such high turnover and higher than local average wages, Amazon is able to pace workers at inhuman speeds, to their body’s breaking point, because each individual worker is an expiring commodity to them.

PSL is a departure of WWP which itself split from a formal Trotskyist sect. They don’t drop Trotskyism in essence just that they are more open to advances made by Stalin.

Trotskyist tendencies remain in PSL with a focus on majoritarianism, treating the “industrial proletariat” as the revolutionary vehicle in the Imperialist states, and placing “workers revolution” above national liberation movements.

Alt-right is dead (in the US) and they were just (petty) Bourgeois intelligentsia coat tailing Trump’s settler populism. The most successful pivot from those politics are the christo-fash “groypers”. In the end Alt-righters were just Liberal elites opportunistically trying gain leverage against their own class competition with Trump’s populism but are dorky snobs who clearly despise Trump’s poorer voters.

I agree that both the settler-populist and Christo-Fash groups are going to be further agitated.

puts on conspiracy hat: inb4 shooter is Uke agent

You’re already underselling the level of crosstalk between US white labor unions and the KKK. The St Louis “Soviet” formed a lynch mob during WW1.

Yeah colleges were heavily subsidized and California had one of the largest public systems in the country. That system also gave Bobby Seale and Huey Newton an education so it’s not a coincidence that 1969 was when college prices started to spiral.

The colleges themselves are racketeers, I recommend Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris who writes about the creation of Stanford U and its subsequent role in Colonialism and Anti-Communism. Stanford’s campus land houses all of the big weapon makers and it produced Herbert Hoover, the man responsible for mining gold during Australia’s genocide, modernizing the March on Africa, and the modern semi-state food cartels and housing policy.

The supply and demand angle is only half-right. There’s an intent to raise the costs to control the amount of people entering college as wages rise, it’s supposed to be a class barrier. Combined with admissions tests (which literally started as “IQ” tests) having the scores to gain funding opportunities for education is a eugenic test. It’s class-eugenicist poll-tests and poll-taxes performed nationally.

Also much of these schools are funded directly by land thefts in the US: https://www.hcn.org/issues/52-4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities/

The University of Minnesota founders started a war to create the school (and the state): https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/great-university-land-grab

This was during the US Civil War. The Dakota uprising was punished by Lincoln with the largest mass execution in US history, of 38 Dakotas, down from the original 200 captured for execution.

The endowments many of these schools have are predominantly funded from these land cessions. Washington State University’s land cessions of PNW nations funded enough to fill its entire endowment with royalties from logging leases. Texas A&M and Arizona are funded by active subterranean oil drilling rights.

The other reason is because the jobs college degrees provide are getting higher wages and the schools can charge that much and someone will take it, and the banks have the surplus funds from Imperialism and the housing racket.

Weaken an economy until it’s cheap and easy to purchase labor-power and mining/farming rights

If I don’t respond directly respond to a point I think they are fair. Inflation eats at the super-profits in wages and eats into the super-profits in greater proportion the smaller the wage. That being said I would put the limit of boojified to be the point where they cross into genuine exploitation (but this does need to be factor in time, segments with long breaks between sources of income would be falling fast into lumpen: unemployed, health/body reasons, discrimination, national oppression). In reality we generally skip over realizing an exploited proletariat due to moving straight from semi-proles to lumpen-proles, this is somewhat problematic for economic organizing and this relationship should be focused on rather than one of the loot share struggle between semi-proles and bourgs (petite and haute). Organizing as anti-inflation attracts strata with interests against national liberation and the bottom 20%, and these cannot be organized as a single mass without convincing the these strata to commit class suicide (challenge level extreme). So far the loot sharing struggle remains as no real exploited prole exists within citizenship standards (outside of some children), so we need to be careful who we are organizing, because just as quickly the balance can swing back towards the boojified workers if they are able to co-opt the energy for their own selfish reforms, (much of the bottom would like it too, pushing us further from agitating towards revolution and prole internat). I want to be clear that my disagreement with your original post is that this strata of people “losing” is growing. I don’t think this is the case, “racial” and gender wealth gaps are increasing which points to privileges growing for white-men. Gender oppressed whites could be on the decline as it seems white-men are desperate to maintain monopoly on income streams “for the sake of the white nation”. That’s certainly a contradiction worth digging at to lop off the white gender-oppressor strata.

White collar work rises over time in every country country as development occurs and the societal needs for social labor increase. That’s just a factor of development, it’s not a sign of bourgeoisification.

Yes but ratios of physical commodities to services do matter globally (the nature of Imperialism). The US workforce is predominantly service facing. If the world was to be equalized, it would be noted that the US has too many of such workers than would be valued by equal exchange. The point is, radical change would happen in the economy if the economy was cut off from physical inputs, including much of the factory work. This would cause internal pressure in the US’s near environment, heightening the settler relationship to the extreme. This is already the scenario Magacoms dream of, being able to “re-industrialize” with all all these natural resources “available to us”. That being said the US white-collar industry has specific anti-communist goals as well. Growing a Labor Aristocracy encourages “brain drain” from all other states and forces even Communist ones to adopt this model of valuing labor, creating Semi-Proles if not LA classes in their countries. It is a sign of bourgeoisification when these workers are paid significantly higher wages than primary and secondary industries. I only mean to say lower wage office workers are pushed from their role as equal users of the MOP, as in paid the same for even less access to it, like in terms of proximity, when looking at the global context in a fair LTV world (e.g. it’s not natural but policy that these workers maintain wages well above global standards). The bulk of office workers are being privileged with increased pay and benefits and this gives them interests that put them at odds with the global proletariat and in the case of Socialist countries with their own proletariat. China has been clamping down on housing speculation and tackling wages for white-collar workers to keep them in check and the current TikTok debacle has Chinese employees potentially benefiting from ByteDance entering the US exchange, likely to be the biggest IPO of all time and the workers own 20% of the company. This leads to the increased stock ownership of unions and unorganized white-collar work in that apparently some 72% of companies offer equity, most give bonuses (which shouldn’t be directly compared yoy but happen often as carrot sticks), and some 19% of employees individually own their employer’s stock. Now stock grants are simply a sleight of hand keep a share of an employee’s wages, but that also means that total compensation is the more accurate number in terms of labor costs and carries with it some stake the employee has in the company. US wide stock ownership dipped in the early 2010s but has since raised back to over 60%. There are not many Capitalists in terms population points, and about 1/5th is considered petty business owners, so much of the stock owners are wage workers who do not own direct productive assets. More households own stocks than ever before. That being said, in general, the top 4/5ths of USian workers are gaining bigger shares of global production (though there might be tugs and pulls in the innards of this mass), the bottom 20% are (slowly) falling behind and here the bulk is oppressed nations. The value of the bottom mass has never been understated though its improvement directly contradicts the global proletariat and indirectly themselves with increased eugenics and increased incarceration.

The colonial police are being transformed into colonial soldiers by the heightened contradictions, but yeah, they were always meant to keep the peace for settlers.

But in Algeria the colonial police did, eventually, start torturing and killing white Algerians. Who gets to be a settler changes as conditions worsen for the empire.

For example, I get to be a settler as long as I stay white passing and am not visibly trans. That goes away if I don’t do my makeup or get literally any Sun etc etc but soon enough that shit isn’t going to protect me because the knives are out for trans folk, and I blame imperial decline. Who gets to be a settler will be winnowed away.

I would not premise Algeria as a model for WITBD in the Americas. The land relationship in the US is essentially one big “tourist sector” that would be visible in Algiers but gone from the rest of the country. Much of the land in the US is run by settler kulaks, and settler claims for domination of land are much greater in the US. The US settler regime has always harmed the bottom of settlers, it seems this does not matter much to the vast majority self interested mass, besides that they are given much lighter treatment if not loopholes to avoid punishment from civil society. Again I strongly put primary fear of oppressed nation led lumpen revolt in the cities, and Indigenous land protection all over, as the reason why police and settlers are getting more militant (only a continuing trend of the last 70 years of continued Jim Crow).

That being said I agree that gender oppression is packaged into settler-nationalism through colonially imposed gender domination. Certainly there is a struggle as strata of settlers are more obsessed with the nation (settler-nationalist sexual politics, white anxiety) than others, the recycling of petty bourg settlers during the growth (and decline) of Imperialism I think holds contradictory seeds for gender liberation and increased gender oppression (combined form assimilation). So I think, motion in Imperialism whether up or down fans the flames of the gender struggle. I believe this also reflects in other eugenic regimes of social control (“ability”, “race” – which is obfuscated national character). Having an antagonized position in the gender structure certainly reduces national ties, often to the point where it’s easy to sever, this is why it’s more important to stress the nat-lib struggles who do not uniformly adopt settler gender norms (certain class-strata may) and are often antagonized by them as policy (ON lumpen “surplus males”, state enforced “single-motherhood”, forced adoptions, and gender oppression in the carceral system). We should not be scared of calling national and gender antagonisms, class antagonisms, and in that sense in certain contexts they can become primary antagonisms in a decisive moment, superseding other class identities including settler and bourgeois. All of these oppressed classes have interests to agitate and form lines on. The support we get at CLN from settlers is already showing strong correlation to certain gender and sexual demographics, regardless of “economic class” background, and our opponents are more often than not bigots towards them. Just as WITBD with the Feminism movement, Marxists must be able to slice the economic sources of Revisionism and solidify a line that is revolutionary even if that means being less “popular” than bourgeois lines, we don’t need a majority.

No, but you’ve as much said that you avoid agitating among settlers and are content to ignore them until they spontaneously join the anti-colonial struggle. You literally said " Wake me when they turn on themselves." How else am I to interpret that but you choosing only to react to spontaneous solidarity among settlers?

None of them are acknowledging the need to give up their settler society, you’re telling me to value the statements on Israel that don’t mention settler-Colonialism. Settlers are national oppressors as a class. In a context with no Colonialism, we still wouldn’t ally with the petty bourgs as a class and center their demands, we have to slice them up and pick friends from foe. We shouldn’t care about the demands of an oppressor nation unless they are in line with ours: prisoners, the homeless, and people oppressed for their bodies are people we intend to work for. If you want science on the settler question hit the books sibling, become an expert on colonial history in your immediate realm. Chunka Luta library exists for free.

No, but you’re saying they’re unproductive, even though they use their labor to produce a service.

Why does it bother you so much? Does it change that these goods and services are being paid from value stolen overseas? Quit projecting workerism onto my line.

The so-called War on Terror was a reaction to the decline of the empire and in response the police had to become more violent and more invasive and more lethal and more secretive etc etc in order to control the proles. The police became occupation soldiers to fight “terrorism” and this has been boiling over into more and more massive uprisings against them.

Maybe you won’t wake up until the streets run red, but I think it’s worth trying to anticipate what comes next.

The streets are already covered in my peoples’ blood, quit playing with me. Read Blood in the Land, Fire this Time. You gotta be kidding me if you think my sense of urgency is lagging when y’all don’t notice shit until you think it might be affecting you and your kin. Thinking the police presence is for you is absurd, the conditions for our oppression has already been here. The cops are killing us now, and most of us aren’t Communists, square that.

Btw lets zoom in on that wage chart, looking at median wage (where half of wage workers do better), It has been increasing in the recent decades with an unusual spike in 2020 due to pandemic stimmies. Why hadn’t there been revolts of white workers and youth in the 90s like Black and Latino youth? Economically the situation was worse then. Again we are looking for declines in conditions, not stagnation, for some reason “class consciousness” spiked in spite of increased earnings during the pandemic, you posit inflation economistically, I blame eugenics and national oppression. Your chart enthusiastically removes supervisors, who are a fifth of the workforce (remember 20% of white men don’t even participate in labor anymore). There’s really no way to see a real decline in US workers if the median and average wages are at a 4 decade high (excluding 2020). It doesn’t line up with your hypothesis. Inflation did not peak with wages in 2020, it peaked in 2022, after a spike in real earnings for USians.

More police and settler-vigilante killings year over year since the 70s, police budgets expanding every year. For some reason these things occurred during “bourgeoisification”, you never quite explained why that occurred.

By failing to recognize the role that settlers always play in anti-colonial struggle, instead leaving them to organize themselves spontaneously and reacting to it as it happens.

For sure but you seem to think we avoid working with settlers as a rule. It’s worth agitating people genuinely interested in understanding reality and changing it, and people pushed to their limits where revolutionary change is the only thing they are satisfied with. What I’m saying is it’s historically clear the base of settlers interested in our struggles has not seen significant motion through time (because they were just as reactionary during the height of exploitation against settler workers). That being said most settlers in Algeria fled, the ones that fought for Algeria earned their place. I expect in our conditions not many fleeing, but also not playing nice.

My contention was you calling socially necessary labor unproductive, when it clearly produces a social commodity. What your proposing reads like a vulgar workerism, almost like Nixonian “hard hat” fetishism, which seeks to devalue socially necessary labor as not being real work and to alienate them from the workers’ struggle.

Yeah this is no such case. I’m only using it insofar as it has been used in the literature. I’m not saying these workers are privileged above productive workers in the US, usually they are not since unions generally are paid significantly higher wages. If there’s actually a group I think tends more reactionary, it’s the production line workers in the AFL-CIO who practice Imperial workerism that obfuscates their relationship to their colleagues in Mexico and China. None of this is to dismiss or alienate US workers for their jobs, the system of their job economy is the problem. They must have some workerist thoughts if they think they are shunned from being Communists for their jobs.

Furthermore, my hypothesis is that debourgeoisification is occurring due to imperial decline, and that’s the source of inflation and the so-called housing “shortage” and the militarization of police and the chipping away of compromises reached by the labor movement when they chose to become collaborators in exchange for concessions etc etc

So-called shortage yes but remember that the overbuilt and expensive houses are already owned, and if Blackstone bought it, it means someone just profited of their speculation. It means somebody actually “owns” that value, and housing prices have always increased faster than inflation because Imperialists around the world (and 401ks, unions, and CPUSA) buy mortgage packages to park their money in investments outpacing inflation.

Police militarization has always been increasing since the 60s. I’ve posted the pic elsewhere in the thread but police and carceral spending increases every year outpacing inflation. This is a pre-existing trend. It looks to be more prevalent due to the firepower readily available to would be fighters in the streets as seen in Dallas during the first round of BLM protests. Though the trend has already been there for the likes of LAPD and NYPD.

Yes! If the chain of commodity production ended with dumping all commodities directly into the ocean then no value would be created.

Then it’s not socially necessary. The manner in which exchange occurs does not matter. Value is produced from the labor not the sales. The value being realized at exchange is not being argued with, but that doesn’t mean it was created by exchange. These are two different phenomena.

And as the empire enters decline, who gets to be a “settler” is winnowed away to preserve superprofits for a smaller and smaller cohort. That’s what the inflation is, that’s what the result of dedollarization will be, and instead of trying to analyze and predict where things are going you have consigned yourself purely to reacting to things after they happen.

By building a Nat Lib struggle for oppressed nations? Lmao? Just because I don’t seek to organize class enemies doesn’t mean I’m sitting around waiting for nothing. And no, just because a settler became a lumpen does not mean their nation has stopped occupying another nation, still a settler. Their national ties form their reactionary tendencies.

As you say, it is socially necessary labor and would still need to be done under Socialism.

Socialism would turn it into necessary labor (socialist planning, as opposed to Capitalist anarchy, this is the fundamental transition away from the prod-unprod relationship in Capitalism). It is not socially necessary labor under capitalism. It’s not making the economy bigger, it’s redirecting the economy. That being said I doubt the world would like to continue trading US call support for their food stuffs as in the world’s current arrangement.

And what about the lowest paid call center workers? They use literal prison labor in call centers, for pennies an hour. Are they petty bourgeoisie too?

Well the vast majority of them are not prisoners (but also prisoners are hired at minimum wage and the state steals the wages, so it’s not directly comparable to 3W labor). I source MIM(prisons), a prison movement, who says they are generally not near the means of production in prison. Prisoners’ interests are already being agitated for the national character of prison oppression. Prisoners receive 3W wages, so yes they are genuinely exploitated workers and agitating them for JDPON rule is much much easier than other wage workers in the US. I’m sure that MIM(p) considers themselves primarily lumpen-proletarians turned revolutionaries. Once again I have not claimed that call center workers or non-managerial unproductive work is petty Bourgeois, merely that it is semi-proletarian, which Lenin never really differentiates besides when he’s picking apart the various parts of the “middle classes”. Semi-proletarian only in the case that they are receiving super-profits in their wages (which all except prisoners, children, and migrant workers are), but they are not alone! Productive US minimum wage jobs in a global context are also super-profit spiked wages. If the aggregate worker has no internal or external super-exploitation, i.e. management and sales paid equal as individuals to production line workers, there would be no Semi-proletarians or labor aristocracy, and all would be Proletarian.

Semi-proletarians bring Revisionism into the movement in their focus on Economism. In the case of an Imperial Semi-proletariat, a Labor Aristocracy, these economic demands are born reactionary and reformist. (wage struggles for the super-exploited would be progressive in that they put pressure back on the labor aristocracy).

I need you to know that I’m calling all legal-wage productive and unproductive US labor a Semi-proletarian Labor Aristocracy. I’m not targeting call center workers particularly as opposed to any other US labor, but it’s a fact that a nearly entirely (non-direct producing) Semi-proletarian working class is not producing nearly as much as it consumes and this is a problem for such an economy if the ports were subject to blockade. Amazon workers can’t ship anything because barely any of it is made here. Call centers have no products to solicit and assist. This is not the same situation if China was blockaded. A sales team isn’t going to be able to transition to growing food or mining ore very quickly.

So! What would you call someone who can’t work in a factory because those jobs don’t exist after de-industrialization, and so they’re forced to work in a call center sweatshop?

Calling them sweatshops is certainly a stretch, averaging $17 compared to 60c in Haitian shops. De-industrialization is the reason why the US is becoming more bourg, its getting wealthier by simply buying more labor in the world.

Value only exists after it has been realized, the realization of value is necessary in the chain of commodity production.

Yes but is value created in exchange or socially necessary labor? These are definitions Marx used. The capitalists speculated on the productive labor, the unproductive labor helps the capitalist realize the profit, the products were already created. Shipping labor is productive in that it is necessary for products to be consumed. A corporation can’t expand their products by hiring advertisers and support lines, it only helps them indirectly recover past speculation. Productive labor is the expansion of capital.

There is certainly unproductive work being done in the US i.e. bullshit jobs, but to just relegate everyone who doesn’t work in the Sparks and Steam Factory as “unproductive” is mystification.

You’re applying an emotional or moral description to unproductive labor that does not exist in the literature. It’s a scientific term.

You are confusing the people who manage the exchange apparatus with the ones who they manage. No one operating the phone in the sweat shop manages anything.

In the sense that there are contractor firms, who speculate on call center labor through contracts rather than them being hired directly alongside productive labor, are producing value for their employer, but this is due to increased Bourgeois cooperation. However, we can abstract conglomerate firms and realize the same productive-unproductive relations remain hidden under layers of Bourgeois contracts. Again this does not matter besides the war strategy that if the US majority is not producing products or components of products, then the real productive capacity of the US is weaker than it looks. This is not a condemnation of the type of labor, it’s simply relaying how Capital treats such labor. Such work could definitely become socially necessary in a Socialist world system. Under Capitalism, it is labor that Capitalists do but now can pay it away, which distances them from the petty-bourgeoisie further.

So you can only ever react to conditions as they change. There’s a word for that~

An oppressed national who doesn’t expect their oppressors to change their ways because they never have historically unless driven by the force of we oppressed, right in their face? Every revolution needs to slice friend from foe and take control in existing conditions. For now settler workers are enemies. If we are able to advance to a stage overthrowing the land regime, where new contradictions are opened as old ones close, these workers can be won en masse.

When AIM and the Lakota radicals took over the hamlet town Wounded Knee in 1973, they declared the Independent Oglala Nation and held the town for 70 days. During this period they granted citizenship to anyone who wanted it, and most of the town stayed behind even after given the chance to flee, because they knew the army would create a bloodbath if all the settlers were out of the picture. This is the faith we have in settler workers, they will not initiate such acts but many will follow when placed in the middle of a revolutionary moment.

The first and most obvious is that it renders children and disabled people who can’t do “productive” work as bourgeois.

Those that can’t work are a strata of the lumpen-proletariat, what separates them is not having access to legal income and consumption (outside of social democracy crumbs). Disabled proletarians working unproductive roles still form an aggregate worker alongside their peers. Nothing in my statement disregards such individuals. Hellen Keller was a professional writer and lecturer, paid for her products, she was petty bourgeois.

The second and more insidious is how you seem to consider customer-facing work as unproductive.

Unproductive labor is all such labor that does not create surplus-value, but helps preserve or appropriate it. Marx:

Since the direct purpose and the actual product of capitalist production is surplus value, only such labour is productive, and only such an exerter of labour capacity is a productive worker, as directly produces surplus value. Hence only such labour is productive as is consumed directly in the production process for the purpose of valorising capital.

Call centers do not create surplus-value, they only help realize surplus-value, this is why they are unproductive. This is not a moral assessment, and it does not mean unproductive workers can’t be exploited. Productive and Unproductive workers form an abstract Aggregate or Combined Laborer which must produce surplus-value to be exploited. If unproductive labor pool is paid more than productive labor pool, then there must be super-profits being realized, such is the case of the Aggregate US Worker and the global proletariat. Such a relationship creates Semi-Proletarians and is the start of a Labor Aristocracy or bourgeois-proletariat.

The bourgeoisie are the owners of capital. They’re the investors, the proprietors, and the shareholders. In what world is someone in a call center sweatshop bourgeois?

I didn’t call them bourgeois, I said they are moving closer to the bourgeoisie than they are the proletariat and lumpen-proletariat, it’s a function of direction. Those that manage bourgeois apparatuses in exchange for wages are also petty-bourgeois. They work directly towards maintaining Bourgeois Rule as a system. I didn’t make this definition up. Nobody would ever deny that there are strata of workers wealthier than members of the bourgeoisie, this is due to decaying and rising strata as Capitalism develops.

Never in my life have I seen so many Americans turn on Israel.

I’m sure as much was said about the Apartheid Regime. Wake me when they turn on themselves.

I doubt you’d say a factory worker that becomes a call center worker is in a particularly bourgeoisifying position.

Much of our disagreement stems from the definition of petty Bourgeoisie (which is actually many different property relations).

Going from factory to call center is being distanced from the MOP. More and more Americans are being distanced from the MOP (moreso as it leaves the country). This means that these wages are coming from someone else’s proximity to the MOP as surplus value producers. This is a more intensely Bourgeois position (Bourgeois != Capitalist or productive property owners). Workers consuming surplus-value from other workers beyond their aggregate output (so we don’t count out unproductive work that directly aids productive work) are not exploited, and are Semi-proletarian in character. The Semi-Proletariat and Petty Bourgeoisie form the “middle classes”. While America has grown simultaneously to moving MOP outside of the borders, this means that the US population as a whole including the workforce is becoming “middle class” between the global south and the Imperialist Bourgeoisie (referred to by Putin as the “golden billion”). Moving away from laboring with the MOP but keeping the same wages is a move closer to the Bourgeoisie. Lenin and Mao both referred to teachers as petty Bourgeois even though there is no productive MOP involved, this is because they are paid with someone else’s labor to facilitate Bourgeois rule. Look at the Middle Class in Britain paper I posted in the thread.

The US absorbs more value than it produces, there is inflation if it does not consume it all at once (savings are a symptom of this). If anything is leftover, inflation. Which leads once again to the problem of Semi-proles valuing land speculation. Not all want to buy an inflating home, but the majority of them do, and this causes the rest to face that inflation through renting, or worse, buy into that system themselves to keep up. The problem is every union pension and retirement fund is speculating on that same system. Caught in the contradiction, the US workforce is reinforcing the settler land regime! Simple Economistic demands further reinforce that problem!

This is why housing/asset inflation is higher than CPI. Economism is always a dead end within an Imperialist economy.

This cycle has been in existence in this exact form since WW2, relative sizes and shares of the Imperial loot are changing but not qualitatively. Just because it crashes doesn’t mean it’s created qualitatively different class consciousness, because 99% of US workers don’t even acknowledge the existence of Labor Aristocracy.

Prices and Wages are products of class struggles. You are correct to point out that there are geo-political factors but then again, how many US workers are actively Russophobes, Sinophobes, and Zionists, the vast majority?

The bottom fifth of US workers have the most potential for committing class suicide, rather than organize them around keeping up with the top 4/5ths, we need to point out to them that those demands are a dead end and can only lead to a shuffling around of who is in the bottom. Ending the colonial system through force is our only option. This is good though, since that bottom fifth represents most food workers and shipping workers, this means they are in position to starve out the fascist bastion and defend the Nat Lib struggles who will be seizing territory from the US. I want you to know that we are much agreement about the potential of the bottom of US workers, what I want to get away from is copium that this segment is growing, it’s simply just not the case. Revolution will come from the minority of the minority. Don’t fear, the US is selling us its noose.

Wages have not significantly dropped. Staying in the $23 dollar range since the 70s including the tens of millions of immigrants since then + women working more and more (and men working less) and wages are still the same? What does that mean overall? As the white male workforce aged and retired, more white men were given high wage jobs that are nearly equivalent to 2 median incomes (like missile engineering) and women and POC took the old jobs (productive factory, shipping, teaching, nursing). Incomes for Americans overall stayed consistent. On a global level $20 dollars an hour is humongous! Cost of living is actually not the cause of these wages, as most Proletarian global South cities are just as expensive as American ones and some are more expensive than NYC. Mexico, Canada, and the US have a merged market due to NAFTA, but only dead labor can travel freely, living labor is blocked by the border. What does this create? A free trade zone where workers doing the same work make $3 one one side of a deadly border, and $20 on the other. Why should we expect that US workers should be getting $25 by the 90s, $35 by now? Maintaining wealth while costs of much of personal consumption is actually dropping in real dollars (compare Nintendo consoles or appliances to the 90s). In the graph you show wages were the lowest in the 90s, where was this debourging then? The fact is that if white men were able to continue segregating women and POC, average wages still would have climbed.

But there is also the factor that average wage is being held down by immigrants, POC, and women (particularly immigrant women POC). Median white male wages have stagnated since the 70s, but the stratification is predominantly above the median, as in the rich got richer while the poor stayed the same.

The problem with centering on wages like this is that US wages have maintained global dominance while even more are getting absurd incomes. Just because tech workers are so rich does not mean GM workers have suddenly become exploited.

Again CoL is fairly comparable globally, US wages are rich everywhere, and US minimum wage is wealthier than most petty boojies in the global south, which is why they are willing to pack up and move here.

The position of US workers is high, them getting knocked off their pedestal will look a lot more drastic than this, like for instance minimum wage getting outlawed or the border blowing wide open (good tbh), or perhaps anti-peonage laws getting ripped away. Then I’d be concerned with them, but likely more concerned of them if the movement is not already approaching statehood ala (Independent Oglala Nation, Neo-Zapatistas, Panther Oakland).

The median wage of white men dropping because white women are working now does not upset me, and I would not run to white men and tell them they should be angry their monopoly on strong wages is ending. This however doesn’t solve that USians in aggregate have a monopoly on high wages (as is the case of Imperialism). And if we look at that chart, let’s say it dropped from 50k to 40k, this is not total compensation and benefits have increased since the 70s as the government props up housing speculation as a rule, retirement funds are growing in the stock market, and healthcare benefits are high. The real total compensation position of white men has not drastically changed since the 70s.

This also ignores that over half of US labor is genuinely unproductive white-collar work. 16% of jobs are factory work, then there is shipping work, and food producing work. I would consider people going from overpaid factory workers to white-collar work a bourgeois-ifying transition (have you seen the noise of this so-called intelligentsia on online?). Graph ends in 2000 but apparently it is up to 62% in 2022.

“Savings savings savings” you say, and yet the rate of savings has been declining since the 60s and right now is on par with the period just before the 2008 financial crash. Savings are not an explanation for the inflation we are seeing and this is another contradiction to your claims: if savings are a source of inflation, and savings are down, where is the inflation coming from? Is it only coming from wage increases like is being claimed by bourgeois economists? I’m skeptical, and so I’m hypothesizing that the inflation is geopolitical.

I already pointed out that inflation, the value of the dollar, compared to 2019 is due to pandemics slowing shipping down, you literally had to pay for more labor for the same amount of goods shipped --> increased costs of goods. Sanctions also increase shipping costs --> increased costs of goods. The bulk of American workers are getting wealthier, thus inflation for even things like apples and watermelon, because there are more people who will spend that money. The struggle between US workers and US petty bourgs over who gets a bigger share of Imperialism does nothing to advance Communism. Savings rate propaganda induced by bourgeois media promotes Economistic organizing, again 6 figure workers spending their full monthly paycheck, whether to rents, social security and retirement funds (savings but not called savings), student/mortgage/consumer loans (others’ savings), gambling/gatcha/collecting, “investing” in bubbles (housing, crypto, Tesla stock, “retail” investment has been growing ala “roaring 20s”), or doordash for every meal does not mean these workers are going to be any more interested in proletarian revolution.

And yet, the state is grappling with inflation despite being the least susceptible state to inflation. Does this not indicate a change?

Inflation rates in the US have never been more stable than the last 3 decades.

Do you think the bourgeois want a high interest rate environment? Do you think they want the global South to turn to other countries for loans?

Interest rates are still historically low. Many loans were forgiven so the recent rise in interest rates seeks to slow down borrowing that the pandemic induced to absorb stimmy checks. It’s all about inducing circulation or slowing it down when the bourgs want to.

One thing that stood out to me was the demands for an end to understaffing, which necessarily means hiring more people. It’s not quite internationalism, no, but it does benefit the internally colonized people who could gain employment instead of being forced to fill the ranks of the gig economy and reserve army of unemployed workers.

This is not a new demand, it’s consistent with Imperialist union activity historically. This type of reform still works on behalf of Imperialism to delay national liberation, it’s certainly a contradiction we intend to exploit where available to us, though this requires we have an even stronger anti-Colonial line since making more oppressed nation bourgs adds troubling revisionisms to the movement.

they only call for Israelis to be released when they should be calling for a hostage exchange and acknowledge that the Zionists have been taking Palestinians hostage by the thousands into detention centers, but they aren’t just silently supporting Israel either.

So it’s a bourgeois humanist position, without a hint of Marxism, and covering the true nature of Zionism and US labor’s role in occupation and genocide? Color me surprised, this is nothing to celebrate, we’ve seen it before:

In fact, the ILWU has a long history of being interested in and supportive of Palestinian liberation going back decades because of their internationalist character that was cultivated during the anti-apartheid struggle against South Africa.

Don’t downplay the role of conditional solidarity in shaping the demands of a Decolonization struggle. The form of the ANC now can’t be separated from the way in which Apartheid “ended” (who owns the land and bread?). The same goes for these “anti-Zionist”-but-nowhere-anti-Zionist gestures that push blame on the Resistance and deny the reality of settler-Colonialism in Palestine.

Yet, you’re underestimating the importance of public demonstration and should recognize that even non-destructive acts still act as propaganda for further radical action.

This must have been said during every US involved war ever. I think such acts result because such bloodshed exists, before the bloodshed, none of them cared. After the bloodshed, they’ll return to not caring. Until white workers are climbing over each other to commit class-suicide on behalf of revolution, I’ll have little reason to value their solidarity.

From MIM Theory 1:

[2.10] Combating Common Wishful Thinking on the White Working Class

It is tempting to look for the slightest tinge of proletarian class interest among that section of the Amerikan nation (the white working class) that participates in production and in the circulation of commodities, as well as in the realization of the social surplus value through the purchasing of commodities for their own consumption.

It is tempting to look for the possibilities of an irreversible, precipitous decline in the economic status of certain strata in the vast Amerikan settler formation. The beleaguered, exploited proletariat residing in the internal colonies of Amerika could benefit from a little help, or at least neutrality, from the middle classes—the petty bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy—during the insurrection/civil war and the preparatory years.

Settler radicals (meaning radicals descended from Europeans settling North Amerika)—from the Trots to some Maoists—have long refused to face the fact that the labor aristocracy is not only not a neutral force, but, if class interests rest on economic interests, not even mildly exploited. To paraphrase Lenin: the petty-bourgeois revolutionaries take the conditions for their own liberation to be the universal demands of mankind.

In terms of party-building this kind of thinking sometimes boils down to promoting left-economist notions of immediate gratification, such as, “Nuke war tomorrow? Oh shit, where do I sign up?” Such an understanding avoids the international class analysis necessary to best promote revolution.

To truly take the stand of the international proletariat means to put our analysis in the spot where the oppressed exist: with no choices available but further oppression—or rebellion. We can strive to do this even during the periods when the masses actually standing in that spot have not yet realized their strength. For a revolutionary hanging by his/her thumbs in a cold Peruvian prison waiting for the flames to hit, Amerika must look like one huge, undifferentiated mass of class enemies.

That’s from the outside of this toilet. Inside it, we must make the differentiation and coldly separate friend from foe. The friends will throw themselves into the flames to annihilate the flame-throwers. The foes will stand a little distance apart at the last moment. As groups, this will be decided, in the final analysis, by the historical group interest.

In the beginning, we decide what groups are worth our efforts building for those decisive moments. If there is even a faint hope that the Amerikan “working class” is waiting in the wings for revolution, then it would make sense to organize for the demands of this group. (MIM seeks to organize amongst all groups at all times, but it only organizes for the demands of the oppressed, not the oppressors.)

MIM holds that, at the present, the majority of white workers in this country—skilled workers, trade unionists, paper-pushers, etc.—do not represent a revolutionary class. They do not create surplus value as much as reapportion the surplus which results from superexploitation of the Third World and oppressed internal nations. They are not prepared to abandon bourgeois aspirations and mainly high-paying jobs to drop everything for the good of the international proletariat.(1)

“Ah ha!” exclaims the desperately vacillating nature of the petty-bourgeois revolutionary. “Just wait until they lose those high-paying jobs and become prepared to abandon their bourgeois aspirations! Then they shall be friends!”

The cold-hearted Maoist replies, “Dream on, by that point what’s left of them shall still be white-collar fascists defending a starving fortress Amerika and firing bullets at Third World Maoist armies, while eating old Spam and lining up to perish for the ‘right’ of their toxic-mutated children to ‘live free or die!’”

These settlers are perfectly willing to fight and die for the continued ability of their group to experience the taste of that rich and famous, completely corrupted, seemingly immortal lifestyle.

An article by Lenin, who died before neocolonialism really pumped up the imperialist alliances of the labor aristocracy and expanded the “shift in class relations,” still says it well:

The greater part of Western Europe might then assume the appearance and character already exhibited by tracts of country in the South of England, in the Riviera, and in the tourist-ridden or residential parts of Italy and Switzerland, little clusters of wealthy aristocrats drawing dividends and pensions from the Far East, with a somewhat larger group of professional retainers and tradesmen and a larger body of personal servants and workers in the transport trade and in the final stages of production of the more perishable goods: all the main arterial industries would have disappeared, the staple foods and semimanufactures flowing in as tribute from Asia and Africa… We have foreshadowed the possibility of even a larger alliance of Western states, a European federation of Great Powers which, so far from forwarding the cause of world civilization, might introduce the gigantic peril of a Western parasitism, a group of advanced industrial nations, whose upper classes drew vast tribute from Asia and Africa, with which they supported great tame masses of retainers, no longer engaged in the staple industries of agriculture and manufacture but kept in the performance of personal or minor industrial services under the control of a new financial aristocracy.(2)

The above quote was from Hobson, a “social-liberal" whom Lenin found useful to quote, lest he be disbelieved. To would-be communist organizers of the labor aristocracy, Lenin exclaimed: “At the present time, you are fawning on the opportunists, who are alien to the proletariat as a class, who are the servants, the agents of the bourgeoisie and the vehicles of its influence, and unless the labor movement rids itself of them, it will remain a bourgeois labor movement."(3)

Most white workers in this country are not prepared to ditch bourgeois aspirations and high-paying jobs to drop everything for the good of the international proletariat.

Notes:

1. What is MIM pamphlet p. 8.
2. I.V. Lenin, Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, Moscow Progress Publishers, 1979, p. 9.
3. Ibid, p. 11.