/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

This post has audio if you're too lazy to read it

This was originally going to be a reply ITT >>2439192 but I decided to make it its own post

<it doesn't deserve to be that!

yeah well we have 20 dead /usapol/ threads in the catolog so who cares

If making above subsistence wage makes you "a petty bourgeois treatlerite" because it allows you to "accumulate savings after monthly expenses" which are "reserves that can be potentially converted into capital" then by that same logic any couple who has fewer than 2 children or any single person who has fewer than 1 child is "petty bourgeois" because the subsistence wage is the wage required, according to Marx, not just to keep yourself alive, but also your children, since capitalism requires the labor force to reproduce itself.

If a nation's population fails to reproduce itself Capital has to seek out labor from other nations by outsourcing or using immigrant labor. Something we see in the imperial core. If you're single and aren't bearing the expense of raising at least 1 adopted child, or if you're a couple, and you aren't bearing the expense of raising at least 2 children, then you aren't reproducing the labor force for capital, which means that even with a subsistence wage (which by definition, according to Marx himself, includes the cost of raising children to adulthood), you will have left over savings that can go towards "treats" (luxury commodities that aren't essential for survival like vidya games) or be used as money capital (i.e. invested as self-expanding value in an interest yielding savings account or 401k or some other petty bourgeois asset).

By this logic, many of the most puritanical Marxists on here (like Iron Felix) who rail against "treatlerites" and such are usually single men without children (the usual imageboard demographic) who, even if we believe them, and they are "immiserated wage workers earning a subsistence wage and unable to accumulate savings" they aren't actually reproducing themselves, which is one of the things Marx originally stated about the working class. This is because Marx himself had 7 children, half of whom died before adulthood, and he was writing during a time when contraception and birth control and sex education were basically nonexistent. This is why Marx railed against the Malthusian doctrine and basically stated that it was impossible for the working class to practice abstinence collectively. I think one of the most important things that has changed since Marx's time is the availability of sex education, contraception, birth control, and a more skeptical attitude towards marriage and starting a family, as well as the rise of anti-reproductive ideologies like antinatalism. It is harder for capital in the imperial core countries to get the desired oversupply of labor power, which is why the resort to outsourcing and immigration. Only a handful of "developing" countries still have fertility rates higher than 4 children per woman, and most of the imperial core countries have trouble getting each woman to have 2 children. So the labor force is not reproducing itself.

Birth strike under capitalism does increase wages actually by lowering the supply of labor and thereby increasing its demand. The inverse is also the case, which is what Marx was trying to point out with the idea of the reserve army of labor, or as Eugene Debs once called it, the reserve army of scabs. The same is true in pre-capitalism. In feudalism for example the only people who were wage workers were artisans in the towns, in the guilds. But when the black plague happened in the 1300s a lot of them died and their wages effectively doubled. This enraged King Edward III in England, at the time, so much, that he tried to freeze wages, but it as basically unenforceable. That was the result of a pandemic instead of a birth strike but we see similar patterns whenever the working population does not reproduce itself: The bourgeoisie has to pay more wages.

So maybe instead of being puritanical about who's "really proletarian" based on the ability to accumulate savings or not (without even considering whether it's set aside for emergency or used as money capital or both), we should look at how vastly different the imperial core is as an environment itself than during Marx's time. The proletariat is able to do things like accumulate savings even when making a subsistence wage by staying single and refusing to reproduce. Now if you want to redefine "subsistence" away from Marx's definition to not include reproduction, fine, but keep in mind that workers failing to reproduce themselves is not sustainable for Capital as a multi-generational system based on self expanding value and high profit rates, which is why Marx was focused on it as a system that needs to survive for more than 1 generation of working class life, which is why he included the cost of reproduction in subsistence.

This is not even getting into the question of whether a given working class person takes care of their dying elders (like me) or cuts off communication from them (like my parents did).

I am a parent btw with both children and old people dependents