99.9999% of fights on leftypol are over whether the top pic or the bottom pic is true.
https://strawpoll.com/GeZARkvDRyVSo which is it leftypol?
1: The 1st world bourgeoisie and 1st world workers are trying to crush the 3rd world bourgeoisie and the 3rd world workers
2: The 1st world bourgeoisie and 3rd world bourgeoisie are trying to crush the 1st world workers and the 3rd world workers
If you look at the south in the US its basically a third world country
>>2880893Like it really is getting bad the proverty rates are getting higher and the united states has been declining in GDP for decades, this whole third world vs first world is a psyop.
Its exploited people vs the exploiters, all major countries have this dynamic (rural russia, rurual and urban china, southern and western USA, rural and indigenous canada, scotland, wales, northern ireland in UK, south of france and corstica in france, southern italy, central spain and catalonia, etc…)
>>2880886For me it's everyone allying against the kind of people who support Trump (or your local temu equivalent.)
There is a progressive and a reactionary faction of each broad group, when split in such a simple binary. (When you sub-divide further, you'll find the anchor point of this group is usually petit bourg, lumpen, retired, or in a highly protected sector, plus of course the utterly insane tech-right types.) It is the militant branch of all of the worst human impulses, all of the most reactionary desires of the most destructive parts of capital, all of the worst warmongers. It is for anyone of any serious persuasion the worst of all possible options. The most progressive faction of the bourgeoisie is of course still nothing compared to the proletariat, but that does nothing to diminish just how bad the most reactionary factions are.
A superficial third worldist analysis will lead you to celebrate their deleterious effect on the west, never realising that the developing world is hit too and will be hit the hardest in the inevitable wars that follow.
I make no direct proposals on how to fix this. This is not a call to "vote blue no matter who". I do not for a second believe your vote matters, but I regard this as a very serious problem.
>>2880886Dialectics, third world bourgeois and proletariat against first world allied with first world proletariat then once third world bourgeois throws off the shackles of the first world imperialism and colonialism then third world proletariat against their own bourgeois
>>2880886Communism versus 3rd world nationalism. Its really sad if anyone picks top option.
>>2880959Big bunch of words with no bearing on the thread. Thanks for your contribution.
>>2880960
Very presumptive and entirely wrong.
>Plutocratic vs proletarian nations
This debate was settled by the time the Comintern still existed.
Still too early to tell, but I don't get the impression a lot of people here agree with the top, but the ones that do are very loud about it in every "geopol" thread.
No, due to your lack in ability to take into account the complexity of time as well as all stratas involved, you are not seeing it clearly enough.
The pyramid needs to have about x2 the layers.
The fact that it's missing a time dimension is catastrophic.
And fuck your poll.
saged
>>2881083I'm saying that originally the notion behind "allying with the national bourgeoisie" was materially sound a century ago during the Baku Congress, as the globe was mostly agrarian, illiterate, formally colonial, comprador-oppressed.
By the end of the 20th century most of the issues acting as blockages to a new proletarian communist revolutionary wave (illiteracy, rural, non-industrial environments, comprador-colonialist "development") are no longer there, as capitalism is truly global.
There no longer is a viable alliance with the national bourgeoisie or even petty-bourgeoisie for the global south, but, dialectically, there also is no viable alliance with the labor aristocracy in the global north (think academics, managers, the (mis)leaders within the CIA-approved labor unions and reformist parties).
>>2881098yeah that seems totally reasonable. I have no objections to anything you said.
>>2880886Neither. It's 3rd world workers versus everyone.
Capitalist competition means the bourgeois solidarity is fake and they will, eventually, devour each other. Through this conflict, 3rd world workers get an opportunity at communism.
>>2881098academics are a slightly unfair one and should be subdivided. the large number of young aspiring academics in insecure or non-academic employment, the small number of secure academic positions available, and the fact that old boomer academics in secure tenure are living longer and longer each year (meaning their position doesn't roll over to someone younger) basically bodes well for the left. obviously the secure academic has nothing to gain and everything to lose, but the situation is precisely reversed for the aspirant.
>>2881105>It's 3rd world workers versus everyone.seems hopeless
>Capitalist competition means the bourgeois solidarity is fake and they will, eventually, devour each other. Through this conflict, 3rd world workers get an opportunity at communism.i hope that you are correct
>>2880993Well it would be better if the proletariat immediately did a proletarian revolution, but anti imperialism is also good too.
The only difference between first and third world workers is that first world workers have more class counsciousness and refuse to be exploited by the capitalist class to the same degree as thirdies
>>2880886it's 1st world workers vs 3rd world workers
AND
1st world bourg aligned with 3rd world workers
AND
3rd world bourg against 1st and 3rd world workers
>>2880959You are also distorting Marx's analysis of the development of the theory of productive workers among the bourgeoisie and its vulgarization by the bourgeoisie itself with Marx's opinion that, if you had read him, you would see that the issue of productive and unproductive workers has to do with being productive to the capitalist in order to generate surplus value to be extracted by the capitalist as profit from the sale of commodities in the market.
You are confusing what Marx is writing in the text, in the same text you can see that If a worker is exploited by an entrepreneur to generate profit, their labor is structurally productive for capital. If you hire a worker directly out of your own pocket to fix your house, they are structurally unproductive, no matter how physically grueling or "useful" their work is.
<Productive labour is here defined from the standpoint of capitalist production, and Adam Smith here got to the very heart of the matter, hit the nail on the head. This is one of his greatest scientific merits (as Malthus rightly observed, this critical differentiation between productive and unproductive labour remains the basis of all bourgeois political economy) that he defines productive labour as labour which is directly exchanged with capital; that is, he defines it by the exchange through which the conditions of production of labour, and value in general, whether money or commodity, are first transformed into capital (and labour into wage-labour in its scientific meaning).
<This also establishes absolutely what unproductive labour is. It is labour which is not exchanged with capital, but directly with revenue, that is, with wages or profit (including of course the various categories of those who share as co-partners in the capitalist’s profit, such as interest and rent). Where all labour in part still pays itself (like for example the agricultural labour of the serfs) and in part is directly exchanged for revenue (like the manufacturing labour in the cities of Asia), no capital and no wage-labour exists in the sense of bourgeois political economy. These definitions are therefore not derived from the material characteristics of labour (neither from the nature of its product nor from the particular character of the labour as concrete labour), but from the definite social form, the social relations of production, within which the labour is realised. An actor, for example, or even a clown, according to this definition, is a productive labourer if he works in the service of a capitalist (an entrepreneur) to whom he returns more labour than he receives from him in the form of wages; while a jobbing tailor who comes to the capitalist’s house and patches his trousers for him, producing a mere use-value for him, is an unproductive labourer. The former’s labour is exchanged with capital, the latter’s with revenue. The former’s labour produces a surplus-value; in the latter’s, revenue is consumed.
<Productive and unproductive labour is here throughout conceived from the standpoint of the possessor of money, from the standpoint of the capitalist, not from that of the workman; hence the nonsense written by Ganilh, etc., who have so little understanding of the matter that they raise the question whether the labour or service or function of the prostitute, flunkey, etc., brings in returns. |303||
<||304| A writer is a productive labourer not in so far as he produces ideas, but in so far as he enriches the publisher who publishes his works, or if he is a wage-labourer for a capitalist.
<The use-value of the commodity in which the labour of a productive worker is embodied may be of the most futile kind. The material characteristics are in no way linked with its nature which on the contrary is only the expression of a definite social relation of production. It is a definition of labour which is derived not from its content or its result, but from its particular social form.
<On the other hand, on the assumption that capital has conquered the whole of production—and that therefore a commodity (as distinct from a mere use-value) is no longer produced by any labourer who is himself the owner of the conditions of production for producing this commodity—that therefore only the capitalist is the producer of commodities (the sole commodity excepted being labour-power)—then revenue must be exchanged either against commodities which capital alone produces and sells, or against labour, which just like those commodities is bought in order to be consumed; that is, only for the sake of its particular material characteristics, its use-value—for the sake of the services which, through its particular material characteristics, it renders to its buyer and consumer. For the producer of these services the services rendered are commodities. They have a definite use-value (imaginary or real) and a definite exchange-value. For the buyer, however, these services are mere use-values, objects in which ||305| he consumes his revenue. These unproductive labourers do not receive their share of revenue (of wages and profits), their co-partnership in the commodities produced by productive labour, gratis: they must buy their share in them; but they have nothing to do with their production.
<Karl Marx, 1863,Theories of Surplus-Value, [Volume IV of Capital], [CHAPTER IV] Theories of Productive and Unproductive Labourhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch04.htmYou forget that workers who transport commodities are productive workers creating value by selling their labor power.
<Quantities of products are not increased by transportation. Nor, with a few exceptions, is the possible alteration of their natural qualities, brought about by transportation, an intentional useful effect; it is rather an unavoidable evil. But the use-value of things is materialised only in their consumption, and their consumption may necessitate a change of location of these things, hence may require an additional process of production, in the transport industry. The productive capital invested in this industry imparts value to the transported products, partly by transferring value from the means of transportation, partly by adding value through the labour performed in transport. This last-named increment of value consists, as it does in all capitalist production, of a replacement of wages and of surplus-value.
<Within each process of production, a great role is played by the change of location of the subject of labour and the required instruments of labour and labour-power — such as cotton trucked from the carding to the spinning room or coal hoisted from the shaft to the surface. The transition of the finished product as finished goods from one independent place of production to another located at a distance shows the same phenomenon, only on a larger scale. The transport of products from one productive establishment to another is furthermore followed by the passage of the finished products from the sphere of production to that of consumption. The product is not ready for consumption until it has completed these movements.[…]
<The absolute magnitude of the value which transportation adds to the commodities stands in inverse proportion to the productive power of the transport industry and in direct proportion to the distance traveled, other conditions remaining the same.[…]
<The capitalist mode of production reduces the costs of transportation of the individual commodity by the development of the means of transportation and communication, as well as by concentration — increasing scale — of transportation. It increases that part of the living and materialised social labour which is expended in the transport of commodities, firstly by converting the great majority of all products into commodities, secondly, by substituting distant for local markets.
<The circulation, i.e., the actual locomotion of commodities in space, resolves itself into the transport of commodities. The transport industry forms on the one hand an independent branch of production and thus a separate sphere of investment of productive capital. On the other hand its distinguishing feature is that it appears as a continuation of a process of production within the process of circulation and for the process of circulation.
<Karl Marx 1885, Capital Volume II, Chapter 6: The Costs of Circulation, III. Costs of Transportationhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch06.htm#3
<However, what the transportation industry sells is change of location. The useful effect is inseparably connected with the process of transportation, i.e., the productive process of the transport industry. Men and goods travel together with the means of transportation, and their traveling, this locomotion, constitutes the process of production effected by these means. The useful effect can be consumed only during this process of production. It does not exist as a utility different from this process, a use-thing which does not function as an article of commerce, does not circulate as a commodity, until after it has been produced. But the exchange-value of this useful effect is determined, like that of any other commodity, by the value of the elements of production (labour-power and means of production) consumed in it plus the surplus-value created by the surplus-labour of the labourers employed in transportation. This useful effect also entertains the very same relations to consumption that other commodities do. If it is consumed individually its value disappears during its consumption; if it is consumed productively so as to constitute by itself a stage in the production of the commodities being transported, its value is transferred as an additional value to the commodity itself. The formula for the transport industry would therefore be M — C<LMP … P — M', since it is the process of production itself that is paid for and consumed, not a product separate and distinct from it. Hence this formula has almost the same form as that of the production of precious metals, the only difference being that in this case M' represents the converted form of the useful effect created during the process of production, and not the bodily form of the gold or silver produced in this process and extruded from it.
<Karl Marx 1885, Capital Volume II, Part I: The Metamorphoses of Capital and their Circuits, Chapter 1: The Circuit of Money Capital, IV. The Circuit as a Wholehttps://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch01.htm#4You are forgetting what Marx wrote:
<Labour may be necessary without being productive. All general, communal conditions of production – so long as their production cannot yet be accomplished by capital as such and under its conditions – are therefore paid for out of a part of the country’s revenue – out of the government’s treasury – and the workers do not appear as productive workers, even though they increase the productive force of capital.
<Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, Grundrisse: Notebook V – The Chapter on Capitalhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch10.htmUnproductive labor, devoted to meeting human needs and which is necessary for the reproduction of labor, would expand with the development of communism, for instance the employment of teachers and doctors. But nowhere is the necessity or intrinsic usefulness of the labor confused with productive labor.
Let us see that many of the so-called unproductive workers in the capitalist system continued to exist in the socialist economy:
<Let us take, first of all, the words "proceeds of labor" in the sense of the product of labor; then the co-operative proceeds of labor are the total social product.
<From this must now be deducted: First, cover for replacement of the means of production used up. Second, additional portion for expansion of production. Third, reserve or insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc.
<These deductions from the "undiminished" proceeds of labor are an economic necessity, and their magnitude is to be determined according to available means and forces, and partly by computation of probabilities, but they are in no way calculable by equity.
<There remains the other part of the total product, intended to serve as means of consumption.
<Before this is divided among the individuals, there has to be deducted again, from it: First, the general costs of administration not belonging to production. This part will, from the outset, be very considerably restricted in comparison with present-day society, and it diminishes in proportion as the new society develops. Second, that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc. From the outset, this part grows considerably in comparison with present-day society, and it grows in proportion as the new society develops. Third, funds for those unable to work, etc., in short, for what is included under so-called official poor relief today.
<Karl Marx, 1875, Critique of the Gotha Programmehttps://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm >>2881303>The only difference between first and third world workers is that first world workers have more class counsciousness and refuse to be exploited by the capitalist class to the same degree as thirdiesThis seems unfair. There are many instances of the working class in the third world organizing revolutions or at the very least electing social-democratic reformists or national-liberation figures only for their movements to be sabotaged by coups, invasions, embargoes, sanctions, loan sharking, asset-freezing, etc. You should read Killing Hope by William Blum. Please respond thoughtfully if you respond at all.
If being born a first world worker means I'm ontologically evil and need killing, then what's the solution?
Do Turd Worldists want me to just kill myself because I happened to be born in Europe? Or should I sell everything I own and move to a corrugated metal shack in the 3rd world?
Or maybe they want me to just be a NEET? Am I no longer a "worker" then?
Honestly you cannot win with these clowns, they are politically illiterate, living in a total fantasy world. Do not waste time on 3rd wordlists.
Marx said it clearly enough when he said workers of the WORLD unite. Anyone trying to debate this, make it an argument is just trying to sow division for its own sake and should be booted from left wing spaces.
>>2882632You're being trolled by a few bored, angry suburbanite yankees
larping as "ThirdWorldists" since a politics more serious than economistic social-reformism deeply unsettles them.
>21-1
are the TWists all AI chatbots that haven't figured out how to use a poll?
>>2882632It’s a call for you to do islamist style adventurism, suicide by cop
>>2882637that certainly has been the hypothesis for several months since they
- spam the same text
- get banned quickly but keep coming back with new IP addresses, seemingly having infinite money for VPNs
- only seem to respond to text, never images, polls, or anything else
- barely even respond to the text, mostly strawman, or misinterpret it, changing the subject, etc.
- pathologically have bad faith interpretations of everything so that it doesn't matter how you respond it's always proof of what they thought.
- will shit on people who even agree with them if they don't have the right tone
>>2883272oh, one more thing, if you reply to them in a thread without bumping it back to the top, they find it right away, even though this site does not really have a robust notifications system or accounts, indicating that they instantly know when you have replied using software that extends the ordinary capabilities of the imageboard.
>>2883272>>2883275Another explanation is they're terminally online with open tabs for the various megathreads and cyclicals.
The bad faith interpretations makes sense when you realize they tribalist identitarians so if you're critiquing their favorite multipolarista of the month, you're attacking
them. And they need to "defend" themselves by accusing you of being a zionist NAFO pedophile fed.
>>2883274Honestly whenever these tards run their mouth just post this image and give no further replies.
>>2880886It's 2 and anyone who says otherwise is a giga LARPer
>>2883274tbh i feel like the people who would say top either stopped using the board or changed their mind. i used to sort of see the idea of first world workers being incentivized against ending imperialism but now i just think all proles are just here for the ride and inter-capitalist realpolitik has largely supplanted class struggle
>>2880893The bottom 50% in America have less than half the wealth of the bottom 50% of China.
>>2883749I agree with your point but to be fair the bottom %50 of China is 700 million people (since China's total pop is 1.4 billion) while the bottom %50 in the USA is 170 million people (since USA's total pop is 340 million). So a more sensible metric would be per capita income of the bottom 50% rather than total wealth of the bottom 50%.
This
>>2883728 post exemplifies why I wrote
>>2881098>>2883753It's been 340 million for like 30 years wtf
>>2880886First worlders in general are not evil, only people from settler states are really evil. But regardless imperialism is not the only reason why first world countries are not M-L states. The establishment of what we would call communist states mostly relied on the contradictions that were generated from a collapsing feudalism and an emerging capitalism along with an anger against colonialist exploitation in non-western countries. All across the world as is current, capitalism has won and there is no more contradictions that can be exploited and turned towards political revolutionary purposes. The countries that had the chance for M-L political control already have it, had it, or missed the bus due to intervening factors (like imperialism). But unfortunatley the imageboard format hates nuance so to get your point across it's easier to spew fire at the people you hate (Which I engage in a fair share of myself). The train for communism is thankfully starting to arrive I think with the arrival of AI, but it still will probably be a long way out.
>>2883728>tbh i feel like the people who would say top either stopped using the board or changed their mind.They probably went back to Reddit or went to Lemmygrad or Hexbear when they found out that you won't get banned because you don't believe in national essences or whatever.
>>2883274So all the 3rd Worldist bs that gets posted here is just one guy?
>>2883759no it hasn't… US population in 1996 was 270 million
>>2883718We should do these more often lol
>>2883790Yes, it's all Iron FEDlix.
>>2881303Truke of the highest caliber
Still using cold war terms is so cringe
>>2883908we're gonna VOTE VOTE VOTE
it's our moment
you know together we're voting
gonna be gonna be voting
WOAH OH OH
>>2883919people use it interchangeably to refer to the level of development of a country, and to its "NATO vs. BRICS" (cold war 2) alignment.
>>2884052
do the toilets in NATO countries magically clean themselves?
Treatlerism makes the first-world proletariat cattle. They will never meaningfully ally with the third-world because they benefit from surplus value extraction from the periphery states.
>>2895392>muh israel>a literal casus belli printer for US to wage war in the Middle Eastok /pol/
>>2895343>he voted in an online poll>he treats the results on an online poll seriously Anyone who thinks countries are hiveminds has had their brain replaced with a Twitter feed
>>2895432>/pol/ is when you want all forms of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, supremacism, defeated, including zionism and American imperialism>fuck the poll resultswere you the one person who thought that the bourgeoisie and proletariat should team up with each other as long as they live in the same "world"?
sorry buddy, workers of ALL countries unite. there is one planet, not three worlds, and there is limited time. That means revolutionary defeatism in the imperial core is a necessity, and that means agitating the workers of the imperial core that they are on a sinking ship and that the "treats" to the extent that they even exist are a distraction from that.
>>2895443see
>>2895437, post AND pic BUDDY
seriously explain how the imperial core proletariat "benefits" in anything but the extremely short term from having their own life torn apart, privatized, deregulated, etc. to fund the genocidal war machine that makes the rest of the world hate them as accomplices of the bourgeoisie through the sanctions, embargoes, coups, and invasions? This is a system that dehumanizes and murders the poorest workers of the world, and then takes less poor workers of the imperial core and makes them complicit in that by "pinning the tail on the donkey" so to speak. How does a person benefit from being made into a complicit accomplice in crimes committed in their name, while they are getting rugpulled to fund those crimes. There is only the short term negative "benefit" of "you weren't the one literally killed and robbed by the war machine, they were just killed in your name and now millions hunger for revenge against you and lump you in with your pedophile warlord ruling class"
what "benefit" is that. everyone should realize from now that this "benefit" is having a target painted on your back by your ruling class, being made complicit through passivity. This must be resisted actively. These bourgeoisie are a minority in every country but they use the majority in every country as a shield in both wartime and peace, and part of that is roping everyone into their crimes, creating systems of interclass hypernationalism that generate complicity and passiveness so that complicity and passiveness can become every bit as guilt-producing as active participation. The guy who works at wal mart and pays taxes to his genocidal government becomes "Just as responsible" for the war crimes as the bloodthirsty guy who believes everything the news says and signs up to kill third worlders directly. How does a person "benefit" from being brainwashed to hate their own class, kill fellow workers, and become a collaborator while having the rug pulled out from under them? Why should I see it as a "benefit" that they defund the schools and hospitals "over here" to bomb the schools and hospitals "over there" ? first they came for the third worlders…
>>2895443
>the electronics, apparel, food, raw materials, and more—are almost all extracted from the Global South’s proletariat
First, that's not how the Marxist concept of exploitation works. Commodities are not "extracted", surplus value is. What you're essentially trying to argue here is that it's exploitation to import things.
>It’s why nearly all Westoid leftism devolves into socdem nonsense.
That's also true in the third world.
>>2895463
>bribed
<looks inside
>has the entire life rugpulled from under them to fund more genocide in their name. while food and actual necessities get more expensive, make millions grow up hating them in exchange for nothing
>>2895463
>prolecattle
Tired of calling people 'goy' huh polcuck
>>2895463
>Before your truncated quote mine, I clearly said:
<The surplus value that flows to the Western bourgeoise
And how does surplus value going to the Western bourgeoisie help the Western proletariat?
>Not as prevalent as it is in the West
Yes it is, this isn't the 1960s. There hasn't been a revolution in the third world in about 40 years. Labour aristocratic tendencies have already begun to manifest in some third world communist parties, the majority of them simply engage in electoralism, armed revolutionary movements have been in steady decline. There is simply no evidence of significantly greater revolutionary potential in the third world today.
>>2895488>Because it allows the Western bourgeoise to supply cheaper goods, higher nominal wages, welfare state funding, and retirement fundsThose things are a result of higher levels of productivity, in turn stemming from more developed productive forces. China has proven that imperialism isn't necessary to achieve that level of industrial and infrastructure development. They've also been severely clawed back and continue to be eroded, since even the briefest look at the history of those concessions will show that they weren't freely given but fought for with decades of struggle and bloodshed. Meanwhile it's been empirically proven that without capitalism, the entire world could enjoy first world living standards on the level of Denmark with a fraction of current economic output.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493>There has ‘t been a revolution in the United States in all of its history.Wild way to move the goalposts. That applies to plenty of third world countries too.
>>2895488
>Because it allows the Western bourgeoise to supply cheaper goods, higher nominal wages, welfare state funding, and retirement funds (owning equities and bonds in the very same institutions extracting surplus value).
I though this was a materialist board
>>2895492Labor aristocracy = not materialist
Moralfagging about muh Epstein class = materialist
>>2895504assuming sarcasm, you are the first person in this entire thread to utter the words "epstein class"
>>2895510It’s the general sentiment I get from garbage posts like these:
>>2895437 >>2895512
>workers of all countries unite, there is one planet, not three worlds and there is limited time. That means revolutionary defeatism in the imperial core is a necessityhow did you get "epstein class" out of that post? honestly.
>>2895519
Doesn't this kind of trolling get tiresome?
Third worlders are never happy and very ungrateful, if we make so many treats with looms and machines and stuff and we export to them it's bad because "it's destroying our industry" "stop transferring our capital to you" blah blah blah. So then we bleeding heart westerners ship all the industry over there and have them do that work but it's also bad somehow? They just don't like hard work
>>2895489>China has proven that imperialism isn't necessary to achieve that level of industrial and infrastructure development.First of all, China is absolutely imperialist. China has basically been lockstep with American imperialism since the Sino–Soviet split. China’s rise is America’s making; just because the US is now shitting its pants over yet ANOTHER "enemy" it has created is irrelevant.
Second, China’s industrial development (disproportionately concentrated along China’s eastern coast) has largely been based on the unequal exchange of surplus value extracted from China’s poor western and inner provinces.
>>2895503>then without unequal exchange, the real wages for Western workers would drop massively because the goods Westoids rely on would cost much moreHave you actually read the theory behind equal exchange? It explicitly says that Western workers don't benefit from it in any way. That unequal exchange is also itself a byproduct of higher productivity and more developed productive forces in the West.
<The point is that the transfer to the North takes place because of the imperialist countries’ superior technology and labour productivity. That enables them to sell their goods in world markets at costs below the international average. The Southern capitalists try to compensate for their lower technical level and productivity by driving the wages of their workers down. So the higher rate of exploitation in the South, whether by super-exploitation or not, is a reaction to the failure to compete against the North.<shows that the economics of imperialism works through the transfer of value by the exploitation of the workers of the South by the capitalists of the South and then through the transfer of some of that surplus value appropriated to the capitalists of the North in international markets and internal global value chains. The workers of the North do not benefit in any way from this imperialist transfer.<To suggest, as some do, that the welfare state, pensions and national health services in the North were only possible because of the imperialist exploitation of the South is economic nonsense. After all, the great period of imperialist exploitation was in the neo-liberal period of globalization since the 1980s, when the welfare and wage gains of workers in the North were taken back. Globalisation of the late 20th century was a response to falling rates of profit in the North (as it was in the late 19th century). It is also a political insult against the class struggles made by Northern workers to achieve those gains in the first place. Both the workers of the South and the North are exploited by capital. It is capital that is the enemy of both.https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2019/11/14/hm2-the-economics-of-modern-imperialism/It's also nonsense to suppose that decent living standards in the third world would cause costs to spike in the West. That would only remain true if both remained capitalist, but if they were to both become socialist then all the profits accumulated by the third world bourgeoisie would instead accrue to the third world workers, allowing a huge increase in their income and living standards without prices going up.
>>2895615>unequal exchange of surplus value extracted from China’s poor western and inner provincesWhat would equal exchange look like in this case?
>>2895615>First of all, China is absolutely imperialistNo it's not
>Second, China’s industrial development (disproportionately concentrated along China’s eastern coast) has largely been based on the unequal exchange of surplus value extracted from China’s poor western and inner provinces.No they haven't, those are just the most populated areas of China, where development took place first. It is actively being spread through the more rural areas as well
>>2895650Nazi Germany was bad because it was anti-Soviet, not because it was "imperialist".
>>2895757>anti-Sovietsome goes for the PRC
>>2895764>anti-SovietSame goes for the Soviets themselves. They denigrated their own history, destroyed their own party, and collapsed their own country.
>>2895757yeah man, leibesraum was totally cool when it was just france and poland
>>2895535treatlers vs. twisters is fake kayfabe and both "sides" are the same handful of trolls
>>2895619>Have you even read THEORY?!?>cites random person’s blogThe West will NEVER turn socialist so long as Western prolecattle continue to benefit from the bourgeoisie’s unequal exchange of surplus value from the Global South. Anti-imperialism must be the forefront issue. Until the Western proletariat no longer indirectly benefits from the unequal exchange with the Global South, they will forever lack any material incentive to revolt. This is why Western leftism ALWAYS devolves into socdem posturing and why nearly all successful workers’ revolutions have occurred outside of the Western world. You can continue to hand wave these indisputable facts, but that’s just because you’re a Westoid social democrat at heart.
>It's also nonsense to suppose that decent living standards in the third world would cause costs to spike in the West. That would only remain true if both remained capitalistIf the Global South became socialist then the Global North would finally bear the contradictions of capitalism that the West has passed on to the rest of the world. This is why the Global North viciously wreaks havoc in Third World countries that experience even a hint of revolutionary sentiment, whereas Western leftism is usually co-opted.
>>2896000>cites random person’s blogHe's not a random person, he's a Marxist economist and one of the leading theorists of unequal exchange.
>Western prolecattle continue to benefit from the bourgeoisie’s unequal exchange of surplus value from the Global South.You still haven't demonstrated this.
>why nearly all successful workers’ revolutions have occurred outside of the Western worldStrictly speaking the only successful worker's revolution in history was in Russia, an imperialist country. The rest were led by peasants, and its a moot point since both worker and communist peasant movements in the third world are already devolving in the exact same way Western ones did.
>If the Global South became socialist then the Global North would finally bear the contradictions of capitalismThat's sidestepping my point. If the world became socialist then workers everywhere could enjoy higher standards of living and more security than they currently do. Therefore they all have an interest in defeating capitalism and imperialism.
>graphsThose don't support your position btw. They show that the Global South contributes far more hours to total world production compared to the North. It doesn't say anything about actual output however, which needs to be considered since productivity in the North is vastly higher. This in fact is the actual basis of unequal exchange.
>>2896000>you benefit from having your education defunded, your health care defunded, so the military budget can triple, so the government can bomb third world workers, and give money to lobbyists, those third world workers can grow up hating you, this benefits you, you are cattle and will never revolt btwwe are gonna kill you, porky
>>2896013>Russia, an imperialist country. make sure you cite Lenin actually calling Russia imperialist or he will play dumb
>>2896000>This is why Western leftism ALWAYS devolves into socdem posturing and why nearly all successful workers’ revolutions have occurred outside of the Western world.Successful revolutions also haven't occurred in the global south in the last forty years. Leftist movements in the global south also devolve into "socdem posturing", fascism, and colour revolutions.
>This is why the Global North viciously wreaks havoc in Third World countries that experience even a hint of revolutionary sentiment, whereas Western leftism is usually co-opted.Not true in the last fourty years. Most revolutions in the global south are co-opted by social media just like in the global north.
>>2880893This. Anyone who looks at shit holes like Appalachia, US ghettos or Native American rezes and thinks all Americans have it better than 3rd world elites are burying their heads in the sands of directionless anti-Americanism
>>2896017My Spidey senses tell me that this is an ultra/Maoist kind of third worldist not a Z kind of third worldist.
>>2896013>He's not a random person, he's a Marxist economist and one of the leading theorists of unequal exchange.Unequal exchange was developed by Arghiri Emmanuel in the 1960s.
>You still haven't demonstrated this.Northern wages are artificially inflated by the South’s underpayment.
>Those don't support your position btw. They show that the Global South contributes far more hours to total world production compared to the North. It doesn't say anything about actual output however, which needs to be considered since productivity in the North is vastly higher. This in fact is the actual basis of unequal exchange.No, the unequal exchange exists because the wage gap between the Global North and South is much higher than the productivity gap. Even in sectors where output between the North and South is the same (usually export industries), Southern wages are still much lower. Moreover, a lot of Southern labor is exclusive to the South (the North doesn't produce iPhones, coffee, bananas, etc), so there's no basis of comparison. Not going to bother replying to the rest because you just repeat yourself.
https://media.springernature.com/original/springer-static/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-024-49687-y/MediaObjects/41467_2024_49687_MOESM1_ESM.pdfhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49687-y<Unequal exchange is sometimes conceptualised as a transfer net of productivity differences. It is not straightforward to assess this empirically. Standard metrics of productivity measure output in terms of income or GDP per person employed, which are metrics of prices and do not reveal anything about physical output. Such metrics cannot be used for our purposes: they tell us that Southern wages and prices are lower than Northern wages and prices, but this is precisely what needs to be explained. Scholarship on unequal exchange holds that prices are an artefact of power imbalances (between labour and capital, suppliers and lead firms, periphery and core) and, therefore, cannot be taken as an accurate depiction of value. If Southern wages and prices are squeezed, Southern ’productivity’ will appear to deteriorate even if there is no change in the actual physical output. To properly assess productivity dynamics would require measuring physical output across comparable industries (see Supplementary Discussion 2 for further discussion).
<There are several reasons to believe that physical productivity differences cannot explain the large North–South wage gaps and unequal exchange we observe. First, in the case of export industries (rather than subsistence and non-traded sectors), most production in the South is performed with modern techniques, often with technologies provided by international capital. Workers in these industries have been found to produce as much or more physical output per hour than their Northern counterparts20,29. Southern production is also characterised by greater labour intensity, as workers are subject to rigid systems of control designed to maximise output to an extent that would fall foul of labour regulations in the core. Second, in cases where Southern export industries do operate with less efficient technologies, productivity differences only account for a small share of the North–South wage gap and the net appropriation of labour time. The key fact is that Northern firms choose to use Southern labour not only because wages are cheaper per hour, but because wages are cheaper per unit of physical output13. Offshoring occurs precisely because the North–South wage difference is greater than any physical productivity difference. Third, physical productivities can only meaningfully be compared for identical tasks and products. For many industries and product categories, Southern production has no counterpoint in the North, because it cannot or does not occur there (such as in the case of coffee, coltan, smartphones, fast fashion, etc.). In such cases, productivities cannot be compared and cannot explain wage inequalities and unequal exchange. Further analysis is available in Supplementary Discussion 2.
<It is important to note that, in cases where physical productivity differences do exist, this is often because it is more profitable for capital to use cheaper, more labour-intensive methods than to invest in modern equipment—especially in cases where state investment in technological development has been curtailed by structural adjustment programmes, or where patents prevent affordable access to necessary technologies—precisely because Southern wages are maintained at artificially low levels. This arrangement benefits Northern consumers with cheaper goods and benefits Northern capital with an increased surplus. In such cases, the use of labour-intensive methods facilitates value transfer and should be understood as constituting unequal exchange. Under these conditions, the South is compelled to allocate more labour to production for international trade than would be required if technology was deployed more rationally and fairly, thus draining—and wasting—a crucial productive capacity that could otherwise be allocated toward producing goods and services necessary for local well-being and development (see Supplementary Discussion 2).>>2896015https://news.gallup.com/poll/694835/image-capitalism-slips.aspx<This year’s survey asked Americans to evaluate free enterprise, big business and small business in addition to capitalism and socialism. Americans are overwhelmingly positive toward small business (95%) and free enterprise (81%), as they have consistently been. They are far more negative toward big business, with 37% rating it positively and 62% negatively.
<Perceptions of big business have tumbled in recent years, including a nine-point decline this year on top of a six-point drop in 2021. In 2019, a slim majority of 52% of Americans still had positive views of big business. The high point was 58% in 2012.>>2896628See pic related.
>>2896871>the North doesn't produce iPhoneswrong
>coffee, bananasso two crops that won't grow in the north? A lot more of the labor is exclusive to the north as it concentrates the highly specialized stuff such as you can see in picrel
>>2896871>Unequal exchange was developed by Arghiri Emmanuel in the 1960s.Okay, Micheal Hudson is still one of the leading contemporary theorists.
>Northern wages are artificially inflated by the South’s underpayment.Wages are determined by the cost of reproducing labour power. If wages are higher in the North it's because the cost of keeping workers alive and working is much higher. Even a subsistence wage in a Western country would be many times greater than in most of the rest of the world.
>Moreover, a lot of Southern labor is exclusive to the South (the North doesn't produce iPhones, coffee, bananas, etc)That cuts both ways since the South lacks other industries like chip manufacturing, aerospace, etc. Much of the Global South in fact has no heavy industry at all.
>Not going to bother replying to the rest because you just repeat yourself.You're not bothering to reply because what I've said undermines your entire argument. Even if there was some kind of direct value transfer from Southern to Northern workers, this could only be described as a benefit if it outweighs the losses of having to live under a capitalist system. If socialism offers greater benefits than the status quo to both northern and southern workers (which it does), then they both have aligned interests in overthrowing capitalism and imperialism. The central premise of third worldism is therefore false.
<First, in the case of export industries (rather than subsistence and non-traded sectors)This seems like a massive oversight given the extent Global South countries rely on those types of industries. But it's worth noting that the passage you posted doesn't actually explain how unequal exchange works, it just criticizes the theory that it's a function of differences in productivity. So you still haven't demonstrated that there is any kind of direct value transfer going on here. The closest example of this would be depressed prices on third world imports, but I already addressed this by pointing out how socialist ownership in the third world could vastly improve the conditions of workers there without causing a rise in prices. Meanwhile socialist ownership in the first world would raise incomes further and help offset any increases that did happen. I know you cling desperately to the bourgeois notion that it's impossible for all the working people of the world to live in prosperity and without exploitation, but us communists know that this simply isn't true.
>>2880959"Produce no value" doesn't mean "not a worker." Value-producing labor in Marx's theory simply refers to the economic arrangement and whether the capitalist class is able to extract surplus from the worker, the way they are involved in production. It has less than nothing to do with whether the thing they are doing is useful to society or whether they have revolutionary potential. It certainly doesn't make them "parasites."
>>2896898>asserting a framework of struggle and therefore are helping to materialize that version in reality.How does that happen ?
>>2896903By frustrating class consciousness and international solidarity. Notice how they (you) always target first worlders with this ideology, doomsaying that reovlution and even solidarity are not possible, rather than going to third worlders as the purported revolutionary force with assistance of any kind. The point of this is to sow discord and black and white us vs them thinking about organizing potential, to demoralize and confuse people who are becoming radicalized but not yet educated.
>>2896890It's also just wrong. Marx explicitly argues that service workers, entertainers, and others are productive labourers and can produce surplus value.
Just as a fun thought experiment, I decided to try and get a sense of how prosperous Western countries would be if it weren't for the figures of unequal exchange given by Jason Hickel. He argues that the equivalent €16.9 trillion ($19.75 trillion US) have been appropriated from the south to the north between 1995-2021. Let's calculate how much poorer the average westoid would be without that appropriation.
I took a grab bag of rich Western countries (the EU, US, Canada, Australia, and Japan). They have a combined GDP of $60.57 trillion as of 2025. The average (mean) GDP/capita was $58,740.
That $19.75 trillion accounts for about 32.6% of the combined GDP of those countries, so with it gone they would retain 67.4% of their current figure.
58,740x 0.674 = 39,590.76
This would mean that without the unequal exchange as calculated for that period by Jason Hickel, the average Western country would have a GDP/capita comparable to the current figure for countries like Czechia, Saudi Arabia, or Taiwan. Keep in mind that this didn't include some other prosperous first world countries like Norway, New Zealand, Israel, or South Korea, so that number would actually be slightly higher.
At any rate it doesn't seem to support the notion that Westoids would be substantially poorer in practice even under a capitalist paradigm. The Czech Republic is hardly an impoverished dump or anything like that. Under a socialist economy even this reduced figure would probably make the average worker much better off than they currently are.
>>2896885<while the design is American, the manufacturing is handled by TSMC in TaiwanRetard.
>A lot more of the labor is exclusive to the northNot true. See pic related.
>>2896887>Wages are determined by the cost of reproducing labour power. If wages are higher in the North it's because the cost of keeping workers alive and working is much higher. Even a subsistence wage in a Western country would be many times greater than in most of the rest of the world.Again, you're just repeating yourself. The wage gap between the two is much higher than the cost of living. There is data on this, so it's not up for debate. Capital exploits the global gap between wages and the value produced, not just the difference in subsistence. Besides, even Marx acknowledged the value of labor power contained a historical and moral element.
>That cuts both ways since the South lacks other industries like chip manufacturing, aerospace, etc. Much of the Global South in fact has no heavy industry at all. Because the Global North monopolizes those industries, while forcing the South into labor-intensive, resource-extractive sectors. The Global South has equal (sometimes even higher) output when it has access to advanced Western automation, yet the wage gap remains. Again, this was already explained to you.
>If socialism offers greater benefits than the status quo to both northern and southern workers (which it does), then they both have aligned interests in overthrowing capitalism and imperialism.In the abstract, sure, but this is just idealist nonsense. Northern workers benefit from capitalism more than Southern workers, therefore the Northern proletariat are more materially incentivized to be in line with their bourgeoisie (and they typically are, unless you want to ignore the last 100 years).
>But it's worth noting that the passage you posted doesn't actually explain how unequal exchange works, it just criticizes the theory that it's a function of differences in productivity. So you still haven't demonstrated that there is any kind of direct value transfer going on here.Then you have no reading comprehension. IDK what else to tell you. The Global South exports significantly more labor time than it receives in the value of its imports. That's the unequal transfer. For example, if South puts in 10 hours of labor to produce a commodity, receives a price equivalent to 1 hour of Northern wages, and uses that to buy imports equivalent to 2 hours of Northern labor, then that is a net transfer of 8 hours of value.
>socialist ownership in the third world could vastly improve the conditions of workers there without causing a rise in pricesEconomically illiterate. If a government doubles wages for workers without a corresponding increase in physical output (Southern productivity is already maxed out by the North's monopolies on technology, finance, and high-value supply chains), the cost of production rises. If the Northern bourgeoisie doesn't absorb that cost (they won't if it's an inelastic good), prices in the North will rise.
>I know you cling desperately to the bourgeois notion that it's impossible for all the working people of the world to live in prosperity and without exploitation, but us communists know that this simply isn't true.Never argued this btw. Good strawman though.
>>2896945>He argues that the equivalent €16.9 trillion ($19.75 trillion US) have been appropriated from the south to the north between 1995-2021.That's the number for 2021 alone, not 1995–2021. For 1995–2021, it's €310 trillion. You've basically calculated that for a single year the Global North (of the countries you selected) net-appropriated labor worth around 33% of their combined annual GDP.
>That $19.75 trillion accounts for about 32.6% of the combined GDP of those countries, so with it gone they would retain 67.4% of their current figure.That's still a major drop, and that's only in A SINGLE YEAR. For reference, the United States' GDP fell about 30% during the Great Depression over the course of FOUR years, between 1929 and 1933. A 30% GDP contraction in a single year would be biggest economic disaster in human history lol. Or are you going to also argue that Americans didn't get poorer during the Great Depression?
Besides, that €16.9 trillion digit is the wage value of the labor (what Northern workers would be paid). You can't compare it to GDP 1:1 since capital depreciation, profits, and taxes would also change if those jobs flowed back to the North. That's not the point of the study. If you would actually read, you'd see the North's current aggregate consumption is propped up by effectively doubling the labor available to it (net-appropriated labor comprises 46% of the North's total consumption of labor). Removing that support would trigger a massive supply-side shock in the North.
>At any rate it doesn't seem to support the notion that Westoids would be substantially poorer in practice even under a capitalist paradigm.Send an email to the authors and explain why they're wrong then.
<Given this dynamic, it is clear that the North’s development model cannot be universalised, as it relies on appropriation from elsewhere. Furthermore, it is unlikely that the North’s current levels of aggregate consumption could be maintained under fair trade conditions. To maintain current consumption, Northern populations would need to substantially increase their working hours (while also committing substantially more domestic land, materials and energy to production), which would be socially and politically difficult to achieve. >>2896965>Because the Global North monopolizes those industries, while forcing the South into labor-intensive, resource-extractive sectorsSo? Nobody said that the North doesn't exploit the South. The question is the mechanism of how this operates, and who benefits and how.
>The Global South has equal (sometimes even higher) output when it has access to advanced Western automationObviously, but much of the time it doesn't.
>Northern workers benefit from capitalism more than Southern workers, therefore the Northern proletariat are more materially incentivized to be in line with their bourgeoisie (and they typically are, unless you want to ignore the last 100 years).That statement only holds true if you ignore the last 40 years, where communist movements around the whole world have either died out or retreated into social democracy. Third worldism simply lacks the explanatory power to account for this phenomenon. It made some sense back in the 60s and 70s when there were actual socialist revolutions breaking out in the global south, but that's simply no longer the case. The entire premise based on the flawed assumption that poverty necessarily leads to revolt and sharper class antagonisms is simply false. "Benefitting more" is a meaningless abstraction. Do you think an American worker with $50,000 of medical debt, working minimum wage, getting his ass beat by ICE Gestapo, and being evicted because he can't pay rent cares that he's so much better off than a worker in Nigeria? This is literally the kind of nonsense bourgeois ideologists tell them so they wont revolt. This simply isn't how the human mind works. They perceive the conflicts and antagonisms that are in front of them and react accordingly. Are you honestly going to sit there and tell me that class conflict in the West isn't both extant and intensifying?
>If a government doubles wages for workers without a corresponding increase in physical output (Southern productivity is already maxed out by the North's monopolies on technology, finance, and high-value supply chains), the cost of production rises.It only rises if you want to maintain the same rate of surplus. If that surplus remains the same but is redistributed as wages, then the prices don't need to change.
>A 30% GDP contraction in a single year would be biggest economic disaster in human history lol. Or are you going to also argue that Americans didn't get poorer during the Great Depression?Of course they did, but once again this assuming a capitalist paradigm where losses are offset onto the working class. Even if the US GDP were cut in half, it would still put GDP per capita at around $45,000 which is comparable to Italy. This means that the US alone could offset the entire appropriation every year and still essentially be a first world country. Obviously it would be a huge shock if this happened all at once and the country remained capitalist, but a phased and gradual reduction through international cooperation combined with socialist redistribution would be manageable. In fact, given the obscene wealth inequality in America and the amount of resources wasted on total nonsense (frivolity, the MIC, etc) it may even be possible to actually increase quality of life for the average person even as the appropriation is abolished.
<Given this dynamic, it is clear that the North’s development model cannot be universalised, as it relies on appropriation from elsewhere. Again, this is obvious. No socialist seriously thinks that first world living standards can be made universal under capitalism. The question is whether they can be made universal under socialism, and whether this is a sufficient basis to build a working class movement upon.
>>2896971Related to this, both Japan and the Czech Republic have GDP/capita below $45k, but higher IHDI scores than the US. This means its at least theoretically possible for the US to offset 100% of this appropriation by itself while still improving the quality of life for the average person. Third wordinsts simply don't account for the obscene amount of wealth hoarded by the Western ruling class.
>>2896971>Obviously, but much of the time it doesn't.The point is that productivity isn't the sole reason for the wage discrepancy between the North and South.
>That statement only holds true if you ignore the last 40 years, where communist movements around the whole world have either died out or retreated into social democracy.I don't disagree that revolutionary sentiment in the Global South has been set back (I never claimed it hasn't). The two positions I hold on this issue don't contradict.
>Third worldism simply lacks the explanatory power to account for this phenomenon. It made some sense back in the 60s and 70s when there were actual socialist revolutions breaking out in the global south, but that's simply no longer the case.The collapse of the USSR, the main vehicle for communist movements in the Global South, tipped the balance of power in favor of the West. The US and its allies are thus more freely able meddle in the Global South, crushing, pacifying, and co-opting almost anything that stands in its way with impunity. For the rest, it opened its markets and let their own corrupt bourgeoisies act as junior partners in imperialism. There are also other factors, such as dividing the Southern working class via mass migration to the West, color revolutions, etc. Can it do this forever? Probably not, but the future looks pretty bleak.
>Do you think an American worker with $50,000 of medical debt, working minimum wage, getting his ass beat by ICE Gestapo, and being evicted because he can't pay rent cares that he's so much better off than a worker in Nigeria.Subconsciously, yes. Who would you rather be?
>Are you honestly going to sit there and tell me that class conflict in the West isn't both extant and intensifying?Class conflict structurally exists in the West, but politically it's largely channeled horizontally. This is because the aforementioned factors about unequal exchange, but also by constant horizontal conflict being sown by Western superstructures. This is an entirely separate discussion that I'd rather not get into right now.
>It only rises if you want to maintain the same rate of surplus. If that surplus remains the same but is redistributed as wages, then the prices don't need to change.That can only happen if the Global South government is willing to clash with the expropriating Global North. Otherwise the surplus stays under Northern control, and any wage increase will be met with imperial retaliation, or else capital will pass the cost onto Northern consumers and raise the price if it has the market power to do so.
>Of course they did, but once again this assuming a capitalist paradigm where losses are offset onto the working class. Even if the US GDP were cut in half, it would still put GDP per capita at around $45,000 which is comparable to Italy. This means that the US alone could offset the entire appropriation every year and still essentially be a first world country. Obviously it would be a huge shock if this happened all at once and the country remained capitalist, but a phased and gradual reduction through international cooperation combined with socialist redistribution would be manageable. In fact, given the obscene wealth inequality in America and the amount of resources wasted on total nonsense (frivolity, the MIC, etc) it may even be possible to actually increase quality of life for the average person even as the appropriation is abolished.GDP tells you nothing about about class power. The US ruling class would never accept 50% reduction in GDP. It would instead intensify exploitation abroad and at home. To "abolish the appropriation" requires seizing control of the American state and global Western finance; you're essentially describing an idealist world revolution in cushy terms. For such a revolution to occur, the Northern working class faces a material choice: end expropriation of the Global South and thus accept a lower standard of living (in relative terms) to build global socialism, or defend their privileges and side with the bourgeoisie. Historically, they have almost always chosen the latter.
Either the Global North runs out of expropriated leverage and revolts, or the Global South revolts and makes the Northern bourgeoisie's exploitation untenable for the Northern proletariat. I'm not sure which will come first, if either ever comes at all, but the latter seems more likely if the US empire is truly in decline (and not substituted by another imperialist entity).
>>2896976>Japan and the Czech Republic have GDP/capita below $45k, but higher IHDI scores than the USJapan, Italy, and Czechia (via the EU and as arms of the American empire) both benefit from imperialist expropriation of the Global South, so this point is irrelevant. Having a lower GDP per capita than the US doesn't mean those countries don't benefit from unequal exchange.
>Third wordinsts simply don't account for the obscene amount of wealth hoarded by the Western ruling class.Another strawman. The fact that the ruling elite hoards most of the wealth doesn't mean core workers get nothing; it means the system can afford both massive hoarding and relative privilege for core workers to keep them docile.
>>2897008>It would instead intensify exploitation abroad and at home. This is how the Northern proletariat gets poorer if the South successfully revolts. The Northern bourgeoisie forces longer hours, lower wages, and less benefits.
>>2896885Anybody that thinks that sophisticated electronic devices like iPhones are anything like agricultural products like coffee or bananas is honestly a blithering idiot. You simply can't make an iPhone with slaves in a sweatshop. Also, since the late 2010s, iPhones and other smartphones have been assembled in completely automated "dark factories" with no human presence that make one iPhone every second. MTWs would know this if they read something other than Settlers.
>>2897008>I don't disagree that revolutionary sentiment in the Global South has been set back (I never claimed it hasn't). Alright, but you need to account for why that has happened, and why the Southern left seems to be manifesting tendencies which third worldism tells us should only be happening in the north. Mainly the emergence of labour aristocracy and associated revisionist tendencies. You need to account why the Southern left appears to be heading down the exact same path as that of the north. Based on current trends, the state of affairs that gave rise to third worldist thinking (i.e. a complacent, happy working class in the north and a restive revolutionary socialist one in the south) appears to have been an abberration rather than the normal situation of capitalist imperialism. The northern working class is increasingly discontented while that in the south is increasingly passive. The two have essentially begun to meet in the middle.
>Subconsciously, yes. Who would you rather be?This reasoning would leads us to conclude that anybody who isn't at the absolute bottom of the hierarchy of a given system "benefits" from it, and will never revolt so long as there are people worse off than them. Tell me, why doesn't this apply to workers within the global south? Don't people in Brazil know they're much better off than people in the Congo? Do they benefit from imperialism then? Does knowledge that people in the Congo are worse off prevent them from revolting? Why wouldn't the same principle apply? If we look at the actual politics of Brazil maybe we would have to conclude that it does since they currently have a Western style social democratic government and no serious communist movement.
>Class conflict structurally exists in the West, but politically it's largely channeled horizontally. Unless you reject the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, then you must agree that this can only ever be a temporary state of affairs. All capitalist societies must constantly and exponentially grow their profits, even as their ability to do so naturally shrinks. This is what causes them to turn to imperialism in the first place, but even this runs into the hard limits of a finite world. The inevitable result is that concessions are clawed back, and prosperous workers in rich countries are cannibalized. Colonialism turns inward and becomes fascism. Capitalism is simply structurally incapable of maintaining them indefinitely, and this is blatantly obvious with the way Western countries have been going since the 80s. They are going to reach the limits of what they can outsource (imo they already have), at which point class conflict is inevitable, we are already seeing it. Also, related to what I said earlier about the South manifesting similar tendencies, let's not sit here and pretent that redirecting class struggle horizontally isn't something that the Southern ruling classes have been doing successfully for decades. They constantly sow division according to nationality, faith, ethnicity, etc. in ways which have proven just as effective at neutralizing revolutionary sentiment.
>For such a revolution to occur, the Northern working class faces a material choice: end expropriation of the Global South and thus accept a lower standard of livingThis is why your argument is flawed. It's simply not true that they would need to accept a lower standard of living. As I said, the US alone could offset the entire difference without ceasing to be a first world country. As I said before, it's been calculated that in the absence of capitalist waste and inefficiency the entire world could achieve a similar HDI to Denmark with only 1/3 of current global GDP. Your argument only makes sense if you adopt the belief that its impossible to maintain globally high living standards, but this is actually a bourgeois notion meant to justify poverty.
>It would instead intensify exploitation abroad and at homeThe American ruling class has been intensifying exploitation at home for decades, even while its empire remained intact. Really makes on wonder what incentive American workers have to keep the current system when its already doing the thing you claim overthrowing it would do.
>Having a lower GDP per capita than the US doesn't mean those countries don't benefit from unequal exchangeI'm not saying they don't, I'm saying that even if the US alone were to bear the entire cost of abolishing expropriation, it would still be a first world country, and potentially capable of delivering better living standards that it currently does.
Ultimately my main issue with this whole area of thinking isn't pointing out that imperialism has a pacifying effect on workers in the first world. I think it pretty clearly does. However, I think it's massively overstated, incapable of accounting for similar tendencies in the third world, and does not account for the inherent inability of capitalism to maintain any stable compromise between labour and capital.
>>2897133>why the Southern left seems to be manifesting tendencies which third worldism tells us should only be happening in the north.No one said this.
>Mainly the emergence of labour aristocracy and associated revisionist tendencies.Southern labor aristocracies are compradors of Northern imperialism—subordinate and dependent on Western finance, debt, and markets. This doesn't disprove the North-South contradiction. Instead, it manifests the contradiction within the periphery itself. Those Southern states are not imperialist centers; they are semi-peripheral states managing subordinate capitalism on behalf of global, Western dominated capital.
>This reasoning would leads us to conclude that anybody who isn't at the absolute bottom of the hierarchy of a given system "benefits" from it, and will never revolt so long as there are people worse off than them. Tell me, why doesn't this apply to workers within the global south? Don't people in Brazil know they're much better off than people in the Congo? Do they benefit from imperialism then? Does knowledge that people in the Congo are worse off prevent them from revolting? Why wouldn't the same principle apply? If we look at the actual politics of Brazil maybe we would have to conclude that it does since they currently have a Western style social democratic government and no serious communist movement. Another strawman. Labor aristocracy is not defined by "someone worse off exists"; it is defined by a material share in imperialist superprofits extracted from the periphery. The Global South, for the most part, does not occupy this position. A poor American worker may not be rich, but his wage, housing, and consumption are subsidized by value transferred from the Global South. A Brazilian worker is better off than a Congolese worker, but Brazil is itself a semi-peripheral country subjected to unequal exchange, debt, and imperialist discipline. Brazil is still a net exporter of value to the core, even if other countries like the Congo are more exploited. Its workers thus do not occupy the same structural position as American workers, and its government is not maintained by a stable imperialist surplus in the same way the United States or European Union is.
The absence of strong workers' movements in the Global South today is not inherently evidence of the Global South's stable privilege. It is the product of the Global South's defeat in the aftermath of the USSR's stagnation and collapse. This was already explained to you.
>Unless you reject the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, then you must agree that this can only ever be a temporary state of affairs. All capitalist societies must constantly and exponentially grow their profits, even as their ability to do so naturally shrinks. This is what causes them to turn to imperialism in the first place, but even this runs into the hard limits of a finite world. The inevitable result is that concessions are clawed back, and prosperous workers in rich countries are cannibalized. Colonialism turns inward and becomes fascism. Capitalism is simply structurally incapable of maintaining them indefinitely, and this is blatantly obvious with the way Western countries have been going since the 80s. They are going to reach the limits of what they can outsource (imo they already have), at which point class conflict is inevitable, we are already seeing it. The crisis of the declining rate of profit does not in it of itself determine how that crisis manifests politically. Concessions in the North have indeed been clawed back (although I would push back on some of the more alarmist interpretations), and yet the Northern working class has not turned socialist. Instead, it has moved towards superstructurally-created false consciousness—reactionary ideology, right-wing populism, social democracy, etc. When Northern labor aristocracy privileges are threatened, its dominant response is a reactionary defense of those privileges, not solidarity with the Southern proletariat. You incorrectly assume that objective class conflict in the West must produce revolutionary class consciousness. It's idealist nonsense that ignores the last 100 years of Western history.
>Also, related to what I said earlier about the South manifesting similar tendencies, let's not sit here and pretent that redirecting class struggle horizontally isn't something that the Southern ruling classes have been doing successfully for decades. They constantly sow division according to nationality, faith, ethnicity, etc. in ways which have proven just as effective at neutralizing revolutionary sentiment. No one denies this, but it still does not disprove with the structural North-South contradiction. In the South, those divisions manage are leveraged to manage scarcity and maintain subordination; in the North, it's to police access to imperialist privilege. Same technique, different structural function. Besides, horizontal divisions are equal, if not more prevalent, in the Northern core. The Northern proletariat are much more fragmented by race, nationality, religion, sexuality, and status since their labor aristocracy is maintained through differential access to imperialist rents. The more the material basis of these privileges are squeezed, the more those divisions are weaponized by the bourgeoisie ("muh heckin ICE GESTAPO deporting the BLACK MEXICAN TRANS rights activists!!!!").
>This is why your argument is flawed. It's simply not true that they would need to accept a lower standard of living. As I said, the US alone could offset the entire difference without ceasing to be a first world country. As I said before, it's been calculated that in the absence of capitalist waste and inefficiency the entire world could achieve a similar HDI to Denmark with only 1/3 of current global GDP. Your argument only makes sense if you adopt the belief that its impossible to maintain globally high living standards, but this is actually a bourgeois notion meant to justify poverty.You're moving the goal posts. "GDP can fall by half and the US remains first-world" does not refute "US living standards will decline." Regardless, this whole appeal to GDP charade you've been doing is a massive red herring. You're treating GDP as if it represents human welfare; the US and Denmark can have the exact same GDP per capita, but the Danish can still materially live better lives. GDP does not measure living standards or material reproduction, so relying on it to claim the US would still be able to maintain the same standard of living is retarded. One of the study's core findings is that Northerners would have to substantially increase their working hours and drastically reduce their consumption if unequal exchange ended, an objective reduction in living standards regardless of any effect on GDP. The supply-side shock would be comparable to or worse than the Great Depression because the embodied labor currently extracted from the South would stop.
Moreover, even in a socialist planned economy, Northern material consumption would still have to fall, because current consumption is not merely inefficient—it cannot be universalized. Again, this is another core finding of the study that you've ignored. You can maintain a high HDI with less output, but that means fewer goods and services—less luxuries, smaller homes, less flying, etc. Thus, the transition to socialism would still require a rupture in which Northern workers would have to accept a loss of relative privilege.
>The American ruling class has been intensifying exploitation at home for decades, even while its empire remained intact. Really makes on wonder what incentive American workers have to keep the current system when its already doing the thing you claim overthrowing it would do.Again, you're confusing political motivation with material reproduction. Can American workers currently maintain their current material consumption if Southern labor stops being appropriated? American workers are still labor aristocrats in the form of high relative wages, cheap consumer goods, cheap inputs, cheap energy, and cheap credit. That benefit may be shrinking, but it still exists. A declining US living standard is still elevated by imperial rents. You still haven't shown how current American consumption can be maintained without that unequal exchange.
>I'm not saying they don't, I'm saying that even if the US alone were to bear the entire cost of abolishing expropriation, it would still be a first world country, and potentially capable of delivering better living standards that it currently does. Same argument, different words.
"Still be a first world country" is a relative geopolitical status, not a living standard. The US is part of the first world despite housing precarity, wage suppression, and debt. Being considered "first world" is perfectly compatible with declining working class living standards.
>However, I think it's massively overstated, incapable of accounting for similar tendencies in the third world, and does not account for the inherent inability of capitalism to maintain any stable compromise between labour and capital.If you think it's overstated, then you need your own evidence or email Hickel and explain to him why he's wrong. The data is pretty clear: ending unequal exchange would force Northerners to substantially increase working hours and drastically reduce their consumption. That's a material incentive for Northern workers to keep the South down. I actually account for those tendencies in the Global South quite well. Imperialism, especially after the collapse of the USSR, creates a privileged comprador class and labor aristocracies within the South as well. Those are compatible with, and parasitic on, the same global process of unequal exchange. They don’t cancel the net transfer of embodied labor to the North, nor does it cancel the material incentive for the Northern proletariat to maintain that net transfer.
Moreover, capital's inherent instability does not refute the Northern workers' material stake in upholding the imperial order; it means that stake is being attacked while the underlying dependency remains. The result is not a break from imperialism, but a squeeze with less cushion.
>>2897133> It's simply not true that they would need to accept a lower standard of living.I like how you said this but in the Ceuta thread you literally state that migration from the south to the north lowers wages in the north, there is an implicit antagonism there which you feverishly argue should remain, but then act stupid and like this antagonism is imaginary and doesn't exist and actually there's no reason why there shouldn't be solidarity between workers on the imperial core and workers on the periphery
>>2897687>Southern labor aristocracies are compradors of Northern imperialism—subordinate and dependent on Western finance, debt, and markets. This doesn't disprove the North-South contradiction. No, but it means that it is subordinate to class contradictions, and that northern workers are not really more aligned with their own bourgeoisie than southern workers. It proves that passivity and absorption of organized workers into the political orbit of the bourgeoisie isn't only explained by imperialism, but by other factors.
>A poor American worker may not be rich, but his wage, housing, and consumption are subsidized by value transferred from the Global South. A Brazilian worker is better off than a Congolese worker, but Brazil is itself a semi-peripheral country subjected to unequal exchange, debt, and imperialist discipline. Brazil is still a net exporter of value to the core, even if other countries like the Congo are more exploited. Its workers thus do not occupy the same structural position as American workersThis is an unconvincing distinction. The American worker may be better off than the Brazilian worker, but he is still exploited by his own ruling class. Brazil may be a net loser in this system while America is a net winner, but this only holds true if you treat nations as monoliths without class distinctions. Wealth that is appropriated to "America" is in reality appropriated to American capitalists. Because American workers are exploited they are themselves net losers as well. Clearly, whatever subsidies they get from the periphery must still be less than the surplus value they produce otherwise they would be a net loss for capital. An American worker's relationship with the Brazilian worker is similar to the relationship of the Brazilian to a Congolese worker. If your argument is that the higher rate of exploitation in the periphery allows for lower rates of exploitation in the core, then it also follows that an even higher rate of exploitation in the far periphery allows for relatively lower rates in the semi-periphery. If for example the countries of the far periphery were throw off imperialism, then to compensate exploitation in the semi-periphery would need to increase, and their living standards lowered. Therefore by the same reasoning workers in the semi-periphery can be called "beneficiaries" of imperialism through the exact same methods as those in the core. There's now a material incentive for Brazilian workers to keep Congoliese workers oppressed by imperialism.
>yet the Northern working class has not turned socialist. Instead, it has moved towards superstructurally-created false consciousness—reactionary ideology, right-wing populism, social democracy, etc. This is also true in the global south, meaning that imperialism can't be the cause.
>In the South, those divisions manage are leveraged to manage scarcity and maintain subordination; in the North, it's to police access to imperialist privilegeBoth of those functions are present in the north and south, and they aren't mutually exclusive. In America the distinction between Black and white is designed to control access to relative privilege via whiteness while keeping Black and white workers divided and easier to control by capital. In India Hindu workers are divided from Muslim workers in the exact same way. In Latin America the same divisions exist between Black and Mestizo, or Mestizo and Indigenous. This is a universal phenomenon.
>A declining US living standard is still elevated by imperial rents. You still haven't shown how current American consumption can be maintained without that unequal exchange.As it currently exists? In its woefully wasteful, frivolous, and inefficient form? It couldn't, nor should it. American workers could enjoy higher standards of living with greater security without unequal exchange because so much of their consumption is artificially inflated through deliberate waste, planned obsolescence, and means designed to move more product rather than actually satisfy needs. The capitalist nature of the US economy forces it to consume far more resources than is actually necessary to satisfy people's needs. This, combined with the obscene consumption of the American bourgeoisie is what you are not accounting for. This is also what I'm getting at with my argument about GDP. The fact that the US has a GDP/capita more than double that of countries like Japan but lower QoL outcomes proves how grossly inefficient their economy is. The US is an extreme example, but this is a universal feature of capitalist economies. Actually efficient economic planning and resource use in both the North and South would in practice radically increase the available resources to satisfy human needs. So your arguments would hold true if the world were to remain capitalist, but not necessarily if it were to become socialist.
>If you think it's overstated, then you need your own evidence or email Hickel and explain to him why he's wrongHickel's position is actually closer to mine. He co-authored the article I cited earlier, the one which said that the entire world could achieve the HDI of Denmark with only 1/3 of current economic output. He doesn't draw the same conclusions from his observations about unequal exchange that you are here. Here's the article again.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493>I actually account for those tendencies in the Global South quite well. Imperialism, especially after the collapse of the USSR, creates a privileged comprador class and labor aristocracies within the South as well. Those are compatible with, and parasitic on, the same global process of unequal exchange. I'm not saying that they negate unequal exchange, I'm saying that if these tendencies exist among southern workers then benefitting from unequal exchange can't be the only explanation. On the surface it makes sense to blame imperialism for why say, a British worker would support the Labour Party as it sends troops to Afghanistan or reaffirms its support for NATO. You say that it's because he has some awareness of his privileged position in the world hierarchy and understands that it needs to be defended. Alright, but then how do we explain similar behaviour among workers in the South? If an Indian worker supports the CPI even as it approves police funding to crush the Naxals, or backs the Indian occupation of Kashmir and the most recent war with Pakistan, what material incentive does he have to do this? If these tendencies have a cause other than imperialism, then it weighs against believing that the north-south contradiction supersedes the contradiction between labour and capital.
>>2897728>No, but it means that it is subordinate to class contradictions, and that northern workers are not really more aligned with their own bourgeoisie than southern workers. It proves that passivity and absorption of organized workers into the political orbit of the bourgeoisie isn't only explained by imperialism, but by other factors. So? Wages are subordinate to profit, but wages still shape worker behavior. The imperial stake is a real material determinant within class struggle, not a denial of it. You're conflating class structure with class consciousness. The argument doesn't require Northern workers to feel loyalty to US capital (although they typically are). The claim is that they are net beneficiaries of unequal exchange relative to Southern workers. If that weren't true, ending unequal exchange wouldn't force Northerners to substantially increase working hours and drastically reduce consumption. That asymmetry is the objective basis for Northern labor aristocracy effect, even where Northern workers remain hostile to their own bourgeoisie.
>This is an unconvincing distinction. The American worker may be better off than the Brazilian worker, but he is still exploited by his own ruling class. Brazil may be a net loser in this system while America is a net winner, but this only holds true if you treat nations as monoliths without class distinctions. Wealth that is appropriated to "America" is in reality appropriated to American capitalists. Because American workers are exploited they are themselves net losers as well. Clearly, whatever subsidies they get from the periphery must still be less than the surplus value they produce otherwise they would be a net loss for capital. An American worker's relationship with the Brazilian worker is similar to the relationship of the Brazilian to a Congolese worker. If your argument is that the higher rate of exploitation in the periphery allows for lower rates of exploitation in the core, then it also follows that an even higher rate of exploitation in the far periphery allows for relatively lower rates in the semi-periphery. If for example the countries of the far periphery were throw off imperialism, then to compensate exploitation in the semi-periphery would need to increase, and their living standards lowered. Therefore by the same reasoning workers in the semi-periphery can be called "beneficiaries" of imperialism through the exact same methods as those in the core. There's now a material incentive for Brazilian workers to keep Congoliese workers oppressed by imperialism. You're conflating two different relations. American capital exploits American workers, and American capitalism also extracts from the periphery. The American worker can be exploited in the first relation and still be a net beneficiary of the second. The question is then this: would the American worker be worse off if the United States lost its imperial position? The answer is usually yes, via lower wages, higher prices, less state spending, weaker bargaining power, etc. That doesn't require the American worker to receive more from American imperialism than the surplus value he produces. It only requires imperialism to improve his position relative to what it would otherwise be. A worker who produces $100 and gets $40 is still exploited, but he may still be better off than he would be producing $80 and getting $30 without empire. Thus, Northern workers occupy a structurally privileged position whose material basis is large enough to explain the dominant reformist/nationalist politics in the North's political movements.
Your Brazil-Congo example still doesn't disprove the North-South contradiction. All it proves is a multi-tiered imperial hierarchy. Semi-peripheral workers occupy a contradictory position: exploited by their own and Northern capital, while also having a material stake in the subordination of the far periphery. That doesn’t show the North-South contradiction is unreal; it shows it isn’t a simple binary. The stakes are much smaller and more mediated in the semi-periphery, but they can exist.
>This is also true in the global south, meaning that imperialism can't be the cause.Non sequitur. If false consciousness exists in both the core and periphery, that doesn't show imperialism isn't a cause. It shows the same global imperialist system can produce non-socialist consciousness across different class positions. The content and function differ even when the forms look similar.
>Both of those functions are present in the north and south, and they aren't mutually exclusive. In America the distinction between Black and white is designed to control access to relative privilege via whiteness while keeping Black and white workers divided and easier to control by capital. In India Hindu workers are divided from Muslim workers in the exact same way. In Latin America the same divisions exist between Black and Mestizo, or Mestizo and Indigenous. This is a universal phenomenon. Nobody denies racial, ethnic, or religious segmentation exists in both core and periphery, that's another strawman you've concocted. However, these divisions serve different material functions. American racial division rations access to the imperialist dividend that exists because of the US position in the world system. At its fundamental core, the post-slavery conflict between American blacks and whites is largely over how the unequal exchange expropriated from the periphery is distributed throughout the US core. However, in much of the Global South, these similar divisions exist primarily to manage access to scarcity, land, state resources, and survival inside economies that are themselves subordinated to imperial extraction. Formal similarity is not functional identity.
>American workers could enjoy higher standards of living with greater security without unequal exchange because so much of their consumption is artificially inflated through deliberate waste, planned obsolescence, and means designed to move more product rather than actually satisfy needs. The capitalist nature of the US economy forces it to consume far more resources than is actually necessary to satisfy people's needs. This, combined with the obscene consumption of the American bourgeoisie is what you are not accounting for.Eliminating these inefficiencies does not automatically replace the specific use-values the US currently imports from the South—textiles, electronics, rare earths, food, components, shipping inputs, etc. Hickel 2024 is unequivocally clear on this.
>Actually efficient economic planning and resource use in both the North and South would in practice radically increase the available resources to satisfy human needs. So your arguments would hold true if the world were to remain capitalist, but not necessarily if it were to become socialist. You're proving my point. An imperial cushion for the Northern proletariat exists, and removing it imposes a material cost. A hypothetical socialist end-state in the North does not eliminate that stake under actually existing conditions. It just says the cost could be managed under different property relations. Show the labor-time and use-value replacement, or you're just engaging in utopian idealism.
>Hickel's position is actually closer to mine. He co-authored the article I cited earlier, the one which said that the entire world could achieve the HDI of Denmark with only 1/3 of current economic output. He doesn't draw the same conclusions from his observations about unequal exchange that you are here. Here's the article again.You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Hickel literally wrote a book called "Less Is More," in which he argues Northern consumption is unsustainably high and must come down. You're also STILL ignoring one of Hickel 2024's core findings:
<Given this dynamic, it is clear that the North’s development model cannot be universalised, as it relies on appropriation from elsewhere. Furthermore, it is unlikely that the North’s current levels of aggregate consumption could be maintained under fair trade conditions. To maintain current consumption, Northern populations would need to substantially increase their working hours (while also committing substantially more domestic land, materials and energy to production), which would be socially and politically difficult to achieve.The point about HDI is also irrelevant since HDI does NOT measure material consumption (it measures things like life expectancy and health); so, even if the US had an HDI similar to Denmark, Americans will still have to own less, consume less, drive less, fly less, etc. That's a material privilege most Americans would prefer NOT to give up.
>Alright, but then how do we explain similar behaviour among workers in the South? If an Indian worker supports the CPI even as it approves police funding to crush the Naxals, or backs the Indian occupation of Kashmir and the most recent war with Pakistan, what material incentive does he have to do this? If these tendencies have a cause other than imperialism, then it weighs against believing that the north-south contradiction supersedes the contradiction between labour and capital.You're treating the fact that unequal exchange materially benefits Northern workers as if it implies that every instance of worker chauvinism everywhere must be caused by direct material benefit from unequal exchange. Those are not the same claim; it's a non-sequitur. Showing that Southern workers sometimes support reactionary policies without direct benefit from global unequal exchange does not show that Northern workers lack such a benefit. The labor aristocracy thesis does not say every reactionary worker everywhere is bought off by imperial rent. It says Northern workers occupy a structurally privileged position because a fraction of imperialist superprofits is shared with them. Showing that some Southern workers are chauvinist for other reasons does not refute that. India is a semi-peripheral regional power, and its workers can manifest a material stake in its sub-imperialism. The Indian example actually illustrates nested imperial hierarchy within the periphery. If anything, it is consistent with the North–South contradiction: worker politics are often mediated by their position within nested imperial hierarchies. Even if some Global South workers support reactionary politics for purely ideological reasons, that does not weaken the core claim. The labor aristocracy thesis only needs to prove that in the core there is a systematic material transfer that gives class collaboration an objective foundation. You have not shown that transfer is absent or politically irrelevant. You have simply mistaken a sub-imperialist state’s own labor aristocracy for an anomaly.
>>2897016>source: am yankee and fully aware of my role in the situation, but cannot kill myself.so would you say you have it good
>>2897016>1st world workers are fuckin' in on it dude whether they like to admit it or not. all their fuckin treats are the result of global plunder and theyre standing by - !and have stood by! - as people group after people group is slaughtered before their eyes for cheap beef and streamable porn.would you say that the government raising the military budget, defunding schools, workplace safety, privatizing everything not nailed down, letting infrastructure rot, etc. all so they can genocide third worlders and the survivors of these wars can grow up hating your guts while your masters flee to bunkers in new zealand… would you say you have benefited from that?
as for the porn industry raping your daughters … would you say that benefits you?
Cattle? One of the few things Amerikkka produces locally… oh wait you said "1st world" not Amerikkka necessarily… hmm…..
You type and spell words like an American though. I don't think you're really benefiting from what the government does in your name while destroying your standard of living. If anything they make you the scapegoat for their crimes. That's the entire pretense of collective guilt. Do a bunch of crimes let everyone take the heat while you jump out the back window.
none of these are true.
they're all exploiting eachother in a giant matrix of power.
first world bourgeois fuck over third world bourgeois. first world workers fuck over third world workers. all bourgeois fuck over all of us workers.
fuck it, first world workers fuck over other first world workers. first world bourgeois fuck over other first world bourgeois.
> nations don't have friends, only interests.
the same is true for every single person that's a part of the economic machine.
there are no alliances, sometimes their (supposed) interests overlap, however.
it's possible for first worlders to synchronize their interests in terms of racism or colonialism, for example. this makes the upper pic "more" true.
it's also possible for all bourgeois' interests to synchronize in order to destroy the workers movement, which would contradict this.
the bottom should, in an ideal world, be true.
>>2898014S-poster, as a youth and suffering from autism, found the comedic intent behind this video indecipherable. As a consequence they took its message as great inspiration, as a microcosm of genuine political engagement…
Today we see the after-effects of improper developmental education by the paragraphs he soils the board with on a regular basis. If he should be acknowledged anymore it should be with "urban guerilla status?".
>>2897008>The collapse of the USSR, the main vehicle for communist movements in the Global South, tipped the balance of power in favor of the West. The US and its allies are thus more freely able meddle in the Global South, crushing, pacifying, and co-opting almost anything that stands in its way with impunity.The USSR wasn't the main vehicle for communist movements in the Global South. The main vehicle was the will of the people in the global south for their political independence from colonialism. The USSR merely gave aid to already existing 20th century anti-colonial movements who in turn warmed up to communism. However, those movements usually had their own ideas, agendas, and leaders. Many of them weren't even communist. For example, the USSR supported Nasser against the British and French colonialists even though he wasn't communist.
The USSR existing didn't spontaneously cause communist movements to emerge into existence across the world. Nor does it ceasing to exist solely explain why communist movements fail to exist today. Just as you can't reduce history to one person and create a great man theory you can't reduce history to one country and create a great country theory.
The failure of communist movements to erupt in the global south which is supposedly more exploited by imperialism must be explained by the issues within the global south itself instead of deflecting blame. However, you can't do that because then you would have to admit that the entire theory of third worldism is bunk so you come up with this great country theory.
Much more then the collapse of the USSR has happened in these last forty years. Colonialism has come to an end. The countries of the global south have achieved political independence. The countries of the global south have developed massively. A large percentage of the global south has smartphones and access to the Internet. More then just being "crushed" by the north, they have received billions in aid from the West. Do you know the US gives billions of dollars in aid every year to Africa?
The global south is much richer then it was in the past. Meanwhile things in the global north are getting worse and worse every year. Education is being defunded, health care is being defunded (I may lose my health care ah fuck), wealth inequality is skyrocketing. Life is getting worse in the global north even as the global south is developing. The gap between the north & the south is going away. There is a common global proletariat and no need for constructs like the "global south."
However, do to imperialism derangement syndrome you need to imagine yourself hiding in the woods as a guerilla warrior fighting a 20th century people's war against colonialism. You are a LARPER.
>>2897872>>2897869he cant answer these questions. they never answer these questions
>>2898240
The strong do what they will and the weak will suffer as they must
>>2898205Nobody said the USSR spontaneously created anti-colonial movements. The point is that the USSR created the geopolitical space for those movements to survive. Nasser proves my point: non-communist, yet able to leverage Soviet support to balance against Western pressure. That space largely collapsed after 1991; the West now has more of a free hand to do what ever it pleases. Colonialism ended? LMFAO, ok retard.
Southern growth and smartphones doesn't end the hierarchy either since this growth still occurs within Western-dominated supply chains. Moreover, Western "aid" (which is only a tool for soft power, not benevolence) is outweighed by debt service, repatriated profits, capital flight, and economic and military warfare. Whether you like or not, the Global South still loses much more than it receives. Northern decline (exaggerated as it is) doesn’t erase the structural position either: a squeezed American worker is still far above a Congolese miner or Bangladeshi garment worker. Go ahead and tell an American his current level of material consumption cannot be universalized and must be reduced; see what happens.
>>2898328You're right. This random person's post triumphs empirical research.
>>2898299> tell an American his current level of material consumption cannot be universalized and must be reduced; see what happens.What kind of consumption in what areas? I would forgo a car if I could get reliable public transport to my job. I could give up red meat. If it means universalized rolling blackouts like in South Africa then maybe not.
>>2898338Agreed. Most Americans making like even up to $25/hr aren't consuming that much. Everyone is living on subsistence wages now, thanks to inflation.
>>2898336The empirical research backs that post. The scarcity of the third world isn't caused by a physical absence of goods, its cause by the woefully inefficient way capitalism manages resources. Jason Hickel's entire point is that redirecting production to actually satisfy human needs and use resources efficiently it possible to achieve universal first world QoL outcomes. Western workers only over-consume in the sense that capitalist economies require vastly more resources to satisfy the same needs than socialist ones. The increased efficiency of socialism would make it possible to raise living standards globally while simultaneously reducing consumption.
>>2898338>What kind of consumption in what areas?Virtually all aspects of Western lifestyle. If everyone on the planet lived like Americans, we'd have to extract resources equivalent to five Earths. The Western way of life, even for the average working class Westerner, is inherently unstable and contingent on the exploitation of an even lower working class in the Global South.
>>2898344>Most Americans making like even up to $25/hr aren't consuming that much.Relative to most of the world, Americans live like kings.
>>2898370>The empirical research backs that post.It doesn't because it neglects use-value extraction that's central to Western lifestyle. Westerners over-consume because their material abundance is directly subsidized by the under-consumption and impoverishment of the Global South. You would know this if you actually read what Hickel has written, but then again, you're the same retard that thought high HDI was the same as maintaining the same levels of consumption.
>>2898382How much would this go down if we made fabrics and electronics that were durable and made to last?
>>2898382>Westerners over-consume because their material abundance is directly subsidized by the under-consumption and impoverishment of the Global SouthYes but it doesn't have to be. Hickel writes at length about how this is only necessary because capitalist economies are so woefully inefficient, meaning that improved efficiency can lead to them living better lives even while consuming less. You are conflating consumption with living standards, but Hickel argues that they are not only not the same thing, but they often aren't even correlated, and that living standards can go up even as consumption goes down and vice versa.
If we need to live on the level of Indonesia is it in the city or the rural, neglected parts of Indonesia? I might be okay settling for the life of a Jakartan even if it means rolling blackouts and eating just rice with spice for most meals, if it has to be on the level of a West Papuan then forget it.
>>2898336Yes it does, we could lower consumption simply by making goods that aren't deliberately made to fail within 5 years. By making them out of more durable longer-lasting materials. Hell, there are sewing machines made in the 1800's that still work to this day.
>>2898387>Hickel writes at length about how this is only necessary because capitalist economies are so woefully inefficient, meaning that improved efficiency can lead to them living better lives even while consuming less.No, dumbass. Can you stop embarrassing yourself? Hickel's core position isn't just that capitalism is inefficient (no one denies this), it's that Western consumption in general is too high and must come down. Correcting inefficiencies is just a band-aid temporary solution that doesn't address the underlying problem.
https://www.localfutures.org/in-defense-of-degrowth/<Ward et al (2016) find that even the most optimistic projections of efficiency improvements yield no absolute decoupling in the medium and long term. The authors state: ‘this result is a robust rebuttal to the claim of absolute decoupling’; ‘decoupling of GDP growth from resource use, whether relative or absolute, is at best only temporary. Permanent decoupling (absolute or relative) is impossible… because the efficiency gains are ultimately governed by physical limits.’<Schandl et al (2016) find the same thing. Even in their best-case scenario projection, global material consumption still grows steadily. The authors conclude: ‘Our research shows that while some relative decoupling can be achieved in some scenarios, none would lead to an absolute reduction in energy or materials footprint.’>You are conflating consumption with living standards, but Hickel argues that they are not only not the same thing, but they often aren't even correlatedI never claimed otherwise; however, Westerners have a material incentive to resist reducing their consumption, grounded in their individual utility and the use-value of Southern imports, regardless if the North was socialist or capitalist.
>>2898435>Yes it doesRetard
>>2898446And you completely ignore the rest of my post showing a example of how to reduce consumption without lowering quality of life.
>>2898450not only can we reduce consumption without lowering quality of life, we can also provide for those who have been up until now deprived of their needs without increasing resources usage at all, since our capitalist economy produces so many commodities that are destroyed without being sold or consumed, because capitalists destroy surpluses during crises of overproduction, in the name of maintaining profit rates
>>2898450Because your post was dogshit and so are you.
If commodities lasted longer, people will just use that money to buy other commodities. It also doesn't address things like food, housing, transportation, etc.
>>2898456>read this random person's book from almost 100 years ago>no i don't have any arguments of my own >>2898460you are being given 1 chapter of 1 book with modern commentary added. maybe give it a shot instead of complaining
>>2898460if every dollar spent on bombing, sanctioning, couping, and embargoing the third world was instead spent on, for example, producing food and giving the surplus away…. that would greatly improve everyone's standard of living without increasing consumption of resources at all, yet this cannot happen under capitalist imperialism. that is the only point I am trying to make. you are trying to make the point that it must be this way and cannot be any other way.
>>2898465You're right. I forgot a random book published nearly 100 years ago by a random politician triumphs current-day empirical data.
>>2898467>has no argument so he spams infographics like a stormuyghur /pol/tardThis is why liberals believe in horseshoe theory.
>>2898468>if every dollar spent on bombing, sanctioning, couping, and embargoing the third world was instead spent on, for example, producing food and giving the surplus away…. that would greatly improve everyone's standard of living without increasing consumption of resources at allHorrific as American imperialism is, this is empirically not true.
>>2898472I'll keep on posting it because you clearly don't want to listen to our arguments and keep on repeating "turd-worldist" dogma from that glowie Sakai.
"Third-Worldists" and Right-wingers are more alike than either of them will admit. Both believe in spooky magical thinking about nations and ethnicities.
>>2898446>Hickel's core position isn't just that capitalism is inefficient (no one denies this), it's that Western consumption in general is too high and must come down. Hickel distinguishes between consumption by producers and consumption by consumers. You don't, and that's why you don't actually grasp his argument. It's perfectly simple, and a really easy way to illustrate it is by looking at food production. Capitalist agriculture is infamous for its waste, witb farmers throwing away as much as 1/3 of everything they produce. They do this for a variety of reasons, like only selling the most aesthetically pleasing fruit or trying to jack up prices by artificially restricting supply. So that means that if you want 80 apples to appear on a store shelf, you actually have to grow about 120 of them because 40 will go straight into the garbage. But if you eliminate those wasteful practices and let people actually eat every apple that is grown, suddenly you can reduce the actual number of apples being grown without reducing the number available on store shelves. This of course has a knock on effect of also cutting by 1/3 the amount of labour, fuel, fertilizer etc. to produce the same amount of output. So miraculously, once instance of reducing inefficiency reduces consumption in numerous areas without hurting the consumer at all. Now apply this on a macroeconomic scale. Eliminate planned obsolescence and build things that are designed to last, don't built near identical products and psyop people into throwing away their perfectly good ones. Stop producing frivolous nonsense that ordinary people don't have access to anyway. Take everybody busy building imperialist weapons, or McMansions or private jets or sports cars, put them onto building things people actually need. Take everybody engaged in industries that socialism would make obsolete (real estate, sales, advertising, insurance, etc.) and have them do something actually useful. Give everybody a right to a job and put every unemployed person to work. Suddenly that shortfall left by the end of unequal exchange starts to shrink. Consumption is reduced at the level of production, while actual consumers don't feel nearly as much effect. This is what Hickel argues is the solution to the problem you identify, not JDPON or some nonsense like that. I mean come on man, in the very article you cite here he specifically argues
against the idea the immiseration of Westerners is necessary to solve this problem:
<Milanovic’s argument is leveled against a straw man. If he had read the literature on degrowth, he would know that it does not call for immiseration.<Imagine cutting the GDP per capita of the US down to less than half its present size, in real terms. This might sound horrible on the face of it, but it would be equivalent to US GDP per capita in the 1970s. Folks who lived through the 70s remember them as pretty heady days. And the poverty rate was lower back then, and happiness levels higher too. I guess Milanovic wasn't arguing against a strawman, since immiseration is what you actually believe in. Hickel however clearly doesn't. He's arguing for controlled degrowth that uses rational planning to offset the necessity of consuming less resources overall. He's not arguing that Westerners need to start experiencing rolling blackouts and walking to work barefoot.
<Ward et al (2016) find that even the most optimistic projections of efficiency improvements yield no absolute decoupling in the medium and long term. The authors state: ‘this result is a robust rebuttal to the claim of absolute decoupling’; ‘decoupling of GDP growth from resource use, whether relative or absolute, is at best only temporary.You're taking that out of context. In that passage he's specifically arguing that increases inefficiency can't break the link between increases in GDP and carbon emissions. What we're talking about here is offsetting the loss of labour power appropriated by the global south if imperialism were to be abolished. This is why Hickel puts so much emphasis on either reducing waste (thereby achieving the same output consumer goods with the same labour power) or else mobilizing unused or misused labour power.
Hence he argues:
<The needs-based poverty metric illuminates much smarter strategies for development. Once we understand that ending poverty is a matter of ensuring people can access the goods and services necessary to meet their needs, then the objective should be to increase production of those specific goods and services. So far we have referred to the goods that comprise the basic needs poverty line (food, shelter, clothing, fuel), but – as we will see in the next section – the same principle applies to the higher-order goods that are required to achieve decent-living standards (nutritious food, modern housing, healthcare, education, electricity, clean-cooking stoves, clothing, washing machines, sanitation systems, refrigeration, heating/cooling, computers, mobile phones, internet, transit, etc), which requires a higher level of industrial output.<It is important to note here that increasing production of socially necessary goods to meet human needs still represents growth in the affected sectors. In other words, it still represents an increase in production, even as measured by GDP. The difference has to do with the content, purpose and quality of growth. Rather than growing total production in the hope that some of it will ‘trickle down’ to those in poverty, the needs-based approach seeks to grow specific outputs to meet specific social goals. Production and growth along these lines is focused on human well-being and social progress, rather than capital accumulation, and pays attention to the question of whether people have access to necessary goods. This approach can be faster and more efficient in terms of human development, as it allows better social outcomes to be achieved at any given level of aggregate output (Dreze and Sen, 1989, Vogel et al., 2021, Lena and London, 1993, Cereseto and Waitzkin, 1986).<Second, using high-income economies as a benchmark is problematic, because they are highly inefficient when it comes to the relationship between aggregate production and social outcomes. They tend to be characterized by high levels of resource-intensive and socially unnecessary forms of production and consumption, such as SUVs, private jets, cruise ships, fast fashion, mansions, industrial meat, weapons, advertising, and artificially accelerated product turnover through practices like planned obsolescence. This is why, despite high levels of aggregate output and throughput in high-income countries, large portions of their working classes are nevertheless deprived of affordable housing, nutritious food, and other essential goods. Importantly, research in ecological economics indicates that high-income countries could achieve better social outcomes at lower levels of aggregate production by scaling down less-necessary output and focusing production on what is required for human well-being (Barrett et al., 2022, Creutzig et al., 2022, Hickel, 2023, Lettenmeier et al., 2014, Kuhnhenn et al., 2020). >>2898536>Hickel distinguishes between consumption by producers and consumption by consumers. You don't, and that's why you don't actually grasp his argument. He really doesn't (and even if he did, he would be wrong). The two are intertwined, though Western consumer behavior, i.e., commodity fetishism, is a consequence of production.
>Capitalist agriculture is infamous for its waste, witb farmers throwing away as much as 1/3 of everything they produce. They do this for a variety of reasons, like only selling the most aesthetically pleasing fruit or trying to jack up prices by artificially restricting supply. So that means that if you want 80 apples to appear on a store shelf, you actually have to grow about 120 of them because 40 will go straight into the garbage. But if you eliminate those wasteful practices and let people actually eat every apple that is grown, suddenly you can reduce the actual number of apples being grown without reducing the number available on store shelves. This of course has a knock on effect of also cutting by 1/3 the amount of labour, fuel, fertilizer etc. to produce the same amount of output. So miraculously, once instance of reducing inefficiency reduces consumption in numerous areas without hurting the consumer at all. Now apply this on a macroeconomic scale. Eliminate planned obsolescence and build things that are designed to last, don't built near identical products and psyop people into throwing away their perfectly good ones. Stop producing frivolous nonsense that ordinary people don't have access to anyway. Take everybody busy building imperialist weapons, or McMansions or private jets or sports cars, put them onto building things people actually need. Take everybody engaged in industries that socialism would make obsolete (real estate, sales, advertising, insurance, etc.) and have them do something actually useful. Give everybody a right to a job and put every unemployed person to work. Suddenly that shortfall left by the end of unequal exchange starts to shrink. Consumption is reduced at the level of production, while actual consumers don't feel nearly as much effect. This is what Hickel argues is the solution to the problem you identify, not JDPON or some nonsense like that. I mean come on man, in the very article you cite here he specifically argues against the idea the immiseration of Westerners is necessary to solve this problem:>I guess Milanovic wasn't arguing against a strawman, since immiseration is what you actually believe in. Hickel however clearly doesn't. He's arguing for controlled degrowth that uses rational planning to offset the necessity of consuming less resources overall. He's not arguing that Westerners need to start experiencing rolling blackouts and walking to work barefoot.When did I say immiseration is necessary? This is like, what, the fifth or sixth time you've strawmanned my position on this? If the North was capitalist, immiseration would definitely occur (and Hickel's research proves that); however, even under a socialist regime in the North that eliminated capitalism's inefficiencies, Westerners would still have to reduce their consumption (which itself is a material incentive to maintain unequal exchange), as its over-reliance on use-value extraction from the Global South is unsustainable. You keep conflating my latter point about consumption reduction with immiseration, which just sort of proves just how much commodity fetishism permeates in the mind of Westoids.
>You're taking that out of context. In that passage he's specifically arguing that increases inefficiency can't break the link between increases in GDP and carbon emissions.Wrong. He's arguing that inefficiencies alone don't account for the massive expropriation of use-value from the Global South to sustain current Northern consumption.
>What we're talking about here is offsetting the loss of labour power appropriated by the global south if imperialism were to be abolished. This is why Hickel puts so much emphasis on either reducing waste (thereby achieving the same output consumer goods with the same labour power) or else mobilizing unused or misused labour power.Which inevitably means Westerners will have to consume less. The excerpts you posted demonstrates that.
>>2898559Consume how much less? Are we cutting meals? Electricity?
>>2898566More focus on things that actually improve material well-being (life expectancy, education, standard of living, etc), less focus on the individualistic, socially unnecessary slop that Westoids love so much. Westerners, especially Western leftists, want to have both which is impossible without unequal exchange. See:
>>2898382 >>2898570What are we counting as socially unnecessary slop? Falling asleep with the tv on? Children’s toys? A gaming PC? Do we eliminate red meat with the exception of venison? I’m stupid, I need something like a picture.
>>2898570You are just arguing for more Austerity, just the same as liberals and conservatives. Communism is not a poverty cult, you retard.
t. see picture.
>>2898472>You're right. I forgot a random book published nearly 100 years ago by a random politician triumphs current-day empirical data.you've produced no "current day empirical data" that debunks Dutt because you refuse to even read Dutt. you are a goalpost shifting sneaky little manipulative cunt who wants to move the conversation away from the fact that
<>>2898472>Horrific as American imperialism is, this is empirically not true.bullshit. bullshit. bullshit. bullshit. you didn't evne respond:
if every dollar spent on bombing, sanctioning, couping, and embargoing the third world was instead spent on, for example, producing food and giving the surplus away…. that would greatly improve everyone's standard of living without increasing consumption of resources at allthat means 1 trillion dollar annual military budget ending. that means US bases closing down. that means no more bombings, sanctions, embargoes, coups, austerity, deliberate destruction of surplus to raise prices, no more assassinations, no more occupations, instead we would put all those resources into actually making life better, and giving the surplus away
and you say "nah actually that wouldn't make anything better LOL"
FUCK OFF. that is unironically an imperialist narrative. everything you freaks do serves imperialism while claiming to be against it. that's why you always change the conversation from what can be done to end imperialism to your tiresome bullshit
>>2898589This is completely hypothetical, but I think the Western lifestyle would be completely overhauled in a way that would make most Westerners highly uncomfortable. Just look at the knee-jerk reaction of this retard that thinks I'm advocating for austerity:
>>2898595Don't mistake what I'm saying, the West won't automatically become impoverished. If anything, objective living standard metrics (like the Human Development Index), can go up because we're no longer allocating massive amounts of resources to unnecessary crap. So there will be less consumption of luxury crap, single-use items, planned obsolescence goods, etc. Less flying, less cars (especially massive SUVs and trucks), less "upgrading" your gaming PC or smartphone, less bullshit jobs (like financial speculation). We would basically be a country with a "poor" GDP, but a very high standard of living.
>>2898607That’s why I’m asking about specifics and where we would need to cut back, because I don’t want to have a knee jerk reaction, and if it essentially austerity, I want to know what the absolute floor is in return.
>>2898607Like uncomfortable in what specific ways, no more A/C at all? Radio instead of television? A limit of one smart phone every five years?
>>2898607I'm arguing this because you are a complete third-wordlist retard who thinks communism has to do with a idiotic "punishing" of leftist first-world workers instead of bring up the entirety of the working class against the bourgeoisie.
You are literally doing the glowies work for them for free, you retard.
>>2898607>If anything, objective living standard metrics (like the Human Development Index), can go up because we're no longer allocating massive amounts of resources to unnecessary crapok so you actually agree with Rajani Palme Dutt who you refuse to read LMFAO.
literally i don't care about fucking treatlers who want to eat nerds rope all day and watch netflix while poisoning themselves with bud light
we can literally raise the standard of living of the entire world while reducing carbon emissions, i don't care of westoids would find it uncomfortable that they can no longer play video games and drink alcohol all day, because that stuff was never good for them in the first place. that's my fucking point. you act like it's profound to point out that the drug addict will resent being in rehab when I am saying the rehab will make the ex drug addict more productive and less of a leech, in this analogy the imperial core and especially the USA is the drug addict. Yes I would rather americans growing potatoes and exporting them to the third world than manufacturing candy and beer that ends up in a dumpster anyway. and that is the same point the other anon is arguing as well
>>2898611The absolute floor would be the guarantee that every single person on Earth has universal access to the essential resources and services required for a dignified, fulfilling life. Sustainable housing, healthcare, education, etc. Current Western consumption is unsustainable and cannot be globally universalized, and so it relies on impoverishing and exploiting the periphery.
>>2898614Are those things socially necessary for you to live? Will you be impoverished if you can't upgrade your smartphone every year? No, but most people would rather not give up that privilege. That's just one example.
> i think we should stop throwing food in the dumpster when we overproduce it and instead give it to people who need it
>i also think we should stop blowing people up and instead spend it on fixing our neglected infrastructure and education system
<YOU IDIOT DONT YOU KNOW HOW UNCOMFORTABLE YOU WILL BE IF YOU DO THAT… YOU'RE GONNA LOSE YOUR TREATS… AND GET AN EDUCATION INSTEAD… THAT WILL BE SO BAD FOR YOU… YOU'LL HATE IT… TRUST ME…
fucking porky
>>2898622>The absolute floor would be the guarantee that every single person on Earth has universal access to the essential resources and services required for a dignified, fulfilling life. we literally produce enough to guarantee that already but throw it out because it's not profitable to give surplus away for free. learn what a crisis of overproduction is. literally read rajani palme dutt's chapter on the destruction of the productive forces linked here…
>>2898456
> Current Western consumption is unsustainable and cannot be globally universalized, and so it relies on impoverishing and exploiting the periphery.literally western consumption habits are bad for westerners and nobody should want it to be normalized to be a fat fuck with diabetes eating nerds rope and watching fox news all day. literally if just the US military budget was diverted to producing what people actually need, and not destroying it when the price goes down too much, then everything would be fine. and when I say "what people need" i mean food, water, shelter, air, education, health care. not fucking beer and strippers and deep fried ice cream. god damn.
>>2898623Yeah and I literally said in
>>2898435>we could lower consumption simply by making goods that aren't deliberately made to fail within 5 years. By making them out of more durable longer-lasting materials. Hell, there are sewing machines made in the 1800's that still work to this day.And we could also lower consumption by making like computers and smartphones that could last 10 to 20 years instead of just 5 if we make them with better materials and the profit motive won't be behind every design and engineering decision.
>>2898622>Are those things socially necessary for you to live? Will you be impoverished if you can't upgrade your smartphone every year? No, but most people would rather not give up that privilege. That's just one example.i live in the imperial core. i have not gotten a new phone in 7 years. i literally would not want to update my phone because new phones suck due to enshittification… you know part of that artifical scarcity and planned obsolesence that is literally a capitalist conspiracy to make the economy more wasteful than it needs to be… idgaf about beer, strippers, ice cream, pizza, video games, or TV. I literally want health care, education, food, water, air, exercise and stable employment for everyone in the world and if it means I never get to see a big screen TV playing garbage zionist propaganda and football slop again….
GREATi already eat mostly vegetables and cook for myself. do you really think I'll miss fucking mcdonalds? do you think it makes me happy that everyone around me is a brainwashed selfish fat fuck with diabetes? do you think that benefits us? do you think that's a society people really want without massive brainwashing?
>>2898621>Yes I would rather americans growing potatoes and exporting them to the third world than manufacturing candy and beer that ends up in a dumpster anywayMost Westoids don't want to give up the privilege of having beer and candy though. Why would anyone give up that luxury?
>that is the same point the other anon is arguing as wellNo, he began by denying that unequal exchange was caused by the wage gap between the Global North and South.
Then he conflated having a high HDI with maintaining the same levels of consumption.
Then he misrepresented Hickel's research by attributing everything he said to the inefficiencies of capitalism, ignoring that Hickel's main thesis is actually that Western consumption, regardless of its efficiency, is contingent on the unequal extraction of use-value from the Global South.
>>2898625Your solution was incomplete.
>>2898626Most people in the core don't share your sentiments.
>>2898627>Most Westoids don't want to give up the privilege of having beer and candy though. Why would anyone give up that luxury?because it's literally poisonous garbage that's bad for us you absolutely porky apologist
>>2898628They also feel good and serve as an emotional crutch, plenty of the third world drinks too, alcohol is the drug with by far the most users in the world
>>2898627>No, he began by denying that unequal exchange was caused by the wage gap between the Global North and South.the wage gap is also a gap in purchasing power from currency hegemony. this benefits the capitalist class more than the workers since they are the ones actually doing the importing before selling it on a retail market. The US dollar of an american worker might go farther than a peso in mexico, but it won't go very far in america itself. if food and rent is getting more expensive, it doesn't matter if your wages would buy more stuff in a country you don't live in.
>>2898627>Most people in the core don't share your sentiments.AND I FUCKING HATE IT AND IT DRIVES ME TO MADNESS BECAUSE IT'S ABSOLUTELY RETARDED TO TRADE WORLD PEACE AND COMMUNISM FOR DIABETES AND GENOCDIE
>>2898629it doesn't feel that good. i drank a bit in my 20s. absolutely overrated drug. preferred weed but now I don't do that either. I don't do anything. why the fuck would I want to poison myself. the world is poisoned enough already. everyone in america should be dosed with a heroic dose of shrooms and forced to learn about US war crimes. that will wake them up far more than a thousand 9/11s ever could.
>>2898628That's your opinion. Most people, especially Westerners, would prefer not to surrender these luxuries. They have a material stake in that maintaining that privilege. They think access to these commodities is a form of "freedom."
>>2898632>That's your opinion. Most people, especially Westerners, would prefer not to surrender these luxuries. They have a material stake in that maintaining that privilege. They think access to these commodities is a form of "freedom."- drugs and alcohol poison and distract
- entertainment distracts
- the government lies to me and takes my money to kill people and make them hate me
- they let the infrastructure crumble so they can fund more wars
- they destroy the surpluses rather than give them away
- resources that could be used to give people shelter food and water are instead used to turn the economy into a mob owned casino
- everyone around me is brainwashed into thinking this is freedom
- i am told this somehow benefits me and I would actually hate it if there was less poison and less imperialism and more education, food, water, shelter
madness, madness, just fucking kneel me over a ditch and shoot me already. i'm sure i'm the problem here.
>>2898634>just fucking kneel me over a ditch and shoot me alreadyYou sound young. I think you should stay away from politics if it's causing you this much mental distress.
>>2898635- drugs and alcohol poison and distract
- entertainment distracts
- the government lies to me and takes my money to kill people and make them hate me
- they let the infrastructure crumble so they can fund more wars
- they destroy the surpluses rather than give them away
- resources that could be used to give people shelter food and water are instead used to turn the economy into a mob owned casino
- everyone around me is brainwashed into thinking this is freedom
- i am told this somehow benefits me and I would actually hate it if there was less poison and less imperialism and more education, food, water, shelter
you could have responded to literally any of this but you went for the imageboard snark of
>LET ME GUESS SOMETHING ABOUT YOU IRL LOLOLOLOLOLno i'm actually 35. this is the part where you say i sound immature for my age and refuge NONE of what i said
>>2898635"you sound" like a CIA agent with a material interest in making people think they benefit from being poisoned and having their infrastructure crumble in order to fund forever wars and accelerate climate change
>>2898641No, because I'm not a Westoid 💪💪
>>2898643i see you're going for cheap ragebait and snarky dunks and nothing else. i bet you are a westoid. possibly a glowie
you had no response to this:
- drugs and alcohol poison and distract
- entertainment distracts
- the government lies to me and takes my money to kill people and make them hate me
- they let the infrastructure crumble so they can fund more wars
- they destroy the surpluses rather than give them away
- resources that could be used to give people shelter food and water are instead used to turn the economy into a mob owned casino
- everyone around me is brainwashed into thinking this is freedom
- i am told this somehow benefits me and I would actually hate it if there was less poison and less imperialism and more education, food, water, shelter
>>2898641>>2898643>>2898639>>2898638>>2898634>>2898632>>2898631>>2898630>>2898644You know all of this shit simply sounds like spooky Moralist purist nonsence.
Life is suffering and people need momentary pleasures just to keep going. People have always suffered throughout history and had "poison" but they still lived.
Relativizing, dissociating and hopemaxxing.
Life always was shitty for most people in history and they still pushed on so loosing your privileges is not that bad. You can emotionally detach yourself from big abstract concepts like world war and climate catastrophe. And lastly we will solve everything with the revolution.
Tl;DR Learn to disassociate from things you can't directly control.
>>2898645you know i made that post in your screenshot right? that was my post. i made that post. don't talk down to me or lump me in with that other guy.
>>2898645>Tl;DR Learn to disassociate from things you can't directly control.fuck you we have to stop this because there is a time limit
>>2898299>Moreover, Western "aid" (which is only a tool for soft power, not benevolence) Oh. Western aid is not about "benevolence." What a profound insight. Marxists don't deal with "benevolence" and moralfagging like this.
> Northern decline (exaggerated as it is) doesn’t erase the structural position either: a squeezed American worker is still far above a Congolese miner or Bangladeshi garment worker. Marxists don't put American workers above Congolese or Bangladeshi workers. The relationship between American workers an Congelese workers is not a class relationship. American workers have no power, especially over foreign workers. This is a neoliberal argument.
> Go ahead and tell an American his current level of material consumption cannot be universalized and must be reduced; see what happens.As that other anon said, Marxism is not a poverty cult. We don't care about levels of material consumption. We don't have to tell anyone to reduce their levels of material consumption.
Society is becoming more productive all the time and everyone is being uplifted even under capitalism. For example, the global south is being uplifted even under capitalism and "imperialism." Countries in the global south are much nicer then they were a few years ago due to development. Have you actually been to any of them? Similarly, society will develop under socialism and no ones livelihood will go down.
>>2898942I know about this very well. I am just trying to find the best way to argue against third worldism and "anti-imperialism." I don't want to acknowledge ANY of the third worldist points: that the global south is 'exploited' or colonized (actually its developing under capitalism), that we need to lose any of our livelihood (we can develop under socialism), etc. To be sure if we did have to reduce consumption we could get around it pretty easily.
>>2898973
>No one said livelihood would go down. Westoids fetishize commodities more than any people on the planet. Material consumption ≠ livelihood.
for a guy who clearly identifies with scientific socialism, you don't seem to know what commodity fetishism means
>Marxists don't deal with "benevolence" and moralfagging like this.You were moralfagging about Western aid being a good thing (it’s not since it creates deendencies), while ignoring the material reason why the West supplies foreign aid.
>Marxists don't put American workers above Congolese or Bangladeshi workers. The relationship between American workers an Congelese workers is not a class relationship. American workers have no power, especially over foreign workers. This is a neoliberal argument.This is because you’re a utopian idealist, not a materialist.
>We don't care about levels of material consumption. We don't have to tell anyone to reduce their levels of material consumption.Illiterate, utopian, and empirically false.
>Countries in the global south are much nicer then they were a few years ago due to development. Have you actually been to any of them?Let me know when you’re planning your next vacation trip to Haiti, Congo, or Palestine.
>Similarly, society will develop under socialism and no ones livelihood will go down.No one said living standards would have to go down. Westoids fetishize commodities more than any people on the planet. Material consumption ≠ living standards. Westoids flying less, consuming less single-use slop, and other pointless activities will not impoverish the Western World lol
>>2898949Ah, so you admit you’re being disingenuous. Good to know you know I’m right.
>>2898983You’re essentially equating reducing commodity consumption to reducing standard of living. That’s commodity fetishism 101. lol
>>2898949I want to clarify what I was saying about the global south not being colonised and exploited since it may have sound dumb without clarification. The colonisation and colonial exploitation of the global south was ended in the decolonisation movements of the 20th century backed by the USSR.
The reason for the backwardness and underdevelopment of the "global south" now is not due to colonial extraction and some unhinged exaggeration of exploitation it is because the West is responsible for almost all of the worlds innovations. The West created the industrial revolution and capitalism ending the backwardness of feudalism and slavery. The West created computers, the world wide web, and the Internet.
The West is now helping to aid the third world countries in getting out from under the devoplement. The West has given billions of dollars in aid to the global south. But when I point out this out the anti-West obsessed turd worldist says "it is not benevolent." Like do you think the real world is awash with benelovence?
And when China takes over from the failing West the anti-imperialists will say that they are imperialist because they want something out of their relationships with the thirld world instead of absolutely nothing. So they are not "benevolent." Based upon the anti-imperialist definitions every relationship between countries is imperialist because it is not benelovent. Hence "anti-imperialism" in general is trash.
Remember that Marxism is a Westoid creation. Karl Marx was from Germany. The West is responsible for humanities greatest inventions, Marxism among them. This kind of deranged anti-Westernism is typically used by fascists in the third world who attack Marxists as foreign interlopers. To them Marxism is one of the ways the West hurts the global south. The turd worldists and anti-imperialists will NEVER admit that the West has done anything right.
There is nothing wrong with Western civilisation. The problem is with a few Westerners who are capitalists. There is no need to hate the West in general or to hate Westerners and call them a "labor aristocracy", etc.
>>2898991i am not that anon and that's still not the definition of commodity fetishism. i don't think you're wrong about single use slop, but i think you're wrong to focus on westoid consumption habits rather than the structure of global production
>>2898994>You are literally moralfagging right now by not calling it a good thing.I made a normative statement based on a positive statement, which was based on materialism. Nothing wrong with that.
>Do you think the whole global south is like Palestine? You couldn't be more out of touch.Strawman.
>You just said I need to tell Westerners their livelihood has to go down.Which isn’t the same as reducing living standards lmfao.
>>2898992Ah, yes, Palestinians are now better off because now they have Western-designed iPhones to document their slaughter by American-manufactured bombs. Such progress!
Yes, we’ve couped Latin Americans’ governments, funded death squads that slaughtered their people, but hey, at least they now have Coca-Cola and gaming PCs.
Countless other examples. Actual fucking retard.
>>2899001>that's still not the definition of commodity fetishismRetard.
>i think you're wrong to focus on westoid consumption habits rather than the structure of global productionWestern consumption is a consequence of production, so the two are basically intertwined. Obviously Western workers don’t dictate this, but to pretend like they don’t benefit from this unsustainable consumption via unequal exchange is a denial of reality.
>>2898985> You were moralfagging about Western aid being a good thing (it’s not since it creates deendencies), while ignoring the material reason why the West supplies foreign aid.You are moralfagging about Western aid not being a good thing. You always have to paint everything the West does as bad.
>This is because you’re a utopian idealist, not a materialist.What is social class?
>Let me know when you’re planning your next vacation trip to Haiti, Congo, or Palestine.Do you think the entire global south is like Palestine? How out of touch are you?
> No one said living standards would have to go down. Westoids fetishize commodities more than any people on the planet. Material consumption ≠ living standards. Westoids flying less, consuming less single-use slop, and other pointless activities will not impoverish the Western World lolYou said that the "current level of material consumption" of Americans has to be reduced. It doesn't because we can still make society more productive with technology. Technology developed under capitalism and it can be develop under socialism.
>Ah, so you admit you’re being disingenuous. Good to know you know I’m right.If anything I am being genuine. Normally I would hide anything that makes the West and America look good. But I won't now because I am annoyed by your anti-Westernism so I will be genuine.
>Ah, yes, Palestinians are now better off because now they have Western-designed iPhones to document their slaughter by American-manufactured bombs.You seem awfully obsessed with Palestine. So you can't convince anyone of your idea of the exploitation of the global south so you have to move the goal posts to Palestine. I consider this a win as you have now moved your considerations to a very small area.
>>2899007>It doesn't because we can still make society more productive with technology. Technology developed under capitalism and it can be develop under socialism.Empirically not true. Western consumption cannot be universalized at all, regardless of any improvements in technology and efficiency. This was already discussed so no need to repeat this deboonked point ad nauseam.
>If anything I am being genuine. Normally I would hide anything that makes the West and America look good. But I won't now because I am annoyed by your anti-Westernism so I will be genuine.Ah, so you’re a Western chauvinist (it was already obvious). Good to know.
> You seem awfully obsessed with Palestine. So you can't convince anyone of your idea of the exploitation of the global south so you have to move the goal posts to Palestine. I consider this a win as you have now moved your considerations to a very small area.Because Palestine is a perfect example for why your worldview is gay, flawed, and retarded. The Global South still objectively lives worse lives relative to the North explicitly due to the North’s policies. You can cope about technology and other shit that’s monopolized by the North, but that doesn’t refute anything. Besides, I also brought up Latin America, and the same is true for the broader Middle East, Africa, and Asia.
>>2899008I don’t support Russia or China either.
>>2899012Its good that we were able to get you to declare absolute submission to my point of view and move your goal posts from the global south to just the liberation of Palestine. I think we really did a good thing for you in this thread. Now you only have to worry about ending the oppression of Palestine and not some nebulous notion of unequal exchange with the global south. And now you might actually get other people to agree with you. This will be a good next phase for you.
I was worried for you that you would never be able to get to engage in your national liberation LARPing fantasies in the advanced 21th century, but now we have found a national liberation cause you can actually support in the 21th century. Finding this has been a good thing for you I think. Boycott Israeli products. Go to protests. Support the Palestinians. Good luck.
>>2899012>Empirically not true. Western consumption cannot be universalized at all, regardless of any improvements in technology and efficiency. This was already discussed so no need to repeat this deboonked point ad nauseam.who cares, here is the correct take already given to you by someone else:
<literally western consumption habits are bad for westerners and nobody should want it to be normalized to be a fat fuck with diabetes eating nerds rope and watching fox news all day. literally if just the US military budget was diverted to producing what people actually need, and not destroying it when the price goes down too much, then everything would be fine. and when I say "what people need" i mean food, water, shelter, air, education, health care. not fucking beer and strippers and deep fried ice cream. god damn.the goal shouldn't be to "universalize" muh WESTOID CONSUMPTION (a fucking meme phrase that erases class dfifferences since some "wEsTOiDs" are homeless and others are literally billionaries who hope in a private jet any time they want to go anywhere.
the important point as stated is that WE COULD LITERALLY RAISE EVERYONE'S
STANDARD OF LIVING without increasing anyone's consumption habits.
STANDARD OF LIVING AS IN:
<food<water<shelter<health care<educationand other ESSENTIALS
not their patriot beer and patriot TV rations, which rots their guts and minds
I don't care whether WeStOiDs "want" this or not because they're brainwashed to hate everything decent because they're literally DEPRIVED OF EDUCATION and given POISON and DISTRACTIONS instead.
there is literally more than enough ESSENTIALS for everyone but the bourgeoisie destroys it during crises of overproduction. humanity is more than capable of producing enough food, water, shelter, health care, and education for everyone on the planet, even under the current system. but instead we take our resources and fund "patriotism" (forever wars), "treats" (poison) "entertainment" (brainwashing distraction)
you hate that this is true so much so you keep circling back to MuH wEsToId cOnSoomPtiOn because god forbid we actually end a system that wastes everything so a few idiots can be poisoned and brainwashed
the periphery is 1984 so that the core can be brave new world, but both are dystopias. it's not actually benefiting us in the imperial core that our ruling class turned us into a bunch of fat, stupid, drooling, soft, brainwashed reactionaries with zero education. that benefits them. it might look like it benefits us if you're skinny and starving and getting worked to death, but trust me, you don't want to be a 300 lb reactionary coke guzzling diabetic parasite glued to a TV all day, that is not an improvement from being a 3rd world cobalt miner. everyone should be like the 2nd world countries. i mean it. the truth really is somewhere in the middle when it comes to "muh consoomption". nobody should be a slave getting worked to death in a mine and nobody should be a 300lb screen addicted treatlerite. everyone should work, exercise, stay healthy, get what they need to survive, receive an education etc. oh but radlibs and fascists hate heaering this. no we can't just give everyone what they need, including a job and a health regiment. No … that would be alt-treatlerism or something.
Okay do you need me to throw my tv and booze out?
>>2899108>hakim vidopinion discarded
>>2898992Based. US Manifest Destiny and Nazi German Lebensraum were historically progressive. Nakba too.
El Mozote and the Atlácatl Battalion were also progressive because now we have big booty Latinas twerking their BBL asses on their OnlyFans accounts recorded using their Apple iPhones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacrehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atl%C3%A1catl_Battalion >>2899108How is that even related to what he said? Are you just doing word association?
>>2898570Preach brother, thirdies don't do decadence and degeneracy like smartphones, tiktok, fast food, eating meat, owning cars, buying new clothes, traveling outside of their village, A/C, gaming consoles, ordering dinner, or anything except eating bread/rice, sleeping and subsistence farming
>>2899247>A/CNot even Euros guzzle through energy via A/C like Americans do. You really think the Congolese are consuming resources at the same rate of Americans? lol
>>2899255They would and could if Rwanda and Uganda stopped raping Kivu
>>2899255Okay, but in a world where those AC units are powered by solar panels, how is someone in Africa being deprived of treats?
>>2899283To give every person on the planet a Western-level material stock (the amount of physical stuff in their homes and infrastructure), we would need to mine and process several times the total historical extraction of humanity. Even if all the electricity came from the sun, manufacturing, smelting, and refining solar panels to reach Western levels of consumption would consume nearly all of Earth’s critical minerals (lithium, copper, indium) and exceed planetary boundaries (land, water, and pollution). Western consumption cannot be universalized on a finite planet.
>>2880886>99.9999% of fights on leftypol are over whether the top pic or the bottom pic is true.You're not thinking dialectically, both are insufficient and regressive mindsets for proletarian struggle. Mods, please ban Leftypol
>>2883919>Still using cold war terms is so cringeHow many million workers were targeted for extermination by the CIA-Zionist entity during World War 3 (it's called a "Cold War" because labor aristocrats weren't affected by their holocausts, your own words betray your class collaboration!)
Radlibs always think they're modern and beyond the contradictions of history, but they clearly are not. For example Obama was born to CIA-USAID parents during the mass killings of Jakarta Method in Indonesia, basically a satanic anti-Christ SCP
>>2897019>sophisticated electronic devices like iPhones are anything like agricultural products like coffee or bananas<looks underneath the Soy Reich's AI data center superstructure<the same old material base of slave labor commodities but now its lithium and rare earth mineralsAOC's Green New Deal utopia requires child slave artisanal mining just like every previous liberal orthodoxy. That's why she immediately met with Bolivian fascists and celebrated their "grassroots" politics of doing a coup, while ignoring anti-coup activists (the non-socialist Democrat guy who she replaced did meet with them by the way. Democrats are objectively better comrades to the international proletariat than DSA social fascists).
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/14/ocasio-cortez-to-constituents-on-bolivian-coup-drop-dead/>MTWs would know this if they read something other than Settlers.spiritually-Israeli settler style smugness and condescension to their slaves ✅
https://readsettlers.org/ch12.html<"So while the liberals and radicals see high-wage U.S. production and low-wage colonial production as opposed to each other, it is truer that there is an interrelationship and even a dependency. The flashy production of robots and automation, of oppressor nation technicians and workers drawing advanced wages, draws sustenance from the ordinary physical labor and skills of the Mexicano proletariat. "Nations become almost as classes." <The maquilas do not constitute any economic development for Mexico. They are just labor-intensive intrusions of U.S. manufacturing. It isn't just the profits that go to the U.S. oppressor nation. The U.S. receives both the super-profits and the consumer products themselves, while retaining all the white-collar managerial, professional, clerical, technical and distributive jobs made possible by the production. Even in this form - of giving Mexican women employment at wages five times the usual rate in the rural areas - the imperialist looting has a destructive effect on the social fabric. The border maquilas gather women from all over the unoccupied zone, while helping to force jobless men north across the artificial border.">>2899247>thirdies don't do decadence and degeneracy another quote from ch 12 of Settlers:
<"Essential production and socially useful work occupy a gradually diminishing place in the domestic activity of U.S. corporations, in the work of its settler citizens, in the imperial culture. Decadence is taking over in an even deeper way, in which non-essential and parasitic things become the most profitable, while worthless activities are thought the most important. Always present within imperialism, this decadence now becomes dominant within the oppressor nation."If you search for any science term on youtube you'll find Indians giving lectures. Western socialists are all art critics and influencers not much different than Andrew Tate imitators who also posture about being brave anti-Zionists. Millennials produced an even more damning insult than champaign socialist: 'gamerchair socialism'.
At least Leonard Bernstein's bourgie parties featured militant Marxists who care about revolution like the Black Panthers!Chapo Trap House is busy making eleven hour long videos about Dark Souls where they think 'social relations' is not a Marxist historical materialist term but literally just means people talking to each other. We can only pray that Matt Christman recovers from his stroke
>>2899294Sakai was a pseud if he didn't realize all jobs are bullshit jobs which reproduce the existing social order. And yes this includes teachers, doctors, factory workers and everyone else considered to be "essential" and "productive"
Just imagine showing up at Sentinelese island and telling the locals truck drivers, nurses and miners are vital jobs they can't do without. These are all associated with particular modes of production, scarcity and technological and (in some cases) ideological driven needs.
<If you search for any science term on youtube you'll find Indians giving lecturesHave you considered there's more Indians than golden billionoids?
I reject the category of "treatlerite" altogether as one utterly devoid of class-conscious content, since it focuses on consumption instead of production. Is a worker having a beer or a cigarette treatlerism? What if he goes home and plays video games instead of drinking alcohol? is it treatlerism to own a gun?
It's an absurd category.
read marx:
The thoughts of every piece of private property as such are at least turned against richer private property in the form of envy and the desire to level everything down; hence these feelings in fact constitute the essence of competition. The crude communist is merely the culmination of this envy and desire to level down on the basis of a preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited measure. How little this abolition of private property is a true appropriation is shown by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization, and the return to the unnatural simplicity of the poor, unrefined man who has no needs and who has not yet even reached the stage of private property, let alone gone beyond it. (For crude communism) the community is simply a community of labor and equality of wages, which are paid out by the communal capital, the community as universal capitalist. Both sides of the relation are raised to an unimaginary universality – labor as the condition in which everyone is placed and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community. […] The first positive abolition of private property – crude communism – is therefore only a manifestation of the vileness of private property trying to establish itself as the positive community. […] By reducing the worker's needs to the paltriest minimum necessary to maintain his physical existence and by reducing his activity to the most abstract mechanical movement. In so doing, the political economist declares that man has no other needs, either in the sphere of activity or in that of consumption. For even this life he calls human life and human existence. By taking as his standard – his universal standard, in the sense that it applies to the mass of men – the worst possible state of privation which life (existence) can know. He turns the worker into a being with neither needs nor senses and turn the worker's activity into a pure abstraction from all activity. Hence any luxury that the worker might enjoy is reprehensible, and anything that goes beyond the most abstract need – either in the form of passive enjoyment or active expression – appears to him as a luxury.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Third Manuscript, Private Property and Labor (1844)
A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls. An appreciable rise in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital. Rapid growth of productive capital calls forth just as rapid a growth of wealth, of luxury, of social needs and social pleasures. Therefore, although the pleasures of the labourer have increased, the social gratification which they afford has fallen in comparison with the increased pleasures of the capitalist, which are inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with the stage of development of society in general. Our wants and pleasures have their origin in society; we therefore measure them in relation to society; we do not measure them in relation to the objects which serve for their gratification. Since they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.
Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital (1847), Chapter 6
>>2899294>(it's called a "Cold War" because labor aristocrats weren't affected by their holocausts, your own words betray your class collaboration!)hey cringelord, most people on here were either single digit age children or not even born yet when the "cold war" ended, and did not live through the "golden" age of unionization rates being high in the US, or there being a strong manufacturing sector with a labor aristocracy in the imperial core. in fact we all grew up in the age after deindustrialization, neoliberalization, suicide by shock therapy (since the US believed in shock therapy so hard, it did it to itself too), outsourcing, privatization, austerity, bank bailouts etc.
you are a dinosaur.
>>2899335>I reject the category of "treatlerite" altogether as one utterly devoid of class-conscious contentI think originally it was meant to refer to a particular attitude where "treatlerites" are workers who'd v00t for Hitler to preserve their access to treats whilst implying it's only firsties who do this
But it's not like these people don't exist in the global south too lul
>>2899293We will need to get dramatically more efficient methods of living moreso than getting more raw materials.
it's a fucking sad joke that the entire western level of quality of life is entirely dependent on everything being disposable and breaking constantly and requiring replacement instead of fixing.
>>2899345Yeah I'd be much more happy as a "Disguising treatlerite firstie" if my stuff lasted longer or was more durable and had longer lasting batteries or able to be repaired instead of disposable junk that breaks in only two years.
>>2899245>How is that even related to what he said? Are you just doing word association?yep basically this is the problem with like 90% of replies i get on leftypol. it's like kids never got taught critical thinking. they latch onto one thing about your post where they don't like the vibes and just change the subject to that while ignoring the logic of what was being said.
>>2899357unironically as a US burgerican I have dreamed of getting my hands on a soviet automobile because they fucking last forever. i would learn stick shift and go without power steering just to have a vehicle that doesn't break down in 5 years.
>>2899345>>2899357Holy shit you faggots are illiterate scum. Efficiency is only half the story, you would still have to cut down consumption. Completely decoupling GDP growth (and thus Westoid consumption) from resource extraction is impossible, regardless of efficiency.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0164733 >>2899508Increasing efficiency would drop GDP you dipstick.
>>2899508and the only way you can seriously drop GDP and increase efficiency is gonna be a national economic planning committee. It directly requires socialism.
your own paper that you cited is effectively agreeing with what you're arguing with.
>However, we also note that GDP has been shown to be a poor proxy for societal wellbeing, something it was never designed to measure, and GDP growth is therefore a questionable long-term societal goal in any case. The mounting costs of “uneconomic growth” [43] suggest that the pursuit of decoupling–if it were possible–in order to sustain GDP growth would be a misguided effort.
>Society can sustainably improve wellbeing, including the wellbeing of its natural assets, but only by discarding the goal of GDP growth in favor of more comprehensive measures of societal wellbeing
>>2899561Those excerpts prove my broader point. Western consumption would have to drop, i.e., the average westerner’s lifestyle would need to change. Total decoupling is ecologically impossible without a reduction in consumption, otherwise you’re advocating for unequal exchange—impoverishing and exploiting the Global South so the West can maintain its unsustainable consumption.
>>2899568
>consumption == quality of lifethat is exactly what the excerpts disagree with.
Nobody here is saying consumption must increase always. What is being said is that lifestyle changes that improve QOL and social wellbeing can come at the same time as reduced consumption.
>>2899562JP mostly comes into play when things that are expended upon usage are made cheaper and more efficient. If something is made more durable over time but it comes at increased cost then it would be an increase of efficiency of resource use but would not cause JP.
Everyone in the world deserves a gaming PC
>>2899597>that is exactly what the excerpts disagree with. Nobody here is saying consumption must increase always. What is being said is that lifestyle changes that improve QOL and social wellbeing can come at the same time as reduced consumption.Nobody disagreed with this though. Westoids don’t want to reduce consumption though—commodity fetishism runs deep in their minds. Consider the whole Western right-wing meme about the WEF forcing people to eat bugs and live in pods. Obviously this is a result of capitalism, but men still make their own history.
>JP mostly comes into play when things that are expended upon usage are made cheaper and more efficient. If something is made more durable over time but it comes at increased cost then it would be an increase of efficiency of resource use but would not cause JP.Not entirely accurate. For example, an expensive fuel-efficient car lowers the cost per mile, but it could encourage more driving and thus a higher total fuel consumption. A more expensive but efficient LED lightbulb potentially incentivizes increased electricity because bills are cheaper. So, as long as the ongoing savings over time outweigh the higher upfront cost and the marginal cost of use, the commodity is still effectively cheaper—thus incentivizing increased overall use and consunption. The upfront price is a red herring.
The necessity of dropping electricity use is overstated and ironically for all the coping third-worldists talking about how the west is going to have to pay, it's the third world showing us the way. Solar power installation has gone up far beyond anyone's predictions because it just works, you do not need any big centralised authority to do it for you. The sun is throwing free energy at us constantly. In the west you can run into this or that regulatory issue mucking everything up, but in the developing world people are buying solar systems out of pocket because they'd quite like to have electricity, actually.
And basically all the FUD is just that: FUD. recycling is trivial and only getting easier. batteries, both chemical and hydroelectric (another great power source btw) are easy too. they work in overcast conditions and at pretty high latitudes, they have no moving parts, they're cheap as can be and only getting cheaper, they are so brilliant that words can hardly do them justice. for all the cope and the seethe and the praying for degrowth, they show that you can decarbonise and still live better than ever before. all the little micro problems here and there are a triviality compared to the fact that for the first time ever we really do have basically free, clean, renewable energy.
>>2899627They want the burger and the big car precisely because you can go homeless at any time, if there’s no social garuantees the trade off is the treats with what disposable income or credit you have. If there’s a real, provable social floor you won’t be able to fall below the calculus changes.
>>2899634I don’t even think it’s electricity use as much as it’s red meat, electronics, and cheap plastic products especially kids toys
>>2899627>fuel efficient caris a matter of making the FUEL cheaper. FUEL is consumed upon use.
>A more expensive but efficient LEDis a matter of making the ELECTRICITY cheaper. ELECTRICITY is consumed upon use.
As I said
>when things that are expended upon usage are made cheaper and more efficient
>Westoids don’t want to reduce consumption thoughThere are plenty of people who are calling for reduction in consumption through calls for things like Right to Repair, hatred of planned obsolescence, and the widespread complaint that "everything breaks too fast/wasn't made like it used to". These are widely resented issues that are actively fought by capitalist corporations in court.
>>2899658The implication is you don’t deserve to have the car or the electronic or the piece of clothing in the first place, the problem is there’s no alternative. You give up your car and your clothes in America and you’re stranded and in jail for public indecency.
>>2899658>>fuel efficient car>is a matter of making the FUEL cheaper. FUEL is consumed upon use.>>A more expensive but efficient LED>is a matter of making the ELECTRICITY cheaper. ELECTRICITY is consumed upon use.Right, but reality doesn’t occur in a vacuum; your point is economically irrelevant at the macro level.
More expensive durable appliances are built to last longer than cheap junk, yes, but they also lead to an increase in consumption. The Industrial Revolution made engines more efficient and more durable, which lowered the total cost of mechanical power across the board, leading to an increase in coal consumption.
>There are plenty of people who are calling for reduction in consumption through calls for things like Right to Repair, hatred of planned obsolescence, and the widespread complaint that "everything breaks too fast/wasn't made like it used to". These are widely resented issues that are actively fought by capitalist corporations in court.Yes, but these are mostly social democrat liberal reforms that do not address the underlying problem. Consumption must be reduced, lifestyles have to change. This is true revolutionary action.
>>2899749Meaning we only wash clothes and have red meat once a week?
>>2895623TIL that at least switzerland, the nordics and ireland aren't imperialist
>>2896000I fucking love the first graph, because it demonstrates that you guys don't even read it.
Yes, 14% of the global population contributes only 14% of the output
>>2898382>the world is not hecking enough, we need like 5 earths n shitMinion: Sire, we have a monopoly on all the best food production machinery
Porky: Excellent
Minion: Sire, we produce food faster than any other agricultural corporations
Porky: Excellent
Minion: Sire, we have destroyed the competition
Porky: Excellent
Minion: Sire, we have fired all the unnecsesary workers
Porky: Excellent
Minion: Sire, we produce food so fast,t hat there is a large surplus, and the prices are plummeting, and the surplus cannot be sold profitably. Should we give away the surplus to those who need it?
Porky: No, we should burn it
Random Communist: WTF, we have to stop this wasteful destruction of food
Random idiot: You fool, you moron, actually the capitalist is right. we would need 5 earths to sustain your treatlerite consumption. it's a good thing he burns the food instead of iving it away. the problem si clearly a problem of consumption, and not one of production and distribution.
>>2898385>How much would this go down if we made fabrics and electronics that were durable and made to last?he won't answer because he thinks the problem is consumption and not waste
>>2899749>jevons paradox means we have to live like medieval paupersdoes it though
>>2897016So… should I support israel if I want to own a house?
>>2898460> If commodities lasted longer, people will just use that money to buy other commodities.Lol so this guy is a yankee zoomer with rich parents
>>2899809It’s both, but current levels of consumption are ecologically unsustainable. Read Hickel.
>>2899808>>2899812>>2899843>>2899851>t. Prolecattle brains rotted by commodity fetishismLess consumption ≠ lower standard of living
>>2898644My man he didn't reply to 3/4 of the questions brought up
>>2899866Too lazy. You guys just repeat the same questions/points anyway, so why waste my time?
>>2899863Which is exactly what I said.
Most of europe has a higer HDI while consuming less already; using the US as a refrence or proxy for general western consumption is nonsense, without even bringing up production.
>>2899868And you still don't reply for the simple reason that you can't without contradicting yourself
so when do we bring up the antinatal question or do we just reject that out of hand and endorse having thirty octodecillion even as we're forced to resort to an ever increasing pace of cannibalism and import carbon from space rocks
>>2899878once women all over the world, especialyl the third world, have abortion, birth control, contraception, sex education, reproductive rights, and a level of feminism at least equal to what Russia had in 1917, the natalism question will take care of itself, because nobody will want more than 1 or 2 children… until porky of course ramps up human cloning to create a new slave caste because AI doesn't work out
>>2899863>Less consumption ≠ lower standard of livingthat's literally what I argued here though:
>>2899082does imperialism really "benefit" the imperial core worker if it just turns them the fat chair people from Wall-E in the long run? Think of a child you're raising. If you spoil them, and give them everything, and never tell them know, they will become an awful person that everyone hates and will be shunned by society. That is what the capitalist class does to the imperial core labor aristocrat, which is why that it is wrong to characterize it as a "benefit" in any terms other than the extreme short term.
>>2899900Surveys show most hetero people want between 2 and 4 kids usually. They just can't afford it.
>>2898559>You keep conflating my latter point about consumption reduction with immiserationIf there is no immiseration then what interest do Western workers have in siding with their bourgeoisie over socialism? You keep talking about how Westerners need to work more and consume less (in the sense of actual consumers rather than just consuming resources through production), and that they have a material interest in supporting imperialism because of this. How can you square this with claiming that they wouldn't be immiserated by a post-capitalist and post-imperialist society?
>>2899905That's their expressed preference, not their revealed preference. People want kids when it comes with zero trade offs whatsoever, but there will always be trade offs. Even if having kids was free, it takes time, and people really really like their leisure time.
The idea that it's because of affordability is risible on the face of it. Within countries, people have less children as their income goes up until they get to the kind of wealth where you can pay someone else to look after your kids for you. Between countries, poorer countries generally have more children. You can explain part of this by kids being an economic asset in the really terrible ones without enforced child labour laws, sure, but only part. The
trade-offs part is much more effective at explaining the paradox within rich countries. The richest and the poorest have the least to lose, while the middle has to make trade-offs between other types of personal fulfilment and childbearing.
speaking personally: i would rather produce one really popular piece of media than have 1-2 kids. >>2899957You’re confusing immiseration with relative privilege. Under capitalism, there would absolutely be immiseration (which is partly why the labor aristocracy effect is so powerful). However, my point is that even if the core hypothetically turned "socialist," it would still have a material incentive to maintain its relative privilege over Earth’s finite resources in order to maintain consumption levels. Unequal exchange and imperialism would thus remain since the core’s consumption cannot be universalized, regardless of efficiency (this is an ecological fact btw). The Western core's use-value requirements, irrelevant of profit motivations, would still override the periphery’s needs, so the former must be curtailed heavily. The USSR maintained unequal exchange with its Central Asian republics and parts of the Global South for precisely this reason.
If the core's relative privilege is materially grounded in unequal ecological exchange, then the core cannot be counted on to voluntarily abolish that privilege as long as it can reliably reproduce it. Its working class may even defend it, as their existing use-value requirements—housing, transport, food, energy, mobility—are materially subsidized by the periphery. Therefore, the rupture has to come from where the system is most violently contradictory, the exploited countries themselves.
>>2900723>it would still have a material incentive to maintain its relative privilege over Earth’s finite resources in order to maintain consumption levels. but we literally throw out half of food under capitalism. if we had socialism it would all get distributed instead of thrown out. meaning "treatlers" could literally eat double without raising muh consoomption one iota. as for shit that isn't required or good for you like alcohol, cigarettes, heroin, cocaine, strippers, etc.
we won't have that stuff
if the west actually had socialist revolutions, production would be planned, and when production is planned to match the needs of the society, and consumption would be therefore limited by that plan. literally everyone ITT saying the socialist west would fight to keep its treats does not understand that all the people who consume the most treats would be defeated, jailed, killed, sent into exile in any revolution worthy of the name. the people carrying out the revolution would perfectly understand the problem of consumption needing to be sustainable . they would do everything in their power to raise productivity, lower consumption, and shift priorities to decrease the amount of labor time needed to produce ESSENTIALS like food ,water, shelter, education, and health care, while de-prioritizing sports cars, speedboats, cocaine, beer, strippers, video games.
>>2899905that number goes down once you have your first one and they turn out to be autistic because your sperm is 5% microplastics
>>2900731The problem isn't that Westerners are treatlerites in the sense of having sports cars, Funko Pops, or DoorDash. Those are easy to condemn and relatively marginal; obviously those things are a problem too, but this is surface-level analysis. The real material basis of Western World's relative privilege is the normalized, unsustainable use-value structure of everyday Western life: car-dependent infrastructure, meat-heavy diets, cheap aviation, air conditioning, imported food, endless logistics, and more. These things are used by large sections of the West's working class as ordinary necessities, not "treats." Planning them away would mean rebuilding the entire spatial and infrastructural organization of life in a way most Westerners would find highly uncomfortable, regardless if it was capitalist or socialist.
>>2900735> car-dependent infrastructure, not good for the treatlers, in fact bad for the treatlers
>meat-heavy diets, resulting in some of the highest colorectal cancer rates on earth outside of south korean kimchi eaters (the salt does it, not the cabbage). plus it costs way more land, water, energy to produce 2000 calories of meat than it does to produce 2000 calories of vegetable. same with 25g of meat protein vs. 25g of vegetable protein. And meat has no fiber. Meat production is overrated. Socialism would greatly reduce meat production to sustainable levels.
>cheap aviation,I go on a plane maybe once every 5-10 years and only if I absolutely need to. It's the bourgeoisie who hop on a private jet when they only need to travel 100 miles.
>air conditioning, ok people just die without that cuz of global warming. idk how to fix this one.
>imported food, the west is a net food producer. in fact a big part of imperialism is what michael hudson noted: the west provides the staple crops, and everyone else is forced to grow export crops that aren't essential for survival because their comprador bourgeoisie took out an IMF loan and that was one of the stipulations
>endless logistics, ok even socialism has logistics
>These things are used by large sections of the West's working class as ordinary necessities, not "treats."the necessities are food, water, shelter, health care, education. everything else is just cope and people are already used to a declining standard of living anyway. the revolutionary generation will be more prepared for it than any other because revolution always wrecks the standard of living.
>Planning them away would mean rebuilding the entire spatial and infrastructural organization of life in a way most Westerners would find highly uncomfortable, regardless if it was capitalist or socialist.revolution is uncomfortable. look. either you want humanity to have a future, or you want to revel in saturnalia while the world burns.
>>2900730>but we literally throw out half of food under capitalism. if we had socialism it would all get distributed instead of thrown out.This is true and nobody denies this. However, not all food is created equal. The Western World would still maintain a relative privilege over the type of food type it consumes and the embedded energy associated with it. Things that are all disproportionately consumed in the West like meat-heavy diets, dairy, processed foods, and year-round imported produce. Even if all food waste were eliminated, a Western diet built on high animal-product consumption would still be ecologically unsustainable and could not be universalized. The issue isn't just "more food for everyone," but a different diet and agricultural system that equally benefits everybody.
>>2900737Real or perceived personal harm isn't the same as relative privilege. The harm you're describing the harm is slow, diffuse, and often individual, while the benefits are immediate, concrete, and socially embedded.
At the end of the day, regardless of the harm associated, a Western worker is still more mobile and enjoys a much higher material abundance than most of the world. Even an occasional flight is an option billions lack. And the West can still be a net food exporter and still import high-footprint animal feed, out-of-season produce, and luxury crops that embody periphery land and water, often from countries whose own food security is undermined by export-oriented agriculture.
Those things, harmful as they can be, still materially places the Western working class above much of the periphery. Losing them will feel like downward mobility.
>>2900723>However, my point is that even if the core hypothetically turned "socialist," it would still have a material incentive to maintain its relative privilege over Earth’s finite resources in order to maintain consumption levels.then explain why other socialist societies went out of their way to improve the production and consumption and general standard of living when they took over other places? The USSR actually parasitized the fuck out of the Baltics, right?
>>2880886People vastly overthink a brief bubble of temporary 1st world prosperity brought about by a mess of conflicting political and material causes that have been slowly evaporating since the invention of the shipping container and the internet.
>>2900746just ignore the TWist trolls, nothing you say will get them to back off. They don’t even actually give a fuck about the third world, they just wanna yell online
typically it leans 2. w/a non-insignificant 1. % but its all super variable and can go either way within that bias
>>2900744>Real or perceived personal harm isn't the same as relative privilegethe relative privilege of being a diabetic 300 lb imbecile in a power chair who wheezes at donald trump ai slop on truth social in between huffing the oxygen mask. i would rather be worked to death on a farm than have the "privilege" of becoming the "treatler" stereotype.
>>2900750NTA, but both the French and Russian revolutions made their states way stronger and followed their pre-revolutionary geopolitical goals. I wonder if Pentagon planners will ever figure that out as they watch their military get hollowed out by financiers.
>>2903598>i would rather be worked to death on a farmNothing is stopping you from giving up your lifestyle of whining on the Internet 24/7 and joining up with the Zapatistas or something.
>>2903686>Pentagon planners will ever figure that out as they watch their military get hollowed out by financiersThis is just pure cope. I wouldn’t be surprised if this talking point is a US military psyop to secure more funding.
>>2904534
class struggle doesn't care about your feelings thoughever
>>2904545Global warming and the worst el nino in 200 years doesn’t care about class struggle
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