/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

1% of the Brazilian population earns 20k BRL or more per month. It's a very bougie income cut. But that's only 4k USD per month.

exploitation of the third world and control over the global financial system and the world reserve currency allows western governments to build up productive forces by making non westerners do all the hard labor, freeing up their own population to pursue more specialized work/education, feeding again into an expansion of the productive forces, technological advancement, advanced social welfare systems, etc. Basically, westoid proles benefit by not being the ones in sweatshops making sneakers all day

You see, buying sneakers and iPhone makes western proles immune to capitalism. It's a +3 counter against the -2 attack of capitalists owning the means of production. So the western prole working in a shipyard or a restaurant has more priviledge than a capitalist living south of the Mediterranean. They are in serious need of checking their privilege!

>>2536067
You should look at purchasing power parity. GDP PPP per capita of Brazil is like 1/3rd average European country. So not that poor. Brazils main problem is extreme corruption, sclerotic government, bad industrial policy etc. All self caused problems.

>>2536071
But eastern euro countries did very well economically post USSR. In fact they are some of the few Western countries that actually grew quickly in this period. So overall if the relationship between East Europe and West Europe can be described as imperialistic, then imperialism actually benefited the poorer country in this case.

>>2536096
Except the financialization of the economy led to hollowing out of the productive forces. And only a tiny subset of workers work in R&D and IT. They're all being replaced by AI and outsourcing as well. Lots of people don't know, it's not just coding and call centres being outsourced to India, even things like design engineering and sales operations are being outsourced.

>>2536102
Lel

Thats nice and all, but can you stop killing black ppl

I think the post-colonial protectionism that 3rd world countries had is actually a successful psyop by Western countries. The West didn't want economic competition, so they successfully convinced leftist academic intellegenstia of the post colonial nations that protectionism was gonna help them. But they knew that the post-colonial countries didnt have the institutions and human capital to make it actually work. So the third world basically delayed it's industrializaition by decades because they got scammed into adopting bad economic policies.

>>2536117
>Brazils main problem is extreme corruption
Sorry but that's retarded. How many billions in corruption do you think Brazil bleeds per year?

>>2536123
Also purchasing power parity is sometimes 1:1 or more expensive depending on the commodities. Technology is more expensive in Brazil even in non-relative price because it's not produced locally. Housing and food are about the same, maybe housing less expensive and groceries more expensive relative to the purchasing power.
As an example of treats, the PS5 costs more than three minimum wages here, and about 50% of the population earns minimum wage or less.

>>2536123
>Studies by the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) from 2009 estimate that the Brazilian economy loses from corruption, every year, from one to four percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the equivalent of one value over 30 billion reais.[6] The following year, a study by the Federação das Indústrias do Estado de São Paulo (Fiesp) found that the annual cost of corruption in the country is 1.38 percent to 2.3 percent of the GDP.] In 2013, a study by the Industry National Confederation showed that each real misappropriated by corruption represents a damage to the economy and society of three reais.

And it's not just direct stealing of tax money that's the problem. Pervasive culturally-ingrained corruption makes it impossible to make the difficult reforms needed to set the economy straight, because every economic clique wants to protect its niche and can do so by undermining institutions through bribery, violence, blackmail etc.

>This resulted in the exact opposite of what happened in colonialism. The Western industries were hollowed out this time, and outsourced to the third world. Now sure, the Western bourgie benefited from this, but the money didnt trickle down much
that's an oversimplification, in reality the wealth gap exploded but the shift to services-oriented economy did bolster a large, educated middle class which created the conditions for justifying the disenfranchisement of workers who were unable to "upskill" into the service and corporate and professional roles. it was a bifurcation of the working class that remains a core contradiction of the Western world. that's the essence of the so-called professional-managerial class.

if you're a burger, the benefit is even more clear. there are tens of millions of suburban households in America that are a net negative on the global economy. they work completely unproductive jobs and businesses that are more like Disneyland stands than economic output, and exist to consume commodities paid for with the dollar which in turn bolsters the dollar even more as you consume products and resources from foreign lands bought with the dollar for dollar-holders.

The main privilege Westoid proles have is not being bombed and sanctioned to death, the absence of disadvantage is itself a privilege

>>2536132
Americans consuming commodity is the only positive thing Americans contribute for the global economy. There are two moment in which the dollar collapsed and Amrricans were unable to consoom, the first is during the 1973 oil crisis which singlehandedly killed developmentalism and pan africanism in the Third World due to collapse of export to Europe. The second is during the 2008 crisis which coupled with bad loans from opportunistic American firms plunged Africa into a second warlordist period and paved the way for the Arab winter. World systems theory had simply become outdated in the face of these two shocks because it proved that an autarchic model of growth is nigh impossible and we need to follow the China model

>>2536151
And now the US and EU is restarting protectionism while also destabilising the world through wars. A double whammy to development in the third world. China can help the global south by massively increasing imports. But a more hands-on solution is to straight up invade the West and force them to accept unequal trade terms.

you dont get bombed when porkies have a melty

>>2536200
Ehhh

>>2536135
Harrison Bergeron ass take

>how exactly Western PROLETARIAT benefits from imperialism?

By its very existence?

>>2536135
Nobody should be bombed and sanctioned to death

They don't really.

>>2536534
If they don’t benefit from imperialism, why hasn’t thee been a successful communist revolution in any imperial core country?

>>2536117
>But eastern euro countries did very well economically post USSR.
didn't someone here do the math a while ago showing that ukraine still hasn't recovered economically

>>2536536
Lack of organization. That's slowly improving.

>>2536536
How do you show the difference between "western porkies let wages rise enough to allow for some savings" and "western porkies transferred net superprofits" in an SNLT transfer accounting for things like developmental differences?

because it actually starts getting very weird trying to make any sense of how marx described capitalist rules if you don't actually keep that primary

>>2536536
I would say the petty bourgeoisie benefits from imperialism while the proletariat is simply eroded, and their numbers dwindle. In the core also you have a lot of prisoners. There's a reason the USA has more prisoners per capita than any othe country. These are used as slaves to perform jobs that a proletariat would otehrwise perform. Proletarian jobs in the core are outsourced, or given to desperate immigrants, or given to prisoners. People are encouraged to become class traitors, like cops, or security guards, bodyguards, prison guards, etc. The ranks of the petty bourgeois home owner swell. Everyone is kept distracted with identity politics and forever war.

one example I've seen given recently is that the IWU made an exception for Israeli cargo and other "national security" cargo during one of their more recent strikes, i.e. they refused to load ships with harmless commodities, but still loaded ships as long as Uncle Sam Government declared it crucial to the burger reich's plunder. So there are instances where imperial coreu unionized workers (if not workers in general) can be seen to either benefit from, or turn a blind eye to, imperialism.

>>2536537

According to official world bank data, the overall inflation adjusted ppp gdp per capita growth rate in the former USSR since 87-88 is abysmal, but in Eastern Europe its only meh overall (Although overall gdp growth for given country tends to be worse then its per capita because of higher death rates & emigration lowering the total population)

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locations=RU

You can add an easy 7-12% to get the 87-88 peak figures (ie. pre-perestroika)

>>2536547
Not saying that it wasn't scum-shit behavior but that doesn't really explain how it benefitted the dockloaders. (for accuracy's sake, it was the ILWU).

>>2536064
<Can someone give me non-bullshit explanation of how exactly Western PROLETARIAT benefits from imperialism?
It doesn't, the western bourgeoisie does, and the only reason the proles had it good from 1945-1975 is socdem/fordist keynesian order of wealth re-distribution, social services and and unionized factory jobs. The western prole has been getting less and less and is a on a decline in terms of living standards since the late 70s till today. In exchange a few more jobs in high finance and technology were created but only accessible to certain people and doesn't create the mass employment of manufacturing so Chadwick the Harvard legacy gets to get his MBA and become a product manager of bullshit at Google or VP at wealth management goldman sachs while Jimmy the prole is selling homemade knives after his job at the coal mine or widget factory went away while his daughter is selling her body for opioids.

People talking about muh privileged western proles are living decades in the past, when you talk about actual PROLES, not petit bourgeoise landlords or wealthy retirees or kulak tier petit rentier farmers with like $20 million worth of land worked by illegal mexicans while they LARP with a overalls and shiny F series truck, when you talk about actual PROLES, they have it worse than ever.

The fact is as far as quality of life goes a high tier thirdoid civil servant lives an order of magnitude better than an out of work coal miner of west virginia and even getting paid lower wages in a thirdoid country allows them to hire the cheap as fuck labor because there's so much cheap labor around, and have a maid and a butler and all kinds of shit westoids haven't had since the victorian era.

>>2536536
That's now how logic works. You first have to prove your assumptions

Average westoid household owns $200000 in assets.

>>2536761
Thank you for saying this. I live in a Western European country and all I see are the living conditions degrading endlessly, year after year. I'm currently homeless, most of my friends earn the minimum wage or even less. The price of rentals, food and public transports have doubled if not tripled in the last ten years, while wages remain stagnant.
I know the situation in Eastern Europe isn't any better, where wages are even lower while prices approach Western European levels, but I have a really hard time seeing how do we benefit from the abstract concept of "imperialism", which involved in Lenin's time capital investments abroad under subjugation by a powerful military force, because all I see around me are more crackheads in the streets. When we hear third-worldists, the West is both simultaneously crumbling while every Western prole is a mega-porky earning a 400k yearly salary while owning ten thousand houses. It's either one or the other.

I like how for westoids "homeless" means "doesn't own real estate"

>>2537049
No, it means I can't rent anything easily because I'm unemployed and I don't have the guarantees landlords want (someone in my family earning 3 times the amount of the rent in one month), even if I have enough money to rent something small. So I sleep on the couch of friends right now.
For me, it's rather telling that you think it's a matter of owning real estate. Not everyone is a bitter petit bourgeois failson like you. Some people are poor in the West and don't own real estate. Again, get your story straight: either the West is crumbling, or we all own 2 private jets and 5 McMansions. It can't be both at the same time.

>>2537053
Most people in the 3w live in one place with their extended families, your complaint is that you can't gentrify an urban area

It's the internally colonized and marginalized who first bear the brunt of imperial decline and most harshly

>>2537066
The house of my family is small and there are basically no jobs there. They get by earning less than the minimum wage.
What you say might sound morally righteous on xitter, but you seem completely disconnected from the reality of how the world functions for a normal prole. Saying "third world people live with their extended families" doesn't amount to anything, as if I could say that to my family and everything would be solved immediately. And keep in mind, I'm already considering moving back to my family place for a while, even if it means being stuck in the middle of nowhere without any job opportunities.

Enjoy your treats, you don't have to LARP as bargain-bin Maoist to feel good in the comfort of your family home. You just want to shame poor people with a red veneer, but deep down inside, you have the same ideology as neoliberals when it comes to blaming workers for their poverty, while never ever criticizing the bourgeoisie.

>>2536126
30 billion BRL is chump change in the grand scale of public investment in Brazil.
>le brazilian people are le culturally corrupt
This is reactionary propaganda, mutt's syndrome. This is not material analysis. You're retarded.

>>2537075
nta, but dude don't compare our situation in western europe, even being homeless in western europe, with the state of the third world. People have options here man, social welfare nets, economic opportunity that simply does not exist elsewhere. The wages alone are an immediate indication, despite them having been stagnant for decades they are still vastly preferable to almost anywhere else, thousands and thousands of people upend their entire life in their home country, risking their lives in some cases, just for the chance to live here and maybe send some of that money back to their families. This is all interlinked. Just because there is also poverty here and the imperial decline/decades of neoliberal austerity policy have caused a massive decline in standards of living and previously mentioned economic opportunity, doesn't mean that the people living in the imperial core don't benefit from living there in comparison to those who live on the periphery, even when they are not bourgeois. It doesn't make you some larping maoist to acknowledge that

>>2536064
>Can someone give me non-bullshit explanation of how exactly Western PROLETARIAT benefits from imperialism?
The bourgeoisie feeds them treats made by the workers and peasants therefore they are bourgeois who subsist from surplus-vaue. A class of imperialist worker aristocrats has indeed enjoyed a higher standard of living at the charity of the bourgeoisie. They are no longer members of the workers' ranks, but renegades of of the proletariat. These worker aristocrats who have been bought by the bourgeoisie must be eliminated.
>The West exported their investments and know-how and helped in the industrialization of the third world.
Wrong. The supreme law of monopoly capitalism, the law of uneven development, dictates that imperialism is the greatest fetter upon third world productive forces.
>>2536102
The treatlerite admits they expropriate wealth from the third-world, yet they attempt to tell us they are not exploiters. Middle classes suffer in any system of exploitation. The term middle class denotes that are still exploiters.

>>2537075
Your situation seems dire and of existential importance to you,and in a way that's true: when middle classers, petty booj and boojs fail to reproduce the class they were born into, they lose their subjectivity (becoming "losers") and join the grey mass of the declassed that nobody even wants to even think about as "fellow citizens/people" (immigrants, internally colonized, marginalized, etc.). And that sucks.
But for the actually oppressed, it's not a matter of losing subjectivity. It's a matter of survival. They *have* no parents home to go back to, they just die. Either from social murder, or being directly killed by the state.

BOOMP

>>2537088
I do agree that people in the West have better living standards, better wages, and in some cases better social welfare (not the case in the USA though). But guess what? This isn't 1965 or 1995 anymore, the social welfare systems of most countries have been gutted, the wages aren't indexed on inflation anymore, a normal worker can't buy a house or rent easily, etc. Also what's the point of earning more if in the end, we spend more to reproduce the material conditions of our existence? It makes traveling abroad more attractive, but that's it.
And that doesn't change the fact that I don't see how I currently profit from imperialism. Was the cheap Chinese phone I own produced because of imperialism? If you say yes, you basically says China is complicit in Western imperialism.
Third-worldism is an incoherent ideology for petit-bourgeois kids who discovered Marxism a couple of months ago and feel guilty about enjoying treats while living standards are collapsing around them. "If you are poor, you deserve it" is the final message, the same exact message that capitalists use to justify their exploitation of workers worldwide.

So yes, I do agree that people in Western Europe have it better than most people, but I won't simp for the third-world bourgeoisie who earn infinitely more than I will ever do and already own 5 villas on the Italian coast and Switzerland.
Maybe most of you have zero problems in life, but it's not my case and I refuse to self-flagellate to show to the world I'm morally superior compared to a boogeyman that exists only in the mind of maladjusted online activists.
If any of you went outside for once, you would see some people are dirt poor in the West and I don't see how they "benefit from imperialism". Really that's my problem with the whole shtick. Does someone begging money in the streets "benefit from imperialism"? Are they exploiting the third-world every time someone give them a 20 cents coin? This is never explained by third-worldists, they use big words to make grandiose statements, but they never talk about concrete situations.

I already disagree with the implication that *if* western imperialism doesn’t benefit the western proletariat, then it’s not their problem and it’s solely up to the victims to resist.

>>2537109
>This is never explained by third-worldists, they use big words to make grandiose statements, but they never talk about concrete situations.
Ironic. This fascist typed all of these words merely to double down in support of their imperialist system of exploitation in defiance of Marxist principle of national sovereignty.

>>2537120
You say this but 100 years of western labor movements engaging in tailism, workerism and opportunism shows that material interests still trump all.
It started with cpusa patsoc shit and culminated with aoc, bernie, mamdani, and now a mercenary with a totenkopf tattoo. Total capitulation to neoliberal fascist establishment.

>>2537120
Nobody said this, of course the western proletariat should for example sabotage weapon shipments to Israel. Third-worldists love arguing against positions nobody believe in, so they can assert the western proletariat is ontologically evil and the third-world bourgeoisie is wholesome like the good lapdogs of capital they are.

>>2537129
Well then what’s the relevance of the question in the OP?

>>2537126
More big words, no material analysis of the situation of the proletariat neither in the West nor elsewhere. Also Marx never praised "national sovereignty", if anything he wanted capital to dissolve national identities so the worldwide communist revolution would be kickstarted. Lenin was not Marx.

>>2537137
I honestly don't understand your question.

>>2537150
>I honestly don't understand your question
If the implication is not
<if I don’t benefit from it, then I shouldn’t be held particularly responsible for stopping it
then what is the relevance of OP’s question? What are we to conclude from the answer either way?

>>2537150
I used small words. The material analysis was decreed by lenin stalin mao. The imperialists exploit the workers and the peasants. You are dogmatic revisionist imperialist. Marx himself stated that he was not a marxist nor did he live in the age of proletarian revolution so his abstract incidental formulations have no meaning

Before imperialism, no spices in Europe, spices expensive
With imperialism, suddenly theres spices and sugar

>>2537160
I honestly still don't understand your point. OP's question is "How does the western proletariat benefit from imperialism?". I think OP wanted concrete examples of how the western proletariat is profiting, or not, from imperialism.
My answer is that they might benefit from a higher standard of living, perhaps indirectly in part due to imperialism (whatever that mean, online MLs can't even define it properly, they just blurb something "exporting capital" without providing current-day examples like I don't know, precious metal mining in Congo and who is profiting from it), but the general class distinction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie still remains.
An African or Russian capitalist who owns a villa on the French Riviera doesn't have a worst standard of living than a cashier at Walmart. Yes, a worker in Germany can buy a phone for cheaper than a worker in Bangladesh, but that doesn't mean the German cashier working at Lidl is bourgeois or directly exploiting the third-world.

That was the diagnosis, then there is the question of "what should be done about this?". Well I can say for sure posturing about how western workers are evil on the internet and telling them they are treatlerites won't change shit. The answer is international solidarity.

>>2537163
>You are dogmatic revisionist imperialist.
Buzzwords. Wake up grandma, Khrushchev died 55 years ago.
>Marx himself stated that he was not a marxist
Indeed, because he thought the people speaking in his name were morons, and the historical trend is continuing.

>>2537193
I can define it quite easily.
It's the flow of labor from the third world to the imperial core.
It's why smartphones are so cheap while healthcare is so expensive.
The former is made in china and you have to pay a chinese assembler and a congolese cobalt miner to make it, while for the latter you have to pay a westoid's wages to live.

>>2537088
>nta, but dude don't compare our situation in western europe, even being homeless in western europe, with the state of the third world. People have options here man, social welfare nets, economic opportunity that simply does not exist elsewhere. The wages alone are an immediate indication, despite them having been stagnant for decades they are still vastly preferable to almost anywhere else, thousands and thousands of people upend their entire life in their home country, risking their lives in some cases, just for the chance to live here and maybe send some of that money back to their families. This is all interlinked. Just because there is also poverty here and the imperial decline/decades of neoliberal austerity policy have caused a massive decline in standards of living and previously mentioned economic opportunity, doesn't mean that the people living in the imperial core don't benefit from living there in comparison to those who live on the periphery, even when they are not bourgeois. It doesn't make you some larping maoist to acknowledge that
not a europoor but plenty of middle countries are approaching if not exceeding europe living standards. East asia in particular. Euro living standards aren't even that good I mean just look at any Chinese city or even Japanese vs modern day Paris, and the level of cleanliness and public infrastructure and modern buildings. I mean yes if you are comparing Scandinavian levels of social welfare then no, but in actual historically "imperialist" countries like the UK/France/etc. the level of historical looting doesn't seem to have trickled down to the man on the street? Europe is fucking depressing I can't imagine living there.

>>2537193
>Well I can say for sure posturing about how western workers are evil on the internet and telling them they are treatlerites won't change shit
Yeah I get that's the point behind OP's question and your rant, but I suppose what I'm getting at is how does that relate to
>The answer is international solidarity.
Because either answer to the question seems to be
<The western proletariat doesn't benefit at all
or
<The western proletariat does benefit, but only in a very minor way, get over it
but what difference does either make when surely the connection between the western proletariat and western imperialism is not one of moral obligation, but just simply both share an origin, by which western imperialism stops when the western proletariat gets organised against the western bourgeoisie. Isn't the solidarity here an understanding that this represents liberation for both half of the world? The garden AND the jungle? That therefore makes it of global importance, no?

So why the outrage against the concept of "treatlerism"? It is a question why western leftists aren't united in that understanding, the framing of the utility that the western left has the best chance against western imperialism as a moral panic "because smartphones", comes across to me as crybullying.

Is
>Oh SURE, I'm not rising against the bourgeoise BECAUSE of the iPHONES, ha! find me some Marx that mentions iPhones please
actually sarcasm?

>>2537109
Your problem is that you only look at the problem of imperialism as some sort of moral question of who is to be condemned or who personally individually has a better or worse living standard. Again with the comparison to the homeless, being homeless in the third world can be a lot worse than being homeless in for instance western europe where in many cases there is a lot of accommodation and social welfare programs designed to alleviate those conditions that people in third world countries simply don't have access to. The benefit a homeless person receives from living in the imperial core is that they're not a homeless person in the third world.

Also third worldism isn't a real ideology bro, you're mostly shadowboxing with imagined opponents

>>2537297
Yeah the imperial core seems to be in decline for the last few decades, but that doesn't automatically erase the build up of previous decades/centuries. We do seem to be at a turning point, or transitionary era, historically speaking

>Europe is fucking depressing I can't imagine living there.
There's a lot of worse places to be man, you could be american

>>2537321
Maoism Third Worldism is an actual ideology though

>>2537252
i would also point out that a lot of things that got cheaper were things that were a lot easier to increase automation in development. Electronics and screens have had pretty huge technical overhauls since 2000.

>>2537351
Frankly the issue with imperialism isn't simply the cost of goods, though that's a good reason why people may be reluctant to oppose it, to understand it, pricks who say things like
>online MLs can't even define it properly, they just blurb something "exporting capital"
must ask themselves whether the resulting profits and investments stay in the country of export, or repatriated back to the country of origin?

>>2537355
The main benefit of imperialism is psychological, seeing poor people getting killed and exploited far away provides a sense of safety and security no matter how false. It can be summed up as
>better them than me and my family

>>2536978
almost like averages are skewed by outliers. look at median

>>2537376
200k is the median
though i think this is also including housing value being absurdly inflated

>>2537355
But the corollary to this is assuming that the profits is retained by proles in the West, when it is just fact that most rich people do not transfer their profits into the national economy through consumption but either hoard it or reinvest it back into expanding production (in the third world!) which is why their consumption index is so jarringly low. Indeed, the only part that is still valid from this critique is the absurdly low price of commodity, but even this entails export of investment to the third world. This is why classical economy used to assume that given time imperialism will equalizes the economy of the world

>>2537364
I feel like a lot of you guys who keeps saying this or that about the first world worker has never actually talked with first world workers (or indeed, any workers outside of your social circle). This is the root behind the completely absurd conjectures online maoists made about imperial core workers, which operates in the same logic of exoticization that /pol/tard conspiracy theories about Jews thrive on

>>2537392
I am a first world worker, so is my boyfriend, that’s what he told me

>>2537150
>Also Marx never praised "national sovereignty", if anything he wanted capital to dissolve national identities so the worldwide communist revolution would be kickstarted.
Sort of. The revolution starts in various nations at the national level, but spreads internationally. This is why in both Principles of Communism and in The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels talk about confiscation of the property of emigrants and rebels during the course of the revolution. Marx and Engels anticipated bourgeois flight from countries where revolution was proceeding rapidly to countries where reactionaries were still dominant. We see that today with the USA being the host of anti-communist emigres from every nation that has ever even tried to have a socialist revolution. For Marx and Engels, national sovereignty as a construct that arises in bourgeois society is still useful insofar as it can be used by a revolutionary government to fortify its gains while the world revolution proceeds perhaps more slowly than desired. This is why Stalin ran into the question of Socialism in One Country, which for him was never a matter of Socialism being permanently confined to one country as some people pretend, but rather being confined for the time being, until further notice.

You can sort of see the contradictions of world revolution being played with between points 18 and 19 of Principles of Communism.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

Look at how often the nation is mentioned in point 18. National banks, national factories, national capital, national labor, national schools and daycares, national transit…

then in point 19 is the more vague idea not of a world revolution, but of a 1st world revolution, taking place simultaneously in "civilized" countries, here the limitations of the 19th century thinkers show themselves. The 20th century saw socialist revolution not in the European and North American core, but in "backwards" countries of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. What we saw in the 20th century was the total attempt to destroy socialism by the core, in the form of CIA coups, and so forth. So Marx's imperial core revolution still hasn't happened even though that is what they anticipated. Instead the core produced national socialism, a reactionary distortion, in Marx's homeland of Germany, and then produced the most vicious anticommunist campaigns of sabotage in the American CIA.

So clearly some predictions of Marx and Engels either are happening way later than they anticipated, or Marxism has evolved beyond the thought of both Marx and Engels….

> Lenin was not Marx.

Precisely. Lenin derives his ideas from Marx, but builds upon them, and uses the context of early 20th century imperialism to ground his theory. Just like Lenin built his theory on Marx in some respects, but also allowed for evolution of theory based on new conditions, so did Mao, and everyone else who came after Lenin. What we have today is a pluralism of Marxist thought. This frustrates people who are looking for one Orthodox line, but I think a pluralism of approaches is good and allows for a variety of attacks on capitalism. What did Engels say after Marx died? He said the Marx-Engels doctrine is one of Evolution, not dogma. So of course Lenin was not Marx. Lenin evolved the doctrine to address evolving material conditions. People who cling to Orthodoxy claim capitalism is exactly the same as it was in 1867. I think this is wrong for many reasons but I will stop here to keep this post from getting any longer.

>>2537364
>The main benefit of imperialism is psychological,
Vibes lmao

>>2537389
>But the corollary to this is assuming that the profits is retained by proles in the West
This is still going down the path of considering imperialism to be a moral panic.
The point is that Capitalism in the imperialised nations does not manifest in the way it does in the imperial nations, because the latter has a bourgeoise and is therefore subject to the fundamental limitations of capitalism that is staved of by this expansion of markets, while the former have compradors at best who are the aforementioned Africans who surprise surprise choose to spend their earnings on "villas on the French Riviera".

>or reinvest it back into expanding production (in the third world!)
If you're imperialising a country for its labour, then it's the low cost of labour that is attractive, because it's cheaper than the upfront cost of increasing automated production. If automated production is pursued, then it is often installed back in the imperial core as "bright entreprener saves forgotten community with 3D printed capsule home production line" as a narrative but really because property is most secure at home.

Ultimately, you have to look at this picture and think they're equally close to the brink of mass, efficient automated production as we are in the west, that seizing the means of production goes beyond just stealing a sewing machine from the sweatshop and assume solidarity is expecting them to view us as equally oppressed as we feel ourselves when our iPhone just fails to scratch that itch after the 7th one we've bought of the bastards.

>>2536064
I think the TWist line that the imperial core is not exploited is erroneous. At the same time, I think that the principal contradiction in the imperial core is not between the workers and the capitalists. In the same way that in the periphery the principal contradiction may be between the oppressed nations and the oppressor nations, the imperial core can also have a different principal contradiction. Not really sure what the principal contradiction in the imperial core is though. It probably has something to do with mass incarceration or something. I don't think it's quite as simple as racism but race (not imperialism) is probably a part of it.

The imperial core is still capitalist and workers are still exploited by the bourgeoisie but I don't think the principal contradiction is between workers and capitalists.

Also read Mao "On Contradiction".
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm

The imperial core cobbles together a monopoly of an industry, either through trade barriers, brain drain abroad, extortion or through open war to under-develop industry abroad and become the sole provider of a particular commodity or service. You may recognize this as what economists call "being at the top of the added value chain". What it actually is, is a monopoly contained within the core. And proletarian workers in the first world benefit from increased salaries because they have virtually no competition abroad. It is at a certain point where an industry stops being profitable enough where it needs to expand towards the imperial periphery in pursuit of cheaper labor force where the imperial core loses the monopoly and the proletarian in the core starts to hurt, you may recognize this as a recession. Thus the imperial core quickly begins developing new industry and repeat the cycle.

>>2537504
There are no contradictions within the imperial core

>>2537342
Hardly

>>2537535
now that is simply an untrue line

>>2537745
If there were contradictions in the imperial core, the imperial core wouldn’t exist, but it does

>>2537769
contradictions take time to resolve

>>2537777
If it hasn’t erupted it’s not a substantial contradiction

>>2537792
i mean, i disagree, but at the same time, there is no theorist who uses these terms how you are. mao's contradictions were ever present - there are tensions (and a great deal of tensions) in everything constantly in flux and changing. for marx, engels, lenin, hegel, the presence of contradiction in all things is pretty fundamental

if you dont agree with the thought (or even definition of the word) of any marxist theorist, then why use the word at all

>>2537443
Man, you really glossed over everything i said. I have demonstrated that the superprofits gained by the bourgeoisie is not reinvested back into either automatization back home (which is completely lacklustre, otherwise the US would not be dealing with a production crisis) or consumption of goods (which you just completely gloss over, probably because you do not understand the implication of this vis a vis the Maoist understanding of comprador vs the bourgeoisie)
>because the latter has a bourgeoise and is therefore subject to the fundamental limitations of capitalism that is staved of by this expansion of markets,
The topic is not about capitalism being saved by expansion of markets. The topic is about whether the workers of the first world benefit from this to such an extent that they become non-revolutionary. Again all indicators shows only dubious correlation between corporate superprofit and welfare of proles
>the aforementioned Africans who surprise surprise choose to spend their earnings on "villas on the French Riviera".
Again the low consumption index and seeing actual flow of investment shows that the distinction between a comprador selling ground rent and an imperial core bourgeois reinvesting in better production method is much more vague than Maoists want it to be. Most imperial core bourgeoisie also invest in French Riviera properties, for example, and the idea that compradors do not reinvest back into production in the third world is laughable; even for excerable food stuff exporters like palm oil exporters or ranchers you cant just export shit and invest the money abroad. You need better roads to transport your goods, you need local fertilizer and harvester production to improve production output, same with pesticides (even one under the aegis of core companies like Monsanto) etc etc. The assumption that compradors all drain local wealth is just not scientific, otherwise we wont have protectionist laws in the TW or cases of them supporting protectionist government.

>If you're imperialising a country for its labour, then it's the low cost of labour that is attractive, because it's cheaper than the upfront cost of increasing automated production. If automated production is pursued, then it is often installed back in the imperial core
Anon you dont actually understand how foreign investments work or what improvement in productive forces mean. When companies export capital to countries with low wages they are not putting them into serfdom, they are employing WAGE LABOUR in production lines. This IS improvement in production, especially in countries where the prevailing social relationships are rural ones (you bring up a photo of a cloth producing sweat shop- in Bangladesh when they closed down these factories a lot of the women have to end their education since they have to return to the fields, and many are forcefully wedded off by their parents). Of course there is a valid avenue of criticism here; P. Patnaik mentioned that the logic of cheap labour caused global competition to focus on wage suppression, resulting in global demand collapse in the third world; but this is not an intrinsic aspect of foreign investment, and again we have strayed from the original topic of how much first world workers benefit from this