Some time ago I supported Third Worldism and consumed various media explaining it’s theories, but at this point it just seems like one of many copes for a lack of revolutionary energy that place blame outside the self-proclaimed “vanguard” groups and displace the need for actual self-criticism. “Westerners are labor aristocrats” is just a form of complaining that “the proles have it too good” which is a subset of the classic Marxist dogma that "conditions determine consciousness and poeple will spontaneously become revolutionary when things get bad enough.” This is something that many accept, even when rejecting the particular claim that there is no white working class. This position seemingly grants the liberal assumption that regular capitalism is fine and it’s only crises and such that are bad; failing to account for the way in which people in poor conditions often follow false explanations for their problems and pursue actions that do not lead to liberation.
“The proles have it too good" is often a claim evidenced by the expanded set of goods that people have access to. As though capitalism didn’t continually manufacture new needs. As though access to cars and microwaves weren’t mandatory for a modern alienated worker with no time not dedicated to either the reproduction of capital or the reproduction of their own labor capacity.
“The proles have it too good” resembles the sentence “kids have it too good these days.” That is not an accident, but it’s not surprising that Marxists would have an aversion to that association. Each judgement’s purpose is to serve as explanation for something one does not like to see. The boomer sees kids with “poor manners” and explains that they have not faced enough hardship to adopt proper virtuous behavior. The marxist sees people going on with the everyday slog of capitalism and “failing” to revolt and explains “only with worse material conditions would they become revolutionary and pursure their historic mission.” It’s the same moralist logic.
Alas, the worker (however “aristocratic”) does not face the decision everyday of whether to contribute to the existing hegemony or do away with it. One works because one must feed oneself – regardless of how tasty the food is. The third worldist supposes that people are bribed into going down a certain path when in fact there was no decision before them. When the conditions finally worsen, there is no guarantee of revolution. If there is revolution, there is no guarantee of socialism. Why would people attempt to establish socialism if they don’t understand what’s wrong with capitalism? When things get bad people have often gone “our rulers are no longer treating us well. Let us change things so that we may have more benevolent rulers once more.” People have indeed been driven by poor conditions to revolt but their was no necessity binding them to the pursuit of revolution.
The third worldist claims that people have it better in the west because prices have dropped.
Of course, the price of commodities have dropped. This is the natural result of competition as well as particular aspects of capitalist competition such as the development of technology. This is elementary marxism. By no means does a decrease in profits imply a decrease in exploitation. Capitalists still seek an increase in absolute profit even as relative profits drop, and all profits come from the exploitation of workers. I’m not sure how imperialist super-profits are special or imply a widespread lack of exploitation.
The third worldist cites the New Deal and such as evidence of westerners coming to benefit from capitalism. Yes, workers fought hard and were ultimately placated or met with a compromise of certain reforms. This somewhat improved the conditions of certain people for some time. I have certainly not seen enough evidence to conclude that a significant amount of people, a whole “nation” had their interests shifted in favor of their former exploiters.
There have been “leftist movements” in the west since that time, and yes, they have not accomplished revolution. Why would they have when the dominant rhetoric and explanations are about states that don’t benefit the nation enough and immoral elites who are so much worse than the petty bourgeois, or even more abstract idealist complaints like many leaders of May 68. Most people did not have a marxist critique of capitalism and their critiques only reinforced the status quo.
Everyone’s “material quality of life is dependent” on the current system. We’re still exploited. We go to our jobs because we receive money in exchange for our labor. People would fight to destroy this system if they understood exactly how capitalism exploits them. People don’t rise up in many places right now despite the fact that they are “exploited more.” Paul Cockshott has shown that baristas, for example, are still very much exploited. https://youtu.be/dEsuQyyv5hc
White people in revolutionary america were not proletarian insofar as they were homesteaders and slave owners. I don’t see why proletarians couldn’t also be reactionary based on reactionary ideas. The fact that people have acted in a counterrevolutionary manner does not make them less proletarian – an argument Sakai used time and time again (yes, I have read Settlers). An argument presupposing the classic dogma of a revolutionary “historical mission” for the proletariat. Any complaint that there is a lack of revolutionary activity can be easily rationalized by the explanation “there aren’t enough (inherently virtous) proles.”
If products are really systematically sold to people in the imperial core at prices “below their labor value” that strongly implies that prices for consumer goods on the whole are much cheaper in the west than outside. Is that the case? Is there some purpose or explanation for this aside from “bribing the workers?” Obviously, there are professional-managerial workers who play a vital role in the circulation of capital and get payed more for it, but I do not see the labor-aristocratic side of that dominating. Anyway, people buy certain commodities that they did not used to based on manufactured needs, as I have already explained. https://en.gegenstandpunkt.com/article/ideologies-about-consumption-and-consumer-market-economy uses workers in the north and south for different purposes, requiring different things of them, and they are both exploited.
On the whole, it seems like Third Worldists largely repeat liberal talking points about how the modern liberal democratic citizen is liberated from the perils of so-called capitalism, except, twisting it with moral condemnation because we have forgotted about “the little guys” in the global south.
Leaving aside the label of “Third Worldism”, which i don’t fully understand the definition of, what i am getting here is this: you reject the “labor aristocracy” theory and the theory of superprofits as an explanation for why we have so far only observed successful revolutions outside of the imperial core. You say this is liberal moralizing. Ok. What is your alternative explanation? You’ve so far explained things that you don’t agree with - fair enough - but what is in your view the more logically consistent analytical framework which explains the observations? What is the main obstacle to class consciousness and which actions would you suggest need to be taken so that revolution can happen in the imperial core?
One alternative explanation is that there were seeds of revolution throughout the imperial core around the time of the October Revolution, they were just successfully rooted out before they could grow.
Take the U.S. as an example. I don’t know nearly enough about the U.S. and Imperial Russia in the 1910s to fully compare their domestic surveillance and repression capabilities. But it seems reasonable to infer that that the U.S. – no lengthy war on its front porch; a more modern country; a long history of repressing sizeable black, indigenous, and immigrant communities; recent colonial counterintelligence experience in the Phillipines and elsewhere – was in a much stronger position to bring the hammer down on leftists at the end of the decade. They did, they never let up, and the weight of the internal security state only increased.
Maybe that’s why the left never got off the ground in the U.S.: they got beat by a stronger state than the Bolsheviks faced, then kept getting punched when they were down.
spoiler
Is this cope? Could easily be. But I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the late-Imperial Russian government was in much worse shape in 1917 than the U.S. government of the time.
There’s also some support for this explanation if you look at the history of the Communist Party of China, which rose to prominence at the end of a national crisis so bad it’s dubbed the Century of Humiliation.
I actually think it was the opposite. The surveillance and repression apparatus was much more developed in Tsarist Russia than it was in the US at that time. Tsarist Russia had a lot of experience in surveiling and uncovering revolutionary cells, and they were far more brutal in their repressions than the US was (toward its settler population at least). At that time the US the state was fairly weak compared to European states, and the emptiness and sparse population of most of the US made it hard to police.
I think the real explanation lies in two factors: one is instability and the other is ability to externalize societal contradictions. Revolutions don’t happen simply because conditions are bad (people can actually endure a lot of hardship so long as there is a feeling of stability), they happen when there is a drastic upheaval, a disruption in the status quo that makes continuing “business as usual” all but impossible. For Russia that upheaval was WWI. The US on the other hand was virtually untouched by the conflict. Therefore there was no catalyst for revolution in the US.
The US had already experienced that instability decades earlier with the civil war, in the aftermath of which there was actually a period (Reconstruction) when there was genuine revolutionary potential for possibly the only time in the history of the US. They eventually managed to dissipate that revolutionary energy by externalizing the contradictions through westward settler expansion domestically and imperial conquest abroad. Racism of course also played a big role in preventing working class solidarity but racism alone would not have been enough.
So i think the US is not that interesting of a case study because you can fairly easily understand why the conditions throughout its history have generally not been suitable for revolution and why the ruling class there has been able to diffuse dangerous contradictions through outward expansion and inward growth (though now that seems to have finally reached a limit, so it will be interesting to see what happens going forward). The more interesting case in my opinion is Europe, and specifically the losing powers of WWI.
We look now at Germany, Italy, etc. and say, “well they didn’t have a revolution so obviously the same theory doesn’t work”, but actually virtually all of the losing powers (Italy switched sides to the winners, but it was nonetheless badly affected) experienced some kind of revolutionary upheaval.
In Germany there was the Bavarian Soviet and the Spartacist Uprising, and it took the betrayal of the SPD and their enlisting of proto-fascist paramilitaries to crush the revolution. In the Rheinland there was even foreign occupation. In Italy also there was a period of almost constant unrest until the fascist seizure of power, which was of course the reaction of the national bourgeoisie to the threat of revolution. The Austrohungarian empire dissolved and there was “Red Vienna”. Hungary also came very close to having a revolution which had to be crushed with outside help. And finally the Ottoman empire dissolved and had a bourgeois revolution under Attatürk.
Why did the winning powers of WWI in Europe, Britain and France, despite also experiencing great instability and social upheaval, not go through the same kind of period where revolutions almost succeeded? It wasn’t because their mechanisms of repression domestically were better than those of, say, Germany or Italy. It was because they were able to externalize the contradictions in their society through their still intact empires. As one of the architects of the British empire openly admitted, the Empire was not a vanity project, it was a necessity if the ruling class wanted to prevent the workers from rising up against them!
What lessons we can take from this? Well one is that generally revolutions need a catalyst, some kind of crisis usually brought about through external factors to act as the “spark”. Even the Haitian revolution came in the wake of the French revolution opening up a window of opportunity. The other lesson is that it is still possible for the ruling class to suppress revolutions if they manage to resolve, even temporarily, some of the contradictions by externalizing them, or if the revolutionary forces are not sufficiently organized and are unprepared to mobilize the people and seize power when the time comes.
In Russia the Bolsheviks were disciplined, organized and ready, having spent years building up connections with the working class base and winning credibility. Germany did not have a Bolshevik party. They had the spontaneous energy from the masses but the revolutionary organizations were too weak to lead the masses decisively. The masses put their trust in opportunist Social Democrats who were long embedded in the working class movement. In the end the German socdems fulfilled the same counter-revolutionary function as the Italian fascists (this is why we call social democracy objectively the moderate wing of fascism).
I’m no expert, but I’ve read enough about internal repressions in the U.S. that I don’t think it can be taken for granted than Tsarist Russia was more effective. In that 1916-1920 window you had Pinkertons and other private detectives in every possible meeting (and working closely with official law enforcement), you had frequent arbitrary arrests and at least occasional lynchings of labor leaders, and you had political action from the highest levels of the federal government aimed at quashing dissent. You had widespread censorship, surveillance of mail and phone communications, torture, mass arrests, and deportations.
Unlike Russia, you did not have a segment of the ruling class in favor of wholesale changes to the national government (or when you did, they were in favor of proto-fascist changes). And while I really don’t know how this would compare to Russia, all of the above repressive forces could be (and often were) supplemented by vigilante violence at least tacitly supported by the state. Any argument about the U.S. being large and difficult to police would apply to Russia as well.
I agree these are big factors, too. As you suggest, I think instability is probably the biggest, but of course all of these affect each other.
Leftist parties being too weak and the repressive organs of the state being too strong are two sides of the same coin, right? And at the risk of overgeneralizing, I’d lump the German paramilitaries in with the armed vigilantes of the U.S. and the Whites who would fight in the Russian Civil War. Maybe the main reason the Bolsheviks won in Russia is the ultimate tool of state repression – the army – had been degraded so much that you had significant defections, all the way up to the garrisons of major cities during the October Revolution. I agree, though, that no small part of this was due to “the Bolsheviks [being] disciplined, organized and ready, having spent years building up connections with the working class base and winning credibility.”
This ignores that while with one hand, the state punched down while the other hand offered meager treats and future faking, and trauma bonding their citizens, much like an abusive parent or spouse will batter with one hand, then buy a gift or offer a hug with the other (see also B.F. Skinner’s work regarding intermittent reward). Our comrades in Russia and China got neither meager treats nor future faking. They struggled and died knowing fully well the hope of revolution was neither promised nor guaranteed. They fought, struggled, often died in the hope and determination of manifesting that hope into material conditions, if not for themselves, then for those behind them.
There are some labor aristocrats in the west, but yes, it’s not a great explanation for the lack of revolution.
I think my “alternative explanation” was fairly explicit—and repeatedly contrasted to the false explanation: plainly, however much rebellious energy there is, there will be no movement that abolishes the present state of things if people do not grasp certain insights about the nature of capitalism and fight that as the source of their suffering. In the U$ today 2/3rds of people are living paycheck to paycheck, yet they mostly blame evil immigrants/woke elites/jews or just an insufficiently benevolent state. Similarly, we have seen many overthrown governments in the last twenty years in the global south, but all of them have just established new rulers and new exploiters. Nothing fundamentally changes because people do not grasp the root of their problems and fight it.
The logical solution is, then, to actually promote class consciousness instead of just protesting the current thing or trying to get your own party popular. One of Marx’s major contributions was the notion that the proletariat must liberate itself, but they will not do so if they place blame incorrectly.
But isn’t “there is no revolution because people don’t have a correct understanding” a more idealist explanation than one which references material conditions as a cause? Did people in countries where successful revolutions happened just a priori have a better understanding of the nature of capitalism than people in the West, or were they forced to develop that understanding because of material conditions? Have revolutionaries in the West simply not had a good enough educational outreach? Has revolution not happened because we did not use the right words? Do you not think that people can be more or less receptive to certain explanations depending on their material conditions?
How do we go about promoting class consciousness? And shouldn’t we also be asking: what conditions are most conducive to the organic development of class consciousness?
Forgive me for asking so many questions, i’m just trying to understand your thinking on this.
Is the explanation wrong?
If we want to talk about history, then let’s note that it was a different era when most socialist revolutions happened. People were rebelling against colonialism, and the national bourgeoisie was pursuing liberal independence and the establishment of a government more suitable for the interests. In some cases communist groups took the helm of the anti-colonial struggle and ultimately founded their own governments. In many cases, the new government allowed the new bourgeoisie to have some power for the sake of developing the productive forces. People didn’t have insight capitalism here. They didn’t blame capitalism or the commodity form. They blamed explicit colonial oppressors. And they succeeded in achieving nominal independence around the world regardless if it was done by communists.
There are no more bourgeois revolutions to ride off or take advantage of. Capitalism is a powerful and legally widespread force. We have to actually abolish it. Colonialism in its blatant form is mostly gone, although exploitation remains. In Engels’ words (the Principles) “The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.” This task can only be achieved by the proletariat’s collective refusal to feed the machine, instead taking control of the means of production and pursuing the abolition of wage labor and commodity production.
This is the real “gap” between the east and west that used to exist. In countries under blatant colonial domination vanguard groups could ride the coattails of bourgeois revolution, whereas in the imperial core we had to do the work of organizing the proletariat. This gap doesn’t really exist any more. We are all exploited by the same international capital.
Insight into capitalism typically only works if one’s interests are violated capitalism, obviously. But it is everyday capitalism that oppresses us, not just the crises. We cannot rely on bad conditions to make class consciousness easier to spread, because people can just as easily take up racist explanations or the idealist complaint that “this couldn’t be real capitalism. If only we could return to the decent time when the economy didn’t go to shit. Maybe one day we could have a true free market again.”
I mean both Engels and Marx would disagree that crises in the current mode of production aren’t the tinder that sets alight the fires of a revolution. You cannot hit a critical mass of people wanting to upend things if most people are, while exploited, broadly comfortable and willing to take their lumps thinking that things will probably continue to improve if they don’t rock the boat. Crises create flash points where people can’t see a moderate and easy way out, where the only safe bet is actually to overthrow the current rulers because they’ve used up whatever good will they had gained from their subjects. Consciousness building is simply the work that is done to ensure that, of that critical mass of revolutionary subjects, there is a sizable portion who can steer the masses, who understand why things are happening and can thoroughly explain it to the masses. Many of the rest of the masses may never actually become ardent communists, or have any great level of communist consciousness besides what the communists are currently telling them to get out of their shit situation they are currently in.
People can be driven towards extremes during crisis yes. We must take advantage of that. However we cannot count on inherently revolutionary conditions coming out of nowhere. We must spread class consciousness. Additionally, we must critique crises not as aberrations where capitalism went “too far,” but as one more horror in a long line. Capital harms the proletariat whether there’s a crisis or not.
Neocolonialism is alive and well.
Can you please explain what this means? How can the proletarian refuse to feed the machine without seizing the means of production, or where manufacturing is defacto non-existent, the apparatus of business, banking, agriculture, and commerce?
Jim Crow, the KKK, Pullman Car Company illustrated this, as well as the Palestinian genocide.
It’s not “without seizing the means of production.” It’s prior to doing so. The proletariat has a special place in capitalism in that its labor is essential to the system’s functioning. If people refuse to work like in a strike (see the USSR) the system stops functioning and people can take over.
Ah ok, I get you. Then we have to deal with scabs.