/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2927149
>Jesus, you people are such fucking children. Anyway,
You said my interpretation of the data was flawed, I listed my interpretation of the data and asked in what way, you then brought up this retarded meme about baileys, as if that is at all relevant. My interpretation of the data is not some bailey or motte or whatever, it is all I have brought into the discussion, and even that was met with heavy resistance and accusations by you of being "incorrect interpretations", which you cannot even specify at all, despite being entirely accurate.

>You people make mistakes in reasoning in what you extrapolate from the facts, the facts themselves are not in question.
We haven't even gotten to that because people itt have simply been ignoring or denying the facts up until now, when they are suddenly "not in question". Literally Im trying to get you to explain how I'm misinterpreting them and you just wont do it. All everyone has done here is question the data I've brought up and hurl personal insults at me, while acting exasperated about some imagined conclusion I supposedly have drawn from this data

>People get mad at you because you’re exhausting to engage
I get mad at you because despite being wrong on every point, you still act as if you somehow have a better conclusion than the one you imagine me to have. Which you don't even know

>>2927159
Exactly. They need to hate their oppressors more. This kowtowing is fucking pathetic.

>>2927159
Wowie wow wow, AI slop made to appeal to western leftists whose moral crusade for Palestinians amounted to denouncing AES states and having orgies on college campuses. Guess that means it’s okay for the herrenvolk to horde their treats!

>>2927158
>Imperialism gives Northern workers cheaper goods, higher wages, welfare, jobs in the imperial apparatus (like your CAF dumbass), and a sense of national superiority.
So why doesn't that apply to workers in countries with moderate levels of development? Does a Brazilian worker benefit from imperialism because his country occupies a superior position in the imperial hierarchy relative to a Congolese worker?
>I was pushing back against your claim that the Third and First Worlds have the same levels of consciousness.
They don't though. They demonstrate the exact same tendencies towards chauvinism and nationalism, and they constantly allow these to obstruct clear eyed understanding of their class interests. They even produce labour aristocratic tendencies, and the most successful third world communist parties today operate essentially in the same way as the revisionist communist parties of postwar Europe.

>>2927168
>muh sex
I hate islamists

>>2927167
>They need to hate their oppressors more.
I agree, Palestine has capitalists

>>2927172
I can smell your semen caked clothes from here

>>2927173
Yeah, they're called israelis

>>2927175
Soon your mother's pussy will be caked with semen

>>2927180
Pleas enlighten us as to what your campus orgies and little smashie sessions accomplished. How many Palestinians did you save from genocide from the safety and comfort of your intelligentsia campuses? I’ll wait

>>2927181
Exactly 0. Now please explain how many Palestinian lives did you save by shitposting on my Nicaraguan social democrat dating site?

>>2927169
>So why doesn't that apply to workers in countries with moderate levels of development?
It does. Those countries are semi-periphery: above the periphery, but still below the core. Nobody said the imperial hierarchy is binary, that's yet another misrepresentation by you.
>Does a Brazilian worker benefit from imperialism because his country occupies a superior position in the imperial hierarchy relative to a Congolese worker?
Relative to the Congo, yes. Relative to the United States and Western Europe, no.
>They don't though. They demonstrate the exact same tendencies towards chauvinism and nationalism, and they constantly allow these to obstruct clear eyed understanding of their class interests.
You're still equivocating consciousness with action. The South has a more immediate and structurally grounded anti-imperialist consciousness because the South has a more direct experience with imperialism. Nobody said that consciousness will directly translate into action.

>>2925758
Guys were calling this schizo when it was right on the mark, lmfao.

>>2927126
>Reminder that my country wasn't participating in either of those conflicts at the time and I joined a reserve unit and never left my home province.
Damn, so you were just raping local women like this Canadian patriot while your "brothers in arms" did the imperialism. Phew, that's so much better.

>>2925859
>mp4
>pro nazi anti amerikkka
who is this supposed to be for? who is the target audience for this?

>>2927126
Shut the FUCK up you IMPERIALIST KKKRACKER. YOU RAPED LIBYANS. YOU RAPED AFGHANS. YOUR COUNTRY DROWNED THE EARTH IN THE BLOOD OF THE INNOCENT. WHEN THE REVOLUTION COMES YOU WILL NOT BE SPARED, TREATLERITE.

>>2927083
>That's why there are no communist revolutions happening there either.
Burkina Faso and Eritrea literally just happened recently thobeit?

>>2927137
but i'm a redfash dengist zigger and I literally think "muh treatlers RAPE EVERYONE by SIMPLY BREATHING" discourse is the stupidest thing of all. if you can't tell the difference between being a do nothing NEET leeching off of unsustainable imperial core coffers and being the proudest US army soldier determined to make the empire stronger then idk what to tell you. if failure to stop crime is the same as being a criminal then the whole world is guilty for not nuking itself.

>>2927241
Ok but there is literally an eceleb flagfag in this very thread who confessed to serving in the Canadian imperialist military so that's why a lot of people immediately got mad. No one gets mad at you on here if you're just a minimum wage worker.

>>2927242
ok fair.

>>2927190
>Those countries are semi-periphery: above the periphery, but still below the core.
Then we have to conclude that this can produce similar attitudes vis a vis the imperialist system as we see among first world workers. They "benefit" from it in the purely relative sense that there are people worse off than them. Following this logic to its conclusion we would find that only the poorest most oppressed people in the poorest most oppressed countries have any revolutionary potential at all. These people are not the majority.
>The South has a more immediate and structurally grounded anti-imperialist consciousness
I'm not even convinced of that. First off, there is no shortage of comprador consciousness among even ordinary people in the global south. Taking Brazil as an example again, they're on the verge of electing an open Ameriphile fascist, and this isnt the first time. Second, anti-imperialist consciousness isn't the same as class consciousness. It's far more common for workers in the global south to be drawn into the orbit of the national bourgeoisie than to assert an independent proletarian movement. In this sense they're no better than the firsties, the difference is that the bourgeoisie that has captured them has some progressive potential whereas the imperialist bourgeoisie of the West does not. Bourgeois anti-imperialism has some uses of course, but without socialism "anti-imperialism" ultimately devolves into a game of musical chairs, with bourgeois states climbing over each other not in pursuit of liberation but in a race to oppress others.
>Nobody said that consciousness will directly translate into action.
Then what good is it?
>>2927239
Burkina Faso wasn't a socialist revolution, but a national bourgeois one. I don't know enough about Eritrea to comment.

Western leftism is an oxymoron, it’s like saying “israeli” palestinian

>>2927303
This guy claimed he was a Hoxhaist during his war against the Derg.

>>2927190
>Relative to the Congo, yes. Relative to the United States and Western Europe, no.
So it's vibes, ok

>>2927303
>Then we have to conclude that this can produce similar attitudes vis a vis the imperialist system as we see among first world workers.
No, you dumb jarhead. Similar attitudes are not the same as structural position. Northern workers live inside the imperial core, while the Southern privileged strata live inside semi-peripheral states that's dominated by the core. Attitudes may look similar, but their structural interests and constraints diverge; the semi-periphery is still exploited and under the core's thumb.
>They "benefit" from it in the purely relative sense that there are people worse off than them.
You're equivocating on "benefit." A strata of the South may be better off than its compatriots, but that is a positional advantage within a looted economy that's often unstable and dependent on maintaining comprador status with the core.
>Following this logic to its conclusion we would find that only the poorest most oppressed people in the poorest most oppressed countries have any revolutionary potential at all. These people are not the majority.
That's a non-sequitur. Even if privilege can breed reformism, it does not follow that revolutionary potential is inversely proportional to privilege.
>I'm not even convinced of that.
And yet you were convinced to join the armed forces of a homicidal, imperialist shithole regime. I don't care to convince you. If anything, I genuinely want armyfags like you to die.
>First off, there is no shortage of comprador consciousness among even ordinary people in the global south. Taking Brazil as an example again, they're on the verge of electing an open Ameriphile fascist, and this isnt the first time. Second, anti-imperialist consciousness isn't the same as class consciousness. It's far more common for workers in the global south to be drawn into the orbit of the national bourgeoisie than to assert an independent proletarian movement. In this sense they're no better than the firsties, the difference is that the bourgeoisie that has captured them has some progressive potential whereas the imperialist bourgeoisie of the West does not. Bourgeois anti-imperialism has some uses of course, but without socialism "anti-imperialism" ultimately devolves into a game of musical chairs, with bourgeois states climbing over each other not in pursuit of liberation but in a race to oppress others.
None of this refutes the argument that the "South has a more immediate and structurally grounded anti-imperialist consciousness," that is to say, relative to the North, anti-imperialist consciousness in the South arises more directly from the structural position of being imperialized. Again, the asymmetry towards the North in the global economy doesn't make the South more revolutionary, but it makes the conscious terrain qualitatively different.
>Then what good is it?
Because it changes the terrain on which action is organized. Consciousness makes action possible, but it's not action in and of itself.
>>2927349
So contrary to all the evidence, you believe a Brazilian worker is just as privileged as an American or Norwegian worker?

>>2925697
the average western ""leftist"" online is an idpol obsessed libshit that simply enjoys the aesthetics of the ussr and likes to larp as a communist while being hellbent on progressing social issues instead of any form of class issue. They alienate the actual working class they are meant to be working for. I believe this is why the "western leftists" are separated from everyone else, but I could be wrong.

>>2927383 (Me)
>Again, the asymmetry towards the North in the global economy doesn't make the South more revolutionary, but it makes the conscious terrain qualitatively different.
Moreover, the South's ability to organize action is often far weaker than the North's ability to stifle or repress said action. So the relative absence of a sustained, unified anti-imperialist offensive in the South is not entirely surprising. By and large, the North has the South thoroughly suppressed and co-opted. However, this does not refute the claim that anti-imperialist consciousness is more immediately grounded in the South. That's a separate question entirely.

>>2927383
>Northern workers live inside the imperial core, while the Southern privileged strata live inside semi-peripheral states that's dominated by the core
What I'm getting at is that when confronted with the fact that the imperialist system is a gradient rather than a binary, these destictions ultimately become arbitrary. Virtually anything you can say about the first world workers then becomes true of the semi-periphery as well. For example:
>the semi-periphery is still exploited and under the core's thumb
If this relationship is enough to cause the semi-peripheral workers to have revolutionary potential, then why is the exploitation of first world workers by their ruling class not enough to do the same for them?
>A strata of the South may be better off than its compatriots, but that is a positional advantage within a looted economy that's often unstable and dependent on maintaining comprador status with the core
How does this not describe the state of the first world workers? Their advantage is positional, relative, transient, and unstable. In fact their position has consistently been declining for decades even as Western imperialism reached its peak in the post-Cold War period.
>Even if privilege can breed reformism, it does not follow that revolutionary potential is inversely proportional to privilege.
That's exactly my point. Revolutionary potential is not inversely proportional to privilege. This is precisely why I'm not at all convinced that there is no revolutionary potential in the first world as a result of the relatively privileged position of first world workers.
>And yet you were convinced to join the armed forces of a homicidal, imperialist shithole regime.
Personally I think communists should all have military training, but if you think that's a bad idea then that's fine. Take it up with the comintern and their directives I guess.
>None of this refutes the argument that the "South has a more immediate and structurally grounded anti-imperialist consciousness,"
Well that's not exactly what I'm trying to argue. Leaving aside evidence that anti-imperialist consciousness in the global south can often be pretty piss poor (picrel), the point I'm making is that the third world *proletariat* has failed to demonstrate substantially greater revolutionary potential than their first world counterparts since the end of the Cold War. You can argue that anti-imperialist thinking is more widespread there, and on average you're probably correct. However this typically takes the form of a bourgeois anti-imperialism as I said. As such, the third world workers demonstrate the same tendencies towards falling into the orbit of their ruling class, with the only difference being the character of that ruling class itself (i.e. national vs imperialist bourgeois). Revolutionary potential can only exist alongside political independence, and the third world workers are not demonstrating this to any greater degree.

>>2927383
>you believe a Brazilian worker is just as privileged as an American or Norwegian worker?
The three are exploited, yes. An whatever moralism you vomit, Brazilians also do/have.

>>2927401
>>2927383
>Similar attitudes are not the same as structural position
>Attitudes may look similar, but their structural interests and constraints diverge
I'll also add in relation to this that there is no actual structural difference in the position of the first and third world worker, at least in terms of Marxist understandings of class and surplus. These are both populations which are exploited and produce more surplus value than they appropriate. I think your mistake is that you are treating nations as monoliths without taking account of the class differences within them, which is a bourgeois rather than a Marxist approach. The ruling and working classes are not the same thing after all. So even if the US has a structurally different position from Brazil in the world imperialist system, it doesn't follow that American workers have structurally different positions from Brazilian workers. The surplus value that is extracted from Brazil to America accumulates to the American ruling class, not its workers who by definition can only ever consume a portion of the value they themselves produce.

At their core a lot of people are functionally idealists no matter how much they claim to be materialists and think that if they achieve the super duper purest idea of how to do communism then it'll just happen and their psychic communizing energies will take over rather than facing the boring dull reality that this is a numbers came that takes decades.

>>2927429
Are you describing leftcoms and ultras?

>>2927401
>What I'm getting at is that when confronted with the fact that the imperialist system is a gradient rather than a binary, these destictions ultimately become arbitrary.
Gradient doesn't mean arbitrary. Gradience allows the definition to be more precise, not that it loses meaning.
>Virtually anything you can say about the first world workers then becomes true of the semi-periphery as well.
No, it means there can be overlap. Overlap does not collapse the asymmetry into sameness.
>then why is the exploitation of first world workers by their ruling class not enough to do the same for them?
Because the imperial core workers' exploitation can be mediated by imperial rent and a state with the capacity to co-opt, whereas the semi-periphery has less capacity. Periphery and semi-periphery workers face exploitation by their own national bourgeoisie plus imperialist super-exploitation and structural subordination. Core workers may be exploited, but they are not super-exploited in the same way.
>How does this not describe the state of the first world workers? Their advantage is positional, relative, transient, and unstable.
Because one depends on serving the core directly; the other is embedded in the core's institutional architecture.
>This is precisely why I'm not at all convinced that there is no revolutionary potential in the first world as a result of the relatively privileged position of first world workers.
Privilege can breed reformism that blunts revolutionary potential to the point where its influence is marginal, but that doesn't mean it eliminates revolutionary potential entirely. You're still arguing a strawman 5 replies in.
>Personally I think communists should all have military training
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. And what have you done with that military training other than being a foot soldier for imperialist psychopaths? "Uhhhh, I'm in a socialist gun club where we do nothing." Faggot.
>Take it up with the comintern and their directives I guess.
Which comintern directive says to partake in the slaughter of millions of Afghans and Iraqis?
>Leaving aside evidence that anti-imperialist consciousness in the global south can often be pretty piss poor (picrel)
Are you retarded? Look at the middle chart. How is that a "piss poor" anti-imperialist consciousness? That is a majoritarian recognition of US supremacy. The fact they don't trust Maduro is a separate political question entirely.
>the point I'm making is that the third world *proletariat* has failed to demonstrate substantially greater revolutionary potential than their first world counterparts since the end of the Cold War
Granted it's nowhere at the level it should be, but this is demonstrably false:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_uprising
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalite%E2%80%93Maoist_insurgency#Peak_of_insurgency_(2000s)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_People%27s_Army
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Armed_Forces_of_Colombia
Where are the Northern equivalents?
>However this typically takes the form of a bourgeois anti-imperialism as I said. As such, the third world workers demonstrate the same tendencies towards falling into the orbit of their ruling class, with the only difference being the character of that ruling class itself (i.e. national vs imperialist bourgeois).
Yes, and? The character of that ruling class matters. The Southern national bourgeoisie is itself under the thumb of imperialism. It is thus not the main enemy, but rather a contradictory, unstable ally. In the North, the imperialist bourgeoisie is the main enemy, and the working class is structurally integrated into its project. Simply pointing out this dynamic doesn't mean we're claiming Northern workers evil or incapable of revolution, but it does mean their path to revolutionary politics requires breaking with their own material privileges in a way most Northern workers would find uncomfortable, even if that break is for their own good.
>Revolutionary potential can only exist alongside political independence
That's circular. Revolutionary potential is precisely the potential to achieve political independence from the bourgeoisie. If you require political independence as a precondition, you've defined away the concept. In the South, the national bourgeoisie's conflict with imperialism creates space that workers can exploit. In the North, it is the exact opposite.
>>2927421
Nobody is treating nations as monoliths. If anything, you're the one treating the global working class as a monolith. American workers aren't directly pocketing Brazilian surplus value; however, imperialism subsidizes the Western workers' wages, cheap commodities, and state capacity. Surplus extracted from the South accumulates first to Northern capital who then redistribute part of it. The fact that you cited Jason Hickel earlier, who empirically demonstrates appropriation flows from South to North, and then proceed to argue this nonsense is palpable. A different structural position in the global economy does not contradict class relations.

>>2927415
>The three are exploited, yes.
The question was who is more privileged, not whether exploitation exists, retard.

>>2927458
>Because the imperial core workers' exploitation can be mediated by imperial rent and a state with the capacity to co-opt
How does this not also apply to workers in the semi-periphery? The fact that their countries are less severely exploited means that their wages are also subsidized by the more severe exploitation of the far periphery. So then don't they have an interest in maintaining the subordination of countries below them? Why would a Brazilian worker support the liberation of the Congo if it leads to their own wages taking a hit, costs going up, etc.?
>Core workers may be exploited, but they are not super-exploited in the same way.
There is no structural or qualitative difference between exploitation and super-exploitation. This is simply a difference of degree, and effectively substituting a Marxist understanding of class interest for a liberal one. It's shifting the focus to income at the expense of relations of production. Once again, every factor you identify as a reason why the first world workers supposedly have interests that deviate from those of the third world is applicable to the semi periphery, but to a lesser degree. In both cases, wages are subsidized by the more intense exploitation of those below them. In both cases we see a lack of political independence and a tendency to fall into the orbit of their ruling class. I see no qualitative difference here, and the overlap in political tendencies is strongly indicative of the similarity of their structural position in this whole rotten system.
>Because one depends on serving the core directly; the other is embedded in the core's institutional architecture.
Concessions to workers in the first world are by no means embedded in anything. The ruling class in the North has spent decades increasing the rate of exploitation and dismantling those concessions.
>How is that a "piss poor" anti-imperialist consciousness?
Its piss poor because they watched the US execute an Operation Condor style coup in Venezuela and literally cheered it on.
>Where are the Northern equivalents?
Black Panthers, Young Patriots, RAF, IRA, FLQ, Italian Red Brigades. These movements are all dead by now, but all the ones you named are in the process of dying. I'd say that the situation in most of the third world is comparable to the situation in the West about 50 years ago. This is also shown by the state of their electoral communist parties (e.g. CPI, SACP) which have by now degenerated into the same sort of revisionism as the Italian and French parties of the 60s and 70s. This points not to a fundamental difference, but a state of arrested development when it comes to third world bourgeois states developing the tools to manage class conflict. This is to be expected considering they are less developed economically and many of them are less than 100 years old.
>the national bourgeoisie's conflict with imperialism creates space that workers can exploit. In the North, it is the exact opposite.
I don't think this has been demonstrated at all. In fact historically speaking, it's extremely rare for a successful socialist revolution to follow a national bourgeois one. The only example I can think of is China. Certainly there is no current national bourgeois state with a serious revolutionary party successfully maneuvering towards power. If anything it's far more common for the natbourg to use the communists as dupes and then turn on them. The most successful revolutions are those where the communists take leadership of the national liberation struggle, which of course requires the proletariat and peasants to have a level of political independence that they are not currently demonstrating.

>>2927467
>How does this not also apply to workers in the semi-periphery? The fact that their countries are less severely exploited means that their wages are also subsidized by the more severe exploitation of the far periphery. So then don't they have an interest in maintaining the subordination of countries below them?
It does, just not to the same degree and under completely different structural constraints. The semi-periphery is a junior partner of imperialism while simultaneously squeezed by the imperial core. The primary beneficiary is the imperial core, and secondarily the semi-peripheral comprador strata. Some semi-periphery workers may get the crumbs, but it's not comparable to the same as structural subsidy imperial core workers receive.
>Why would a Brazilian worker support the liberation of the Congo if it leads to their own wages taking a hit, costs going up, etc.?
Your premise is incorrect because the actual cause of the semi-periphery's wage repression is by and large its dependency on the core.
>There is no structural or qualitative difference between exploitation and super-exploitation. This is simply a difference of degree, and effectively substituting a Marxist understanding of class interest for a liberal one.
The periphery lacks the technological and monopolistic advantages of the core. That is qualitatively a different relation of production. Sure, if you want to be a vulgar retard and say it's all ultimately comes down to S/V but that ignores the material reality of the global economy.
>It's shifting the focus to income at the expense of relations of production.
No, it isn't retard. The core worker's relation to capital is mediated by the imperial state; the periphery worker's is mediated by dependency. Those are global relations of production, not just "income." The difference in income is just one of the end-results.
>Once again, every factor you identify as a reason why the first world workers supposedly have interests that deviate from those of the third world is applicable to the semi periphery, but to a lesser degree.
The semi-periphery has some buffer, but not enough to stabilize capitalism, whereas the core has enough to stabilize. That is a qualitative difference in political possibility: reformism versus permanent instability. Of course, you'll say "uhhh the core is unstable too," but the claim was never that the core is stable in an absolute sense: the claim is that the core has the structural buffers sufficient to stabilize the capitalist mode of production relative to what it otherwise would have been without imperialism. Rather then getting rid of capitalism's instabilty, the core exports it to the periphery. The core then subverts and wreaks havoc in the periphery to keep it down and incapable of initiating action. This is the true nature of modern day American imperialism: control via chaos. Indeed, aside from the MIC and narrow capital interest groups, the Northern bourgeoisie at the aggregate level actually benefits very little whenever the United States decides to tear some random peripheral country to shit.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/10/26/is-there-a-payoff-from-u-s-intervention-to-protect-u-s-assets-we-found-few-trade-benefits/
American imperialism is a lot more sinister than just "uhhhh bourgy need money, teehee." These psychopaths, armed with the largest and most sophisticated military in history backed by a budget of trillions of dollar, are deliberately maximizing chaos across the world in a way they can control and morons like you will still say "bruhh the THIRD WORLD ain't doing shit!1!!"
>In both cases we see a lack of political independence and a tendency to fall into the orbit of their ruling class.
Bourgeois hegemony is universal under the capitalist mode of production, so of course both fall into the orbit of their ruling class. The question is which ruling class, and what does that orbit look like? The core worker orbits the imperial bourgeoisie; the semi-peripheral worker orbits a comprador and sub-imperial bourgeoisie; and the peripheral worker orbits a thoroughly dominated comprador bourgeoisie. Of course, this isn't the inevitable consciousness of every worker, but it more or less accurately describes the gravitational pull on working-class politics in the capitalist mode of production.
>I see no qualitative difference here, and the overlap in political tendencies is strongly indicative of the similarity of their structural position in this whole rotten system.
You also apparently saw no qualitative difference between joining an imperialist military force versus just practicing at a gun club or some thing, so your judgement doesn't mean much. An overlap in tendencies does not mean identical structural positions. The semi-periphery is a junior partner; the core is the monopolist. The core worker is stabilized by imperialism; the semi-peripheral worker is destabilized by dependency.
>Concessions to workers in the first world are by no means embedded in anything. The ruling class in the North has spent decades increasing the rate of exploitation and dismantling those concessions.
Yes, and the erosion of those benefits materially conditions the consciousness behind the recent increase of left- and right-wing populist reformist sentiments in the West over any genuine revolutionary action. The conflict in the North by and large is over access and distribution over these imperial super-profits.
>Its piss poor because they watched the US execute an Operation Condor style coup in Venezuela and literally cheered it on.
Where does it say they "literally cheered it on?" Your own data shows that the majority explicitly rejected the US assuming control of the Venezuelan Govt. You claimed it showed "evidence that anti-imperialist consciousness in the global south can often be pretty piss poor," when it demonstrates the complete opposite. You're strawmanning their opposition of Maduro as evidence of supporting American imperialism.
>Black Panthers, Young Patriots, RAF, IRA, FLQ, Italian Red Brigades. These movements are all dead by now, but all the ones you named are in the process of dying.
Those aren't post-Cold War, you fucking goalpost moving retard. You said that the "third world *proletariat* has failed to demonstrate substantially greater revolutionary potential than their first world counterparts since the end of the Cold War." I gave you four post-Cold War examples to show how dumb that statement was. When I asked for equivalents in the North, you give me stuff from the 1960s and 1970s.
FARC controlled around 40 percent of Colombia during the late 1990s and early 2000s; the Naxalites were active in nearly one-third of India in the late 2000s; the Nepali Maoists overthrew the monarchy in 2006; and the New People's Army in the Philippines have been running of the longest-running communist insurgencies.
>I don't think this has been demonstrated at all. In fact historically speaking, it's extremely rare for a successful socialist revolution to follow a national bourgeois one.
Strawman. No one said socialism must follow a national bourgeois revolution, but that the national bourgeoisie's conflict has the potential to create a crisis that can be exploited. China, Vietnam, Cuba, and Yugoslavia are all examples of this exact dynamic where a non-proletariat national crisis fractured the ruling clique and created the opening for communist-led revolution. Even the Bolshevik's October Revolution was made possible by the space created by the February Revolution, which the Bolsheviks had very little to do with.
>Certainly there is no current national bourgeois state with a serious revolutionary party successfully maneuvering towards power.
The subjective factor, i.e., revolutionary organization and political independence, is quite weak in the South, but that doesn't mean the objective space has vanished. It means it is failing to be capitalized on. Why this is the case has already been discussed: >>2927389 >>2927383

>>2927463
>The question was who is more privileged
Bro SJW lmao

>>2927525
>GDP^2/pop
what a weird metric

>>2927608
>>2927613
>Muh no args
What a weird cope

>>2927525
Honestly Anon at this point I'm wondering what is even left of the "third worldist" argument you're trying to make. If you admit that large sections of the global south are themselves subsidized by imperialism, that their workers display similar labour aristocratic and revisionist tendencies, that first world workers retain revolutionary potential, that they would benefit from socialism, then what exactly are you even arguing about? What exactly are you disagreeing with me on?
>Those are global relations of production, not just "income."
The relations of production are the same, the only difference is the rate of exploitation. A highly exploited worker does not occupy a different position in relations of production than a less exploited one.
>the claim is that the core has the structural buffers sufficient to stabilize the capitalist mode of production relative to what it otherwise would have been without imperialism
I wouldn't necessarily deny this, but what I'm getting at is that these buffers are far stronger and more prevalent outside the imperial core than many people seem willing to acknowledge. I think the explanation for this is that Lenin was correct in identifying the social formations that suppressed working class militancy (mainly the labour aristocracy), but was wrong about imperialism being necessary to sustain them. A labour aristocracy exists throughout much of the third world and operates in the exact same way as its northern counterparts. In other words, what was in Lenin's day an exclusive feature of imperialist countries turned out to be a universal feature of capitalist countries, at least once they surpassed a certain minimum level of development.
>are deliberately maximizing chaos across the world in a way they can control
Yeah and they're doing it to their own workers too. Once again you're talking as if these are unique features of colonized countries and not universal features of capitalism. This is your main issue I think, the actual qualitative differences between the two are very small, and mostly exist in the relationship between the bourgeoisie of the North and South rather than the workers. What you're describing is differences of degree of various mechanisms of bourgeois control which are in fact universal, and even those quantitative differences are shrinking as the West declines and the multipolarity elevates much of the semi-periphery. I'd say that the most positive trend of multipolarity is the flattening of any difference in short term interests between workers of various countries.
>The conflict in the North by and large is over access and distribution over these imperial super-profits.
If you admit that northern workers are exploited then you must also admit that all of their consumption in the form of wages and benefits is furnished by their own productive output. Were this not the case then they wouldn't be exploited. You're deliberately framing this in a way that demonizes other workers and undermines the inherent unity of their class interests. In reality what's happening is that workers in the first world pay for their standards of living with their own labour. It's the capitalist profits that are subsidized by imperialism, whereas the workers pay for everything themselves. That being the case, then the struggle of the first world proletariat is a struggle to reclaim their stolen surplus, nothing else.
>Where does it say they "literally cheered it on?" Your own data shows that the majority explicitly rejected the US assuming control of the Venezuelan Govt.
It shows that a majority of people in surveyed countries approved of the coup, they simply preferred that the Venezuelan opposition (i.e. US puppets) run the country instead of the US directly.
>I gave you four post-Cold War examples to show how dumb that statement was. When I asked for equivalents in the North, you give me stuff from the 1960s and 1970s.
Fair enough, but by now pretty much all those movements are dead. I'll reiterate my statement that the third world is simply experiencing a delay in terms of development of class struggle in line with its delay in economic development. At this point it resembles the dynamics at play in Europe in the 60s and 70s with a smattering of social democratic parties, a handful of big revisionist communist parties, and a couple dying militant movements quickly sinking into irrelevance. This is hardly a promising picture for third world revolution. The downward trend is obvious, and you need a theory with better explanatory power than the standard ideas about imperialism, labour aristocracy, etc. The discrepancy between working class militancy in the 20th century was not inherent to imperialist capitalism, but a result of the fact that the third world had simply not developed the tools necessary to maintain stable bourgeois rule. They are now well on their way to doing so.
>The subjective factor, i.e., revolutionary organization and political independence, is quite weak in the South, but that doesn't mean the objective space has vanished
I would argue the same thing about the global north. Objective space remains, and the relatively high living standards don't erase that, especially since these come with countervailing tendencies that make bourgeois rule in this countries less stable, not more. Case in point, French students are rioting about poor education funding in classrooms, poor conditions, etc. I'm sure you'd agree that whatever the state of French schools, they're a million times better than what you see in Nigeria or Egypt. And yet the French riot over conditions far better than what Egyptians tolerate every day. These buffers are in reality a double edged sword, since they lower tolerance for decline. Poverty and perceptions of it is in many ways socially conditioned as Marx observed.

>>2927697
>the "third worldist" argument you're trying to make
Nobody is making a "third worldist" argument because nobody here has advocated for campism towards the "third world." People are simply pointing out the asymmetry in the global political economy and how that asymmetry affects the proletariat's consciousness in the North and South. You are still arguing in bad faith and misrepresenting people. Why is that?
>If you admit that large sections of the global south are themselves subsidized by imperialism
Nobody admitted that, jarhead. I said a narrow strata in the South benefits but remains dependent. The net flow of surplus value is still from South to North. If "large sections" of the South were subsidized by imperialism, the net flow would be reversed or at least not as one directional. You are obfuscating by taking an outlier and using it to erase the general rule.
>that their workers display similar labour aristocratic and revisionist tendencies
And you're STILL conflating similar tendencies to structural position. A Southern worker who is co-opted by their national bourgeoisie is co-opted within a state that is itself squeezed by imperialism. A Northern worker who is co-opted is co-opted within the heart of the imperial core, within a state that projects power and extracts imperial rent. The tendency is similar, but the material basis and consequences are fundamentally different.
>that first world workers retain revolutionary potential, that they would benefit from socialism
The terrain of that revolutionary potential is fundamentally different. The "benefit from socialism" does not erase the fact that Northern workers have a material stake in the imperial system in the short and medium term.
>then what exactly are you even arguing about? What exactly are you disagreeing with me on?
Everything, faggot.
>The relations of production are the same, the only difference is the rate of exploitation. A highly exploited worker does not occupy a different position in relations of production than a less exploited one.
Why did you truncate my reply? If you're not a vulgar retard, the relations of production are absolutely different.
<The periphery lacks the technological and monopolistic advantages of the core. That is qualitatively a different relation of production. Sure, if you want to be a vulgar retard and say it's all ultimately comes down to S/V but that ignores the material reality of the global economy.
<The core worker's relation to capital is mediated by the imperial state; the periphery worker's is mediated by dependency.
The imperialist superprofit link to the Northern worker's wage and welfare is absolutely a difference in the conditions of reproduction of labor-power.
>Yeah and they're doing it to their own workers too. Once again you're talking as if these are unique features of colonized countries and not universal features of capitalism.
When did I say it wasn't a universal feature? Go on and quote me fully instead of being a strawmanning faggot. Here's what I said:
<Of course, you'll say "uhhh the core is unstable too," but the claim was never that the core is stable in an absolute sense: the claim is that the core has the structural buffers sufficient to stabilize the capitalist mode of production relative to what it otherwise would have been without imperialism. Rather then getting rid of capitalism's instabilty, the core exports it to the periphery. The core then subverts and wreaks havoc in the periphery to keep it down and incapable of initiating action.
The core state can manage chaos at home because it has imperial rent, monetary sovereignty, and fiscal capacity. In doing so, it exports much of capitalism's chaos on to the South. Thus, the same universal drive to accumulate capital produces different outcomes depending on where you are in the global division of labor.
>This is your main issue I think, the actual qualitative differences between the two are very small, and mostly exist in the relationship between the bourgeoisie of the North and South rather than the workers.
You're just making shit up at this point. Jason Hickel, the guy you cited at the start of this exchange, empirically proves the exact opposite of what you're spewing here. Others have also supplied copious amounts of data that demonstrate the massive structural asymmetry between the Northern and Southern proletariat. The core worker's wage and political rights are subsidized by imperial superprofits; the periphery worker's wage is suppressed by super-exploitation and dependency. How can you honestly sit here and say that there is very little difference between the state of Guatemalan laborers, whose wages often fall below the cost of reproducing labor power, and American workers?
>What you're describing is differences of degree of various mechanisms of bourgeois control which are in fact universal, and even those quantitative differences are shrinking as the West declines and the multipolarity elevates much of the semi-periphery. I'd say that the most positive trend of multipolarity is the flattening of any difference in short term interests between workers of various countries.
This isn't true at all, lol. The gap between North and South is only widening.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2026.2659076
<The conventional narrative in international development holds that poorer countries are “catching up” with richer countries through the process of capitalist growth. This paper assesses this claim using data on inequality in GDP per capita for 1960-2023, processed using three different methods for currency comparison. We find that convergence narratives are not supported by empirical evidence. In fact, the opposite is occurring: the absolute income gap between the core (‘advanced economies’) and the periphery (‘emerging and developing economies’) has increased since 1960, by 170–270% depending on the currency concept. The core has captured 4–10x more income than the periphery over this period. Even in relative terms, convergence is not occurring; for most regions and most countries in the periphery their relative position vis-à-vis the core has deteriorated. Core–periphery inequality worsened particularly during the period of market liberalisation in the 1980s and 1990s. China is the only peripheral region that has meaningfully improved its relative position, but its income remains just 22–38% of the core level. While some peripheral countries have been integrated into the core for geopolitical reasons, an increasing majority of the world population is peripheralised. These results support the insights of world-systems analysts who argue that convergence is unlikely to occur within the existing structure of the capitalist world economy. Real development in the South will require strategies of industrial policy and planning to increase economic sovereignty, develop South-South trade, and delink from the imperial core.
>If you admit that northern workers are exploited then you must also admit that all of their consumption in the form of wages and benefits is furnished by their own productive output. Were this not the case then they wouldn't be exploited.
That's a non-sequitur. You can be exploited in production and subsidized in reproduction. Being exploited does not require autarky in consumption. That makes no sense.
>You're deliberately framing this in a way that demonizes other workers and undermines the inherent unity of their class interests.
Analyzing material interests does not demonize anybody. I know you want to have this strawman so bad, but it's no cigar. If anything, the unity of the global working class is undermined by imperialism itself, not by pointing out its effects. Treating the global working class as a monolith ignores the material reality of the world political economy.
>In reality what's happening is that workers in the first world pay for their standards of living with their own labour. It's the capitalist profits that are subsidized by imperialism, whereas the workers pay for everything themselves.
No, that's not true at all either. Much of the North's standard of living is sustained by unequal exchange that transfers massive amounts of surplus value from the South to the North.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49687-y
>That being the case, then the struggle of the first world proletariat is a struggle to reclaim their stolen surplus, nothing else.
If the struggle of the Northern proletariat is "nothing else" than to reclaim their stolen surplus, without challenging the imperial system that subsidizes their standard of living, then that struggle will tend to become a fight to preserve their relative privilege in the global economy. Congratulations, jarhead, you've succinctly described everything wrong with "Western leftism."
>It shows that a majority of people in surveyed countries approved of the coup
And? That doesn't necessarily equivocate with supporting imperialism. They agree with a particular outcome regarding a transnational inter-bourgeois conflict (Maduro's disposal), not that the US should imperialize Venezuela. If anything, the vast majority of people in those countries know the US could use the "drug trafficking" pretext to invade them next. That's not a "piss poor" anti-imperialist consciousness.
>they simply preferred that the Venezuelan opposition (i.e. US puppets) run the country instead of the US directly
So? You're demanding ideological purity by expecting the average person to be aware of the US connection to the opposition. Also, "Venezuelan opposition" is so vague that it can basically be interpreted as anybody who opposes the Maduro Govt, not just the US-backed compradors. A big problem with surveys like these is that you can get drastically different  responses just by how the survey is framed and worded. The bottom line is that when given a choice between local versus foreign governance, they chose the local option.
>Fair enough, but by now pretty much all those movements are dead.
First you said that the "third world *proletariat* has failed to demonstrate substantially greater revolutionary potential than their first world counterparts since the end of the Cold War." When that was proven to be false, you shifted the goalposts to your new position that "uhhh, those are all just dead now anyways."
But that's not even really true either. Zapatistas still govern autonomous territories; FARC signed a peace deal in 2016 but splinter factions are still fighting, you also have the ELN which never signed the deal; and the Naxalites and NPA have been fighting for over 50 years, despite recent military defeats. Social movements ebb and flow. The question is whether the structural conditions that produce them have disappeared, and the answer is no.
>I'll reiterate my statement that the third world is simply experiencing a delay in terms of development of class struggle in line with its delay in economic development.
There is no universal sequence of development that every country must pass through. This is a linear, stagist view of Marxism. The Global South is not just a "delayed" version of the Global North; by and large, the South occupies a subordinate position to the Global North under the same global system. It's not even true either, as the gap between North and South is only widening. Indeed, the Global South can never truly "catch up" to the North under the capitalist mode of production because the North's levels of consumption literally cannot be universalized as a matter of entropy, i.e., there are literally not enough resources on the planet.
>At this point it resembles the dynamics at play in Europe in the 60s and 70s with a smattering of social democratic parties, a handful of big revisionist communist parties, and a couple dying militant movements quickly sinking into irrelevance. This is hardly a promising picture for third world revolution.
This analogy is retarded. Western Europe in the 1970s and 1960s was part of the imperial core that enjoyed the height of the postwar WW2 boom funded by imperial rent and Bretton Woods. That's not comparable to the South at all, which experiences routine debt crises, structural adjustment, imperial destabilization, war, and sanctions. Like are you genuinely trolling, lmfao?
>The downward trend is obvious, and you need a theory with better explanatory power than the standard ideas about imperialism, labour aristocracy, etc.
You haven't evidenced why it's "obvious." Strawmen and false equivalences aren't going to cut it.
>The discrepancy between working class militancy in the 20th century was not inherent to imperialist capitalism, but a result of the fact that the third world had simply not developed the tools necessary to maintain stable bourgeois rule. They are now well on their way to doing so.
You have it backwards. The tools of stable, independent bourgeois rule in the Third World is precisely what imperialism denies. What it supplies instead is a dependent and coercive rule that's serves the imperial core's material interests.
>I would argue the same thing about the global north. Objective space remains, and the relatively high living standards don't erase that
Nobody said otherwise; however, the character of that space is of a different nature. In the South, it is defined by super-exploitation and dependency. In the North, it is defined by the distribution of imperial rent and fragility of the social wage.
>especially since these come with countervailing tendencies that make bourgeois rule in this countries less stable, not more.
That's an overstatement. The imperial buffer is absolutely a stabilizing force in the short and medium term.
>Case in point, French students are rioting about poor education funding in classrooms, poor conditions, etc. I'm sure you'd agree that whatever the state of French schools, they're a million times better than what you see in Nigeria or Egypt. And yet the French riot over conditions far better than what Egyptians tolerate every day.
Riots/protests such as these are often defensive, reformist struggles. They demand the restoration of the social wage, not the abolition of the imperial system that helps sustain it. In fact, such struggles often implicitly demand a larger share of imperial rent.
>These buffers are in reality a double edged sword, since they lower tolerance for decline.
Sure, but that doesn't determine the resolution. A crisis in and of itself does not automatically produce revolutionary politics. Indeed, the numerous crises in the North have produced very little in the way of revolutionary consciousness. It didn't happen during the Great Depression; it didn't happen during the anti-Vietnam War movement; it didn't happen during the 1970s oil spike; it didn't happen during the Grand Recession; and it didn't happen during COVID-19.

TL;DR, your pastiche of strawmen, non-sequiturs, false equivalences, and empirical falsehoods does not disprove the asymmetrical reality of the global political economy, and how that asymmetry materially mediates consciousness in the North and South in fundamentally different ways. Acknowledging this is not demonization of Northern workers.
P.S. kill yourself.

>>2927629
Is it supposed to be an argument?

>>2928007
>People are simply pointing out the asymmetry in the global political economy and how that asymmetry affects the proletariat's consciousness in the North and South.
But when you are presented with the fact that this asymmetry is in fact actually quite minor and that the Global South has for decades been unable to produce a serious challenge to bourgeois power you just handwave it away. Whatever explanation you give for the tendencies of first world workers has to also account for the tendencies of those in the third world, and those tendencies are looking increasingly similar.
>Nobody admitted that, jarhead
Its the logical conclusion for your understanding of how Northern workers "benefit" from imperialism, which boils down to pointing out that more intense exploitation in the South allows for less intense exploitation in the North. If that's the case, then it also follows that more intense exploitation in the far periphery allows for less intense exploitation in the semi-periphery. This means that semi-peripheral workers as a whole "benefit" from imperialism through the exact same mechanisms, but to a lesser degree.
>And you're STILL conflating similar tendencies to structural position.
A basic materialist understanding of the relationship between material conditions and consciousness should lead us to conclude that if they are exhibiting similar political tendencies that this is indicative of similar structural positions. Or alternatively, that there is another explanation for these tendencies unrelated to imperialism which can explain their prevalence in both the periphery and core. If not, then where are these tendencies in the Global South coming from?
>Why did you truncate my reply? If you're not a vulgar retard, the relations of production are absolutely different.
So your position is that workers in the North and South aren't even members of the same class? Because if they occupy different positions in the relations of production then this is what we would have to conclude. In fact they do not, they are all proletarians. If they sell their labour power and are exploited through this, then they occupy the same class position. Variations (even large ones) in the rate of exploitation don't create a class distinction. To say they do is to adhere to a liberal understanding of class in terms of income.
>You're just making shit up at this point. Jason Hickel, the guy you cited at the start of this exchange, empirically proves the exact opposite of what you're spewing here
No he doesn't. Hickel does not claim a qualitative difference between workers in the North and South, he doesn't claim they are members of separate classes or have fundamentally different relations to the means of production. He identifies the immense quantitative differences in rates of exploitation. In fact he is even more general than that, speaking mainly of the flow of wealth between entire states and economies rather than analyzing their distribution within individual countries.
>This isn't true at all, lol. The gap between North and South is only widening
Once again you are conflating "North and South" for Northern workers and Southern workers, as if their interests are necessarily aligned with their bourgeois states and economies. Its actually a profoundly bourgeois perspective that doesn't account for class differences in either the North or South. The flattening I'm talking about is happening due to the decline of first world proletarian living standards, not the closing of the overall gap between the North and South. As Northern experience increasing rates of exploitation, the quantitative differences between themselves and those of the South necessarily decline.
>Being exploited does not require autarky in consumption
Being exploited requires you to appropriate from the productive process less than you contribute to it. Therefore whatever a Northern worker consumes in whatever format (wages, benefits, social programs, etc) must necessarily be less than their productive output. Therefore their own production accounts for the entirety of their consumption, and they are subsidized by nobody. The people receiving the subsidy are their bosses, who then find it more tolerable to allow Northern workers to receive back a greater portion of their own output. Of course imperialism is what allows this, but you are erroneously framing it as Northern workers getting a piece of the imperialist surplus, rather than a bigger piece of their own surplus. This framing obscures the fact that the imperialist bourgeoisie remains the ultimate enemy of both, and assigns guilt to Northern workers for wanting (or even just having) a bigger piece of their own product.
>Much of the North's standard of living is sustained by unequal exchange that transfers massive amounts of surplus value from the South to the North.
However massive it may be, the consumption of Northern workers cannot exceed their own productive output. If that were the case then their bosses would be losing money on them. Even if that value is accruing to northern *economies* (i.e. bourgeoisie) this doesn't mean they are accruing to the workers.
>If the struggle of the Northern proletariat is "nothing else" than to reclaim their stolen surplus, without challenging the imperial system that subsidizes their standard of living, then that struggle will tend to become a fight to preserve their relative privilege in the global economy.
You're taking that statement way too literally. I'm simply pointing out that any struggle waged by workers to reclaim their own surplus is not a struggle to obtain a portion of imperial plunder.
>And? That doesn't necessarily equivocate with supporting imperialism
Come on man, if you saw those kinds of opinion polls in Europe or the US you would trumpet it as irrefutable evidence that Northerners are all unreformable treatlers. You can't just handwave away evidence that flies directly in the face of your assertions about more advanced forms of class and anti-imperialist consciousness in the South. These people saw the US attack their neighbour, kidnap its president, and impose a puppet government and they cheered for it. And it's not just that, Brazil is on the verge of electing another Bolsonaro. Argentina elected Millei. Clearly open Ameriphile fascists are entirely capable of winning elections in the global South.
>Indeed, the Global South can never truly "catch up" to the North under the capitalist mode of production
I'm not talking about catching up in the sense of eliminating the gap. Rather I'm talking about tendencies that begin to emerge once a state has surpassed certain markers of development in absolute terms. Things like the degree of urbanization, proletarianization, industrialization, etc. What I'm suggesting is that features which were originally thought to be unique to imperialist countries (e.g. labour aristocracy) have actually proved to be effectively universal once states surpass a certain threshold of development. They only appeared unique to imperialism in the 20th century because the third world had not yet passed that point, but they are now doing this. This is a better explanation than the one you are offering because it accounts for why Southern workers increasingly exhibit the same tendencies and attitudes you criticize in Northern workers and attribute to imperialism.
>First you said that the "third world *proletariat* has failed to demonstrate substantially greater revolutionary potential than their first world counterparts since the end of the Cold War." When that was proven to be false, you shifted the goalposts to your new position that "uhhh, those are all just dead now anyways."
Sure, I should have been more precise in my description. Some of these movements persisted after the Cold War, but that doesn't alter my overall point, which is that they are universally in severe decline and nowhere close to taking power.
>This analogy is retarded. Western Europe in the 1970s and 1960s was part of the imperial core that enjoyed the height of the postwar WW2 boom funded by imperial rent and Bretton Woods. That's not comparable to the South at all, which experiences routine debt crises, structural adjustment, imperial destabilization, war, and sanctions
It's precisely the structural difference between the two in the imperialist system that sustains my argument. These countries occupy different positions in the imperialist hierarchy, and yet they seem to be increasingly manifesting the same political trends. You say the analogy is stupid but you didn't actually make any arguments for how the political situation in the South differes substantially from the North 50 years ago. At least in terms of the state of the socialist movement. If they are heading down similar paths despite the differences in the imperialist hierarchy, then something else must be the cause rather than imperialism itself. This is why I think it's a function of an absolute level of development rather than relative differences between imperialist and colonized countries.
>You haven't evidenced why it's "obvious."
Actually look at the course of any of the conflicts involving these armed movements. FARC is laying down their weapons, Naxal activity has collapsed, the NPA is down to as little as 1000 fighters by some estimates, the Zapatistas are bleeding people into the more developed and urbanized areas of Mexico and have never ventured outside their tiny enclave. Meanwhile the electoral communist parties display the same revisionist tendencies as European communists in the 60s and 70s. The CPI backed the most recent war against Pakistan and didn't even bother to mention India's oppression of Kashmir in their statement on the issue. They back the armed repression of the Naxals, while their deputies carve out a comfortable political niche in Kerala that is indicative of labour aristocracy in Lenin's original meaning. The SACP sat in the ANC's orbit for literal decades and has only now begun to take tentative steps into some form of political independence. Most other countries don't even have communist parties large enough to be worth mentioning.
>The tools of stable, independent bourgeois rule in the Third World is precisely what imperialism denies
It denies them to the extent that it retards their development, but the poor state of the socialist movement in the third world shows that these tools are still able to develop over time.
>Riots/protests such as these are often defensive, reformist struggles. They demand the restoration of the social wage, not the abolition of the imperial system that helps sustain it.
That's how pretty most class struggles play out most of the time everywhere in the world. Truly revolutionary struggles are the exception rather than the norm, even in the global south. This is increasingly the case there as the Southern bourgeoisie develop the necessary tools for managing class conflict.

>>2928109
>But when you are presented with the fact that this asymmetry is in fact actually quite minor
You haven't not actually presented the "asymmetry" is minor.
>that the Global South has for decades been unable to produce a serious challenge to bourgeois power you just handwave it away.
My original point was that the "South has a more immediate and structurally grounded anti-imperialist consciousness" because of their direct experiences with it, nothing more. So this is yet another strawman. Similarities in tendencies are not the same as similarities in consciousness, and consciousness on its own does not necessarily translate into action. Why this immediate consciousness hasn't translated in sufficient action and organizational capacity has been discussed ad nauseam: >>2927389 >>2927525
>Whatever explanation you give for the tendencies of first world workers has to also account for the tendencies of those in the third world, and those tendencies are looking increasingly similar.
It does. The core and periphery are linked by unequal exchange. The mechanisms between North and South are different, so consciousness is materially mediated differently even if tendencies look similar on the surface. You have not demonstrated why this is incorrect. Simply tendencies look similar and therefore consciousness must be similar confuses the form with the cause.
>Its the logical conclusion for your understanding of how Northern workers "benefit" from imperialism, which boils down to pointing out that more intense exploitation in the South allows for less intense exploitation in the North.
Nobody said this. I said Northern workers benefit from imperialism through a net transfer of surplus from South to North. Keep strawmanning, though.
>If that's the case, then it also follows that more intense exploitation in the far periphery allows for less intense exploitation in the semi-periphery. This means that semi-peripheral workers as a whole "benefit" from imperialism through the exact same mechanisms, but to a lesser degree.
No, that's a crude definition of the imperialist hierarchy. It is not a simple chain where anyone with someone below them gets subsidized, but rather a system of NET TRANSFER that flows to the core. The semi-periphery worker does NOT have the same structural relationship to the imperial state and capital as an American worker, no matter how hard you try to force this inversion.
Moreover, I said only a narrow strata within the semi-periphery benefits, not that "semi-peripheral workers as a whole" benefit, so you are STILL misrepresenting my position, lmfao. Unlike the core, the semi-periphery is a net-loser, so yes, equivocating the tendencies is retarded on two counts. (1) You're comparing a largely systematic labor aristocracy in the core to a small, largely incidental labor aristocracy in the semi-periphery; and (2) you're neglecting that the semi-periphery is objectively not in the same structural position as the core, as the former is fundamentally dependent on the latter and is NOT a net beneficiary of unequal exchange.
https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/osfsocarx/tj2mu_5fv2.htm
<Abstract: Capitalism depends on a positive rate of surplus value: excess labour provided by workers relative to that embodied in their consumption. Yet a “labour aristocracy” escapes this by receiving more than it contributes, yielding a negative rate. Unequal exchange enables this by redistributing surplus value not only between regions and classes, but also between net providers and receivers within the working class. In 2022, the centre net imported 639 billion labour hours, enabling a −42% surplus rate. However, 31% of the centre’s workers remain exploited, with rates reaching +316% in the bottom decile. Of global surplus, 63% is appropriated by capital and 37% by the labour aristocracy—comprising 69% of the centre’s workforce and 6% of the semi-periphery’s, but none in the periphery, where surplus rates reach +37,183% in the bottom decile. Anti-imperialist movements must therefore recognize these complex patterns of appropriation by both capital and segments of labour.
>A basic materialist understanding of the relationship between material conditions and consciousness should lead us to conclude that if they are exhibiting similar political tendencies that this is indicative of similar structural positions.
No, that's dumb. Material conditions shape consciousness, but they don't determine it one-to-one. If that were true then workers would automatically become revolutionaries, but that obviously isn't the case.
>Or alternatively, that there is another explanation for these tendencies unrelated to imperialism which can explain their prevalence in both the periphery and core.
False dichotomy. The explanation is imperialism, but imperialism doesn’t operate as a flat, uniform force; instead, it operates as a structured hierarchy. It shapes consciousness in both the North and South.
>If not, then where are these tendencies in the Global South coming from?
From the same global system, but doesn't mean the South occupies the same structural position within that system.
>So your position is that workers in the North and South aren't even members of the same class?
No, retard. I was saying sharing a class position does not mean occupying the same structural position in the global relations of production. You can be the same in the former and different in the latter.
>Because if they occupy different positions in the relations of production then this is what we would have to conclude. In fact they do not, they are all proletarians. If they sell their labour power and are exploited through this, then they occupy the same class position. Variations (even large ones) in the rate of exploitation don't create a class distinction. To say they do is to adhere to a liberal understanding of class in terms of income.
That's yet another non-sequitur. The relations of production is not a single, flat relation between worker and capitalist. There can be different positions within the same class. Skilled vs unskilled workers; manual vs mental labor; industrial vs capital. Core vs periphery workers is simply another example of different positions within the same class of the global economy.
>Hickel does not claim a qualitative difference between workers in the North and South, he doesn't claim they are members of separate classes or have fundamentally different relations to the means of production. He identifies the immense quantitative differences in rates of exploitation.
Hickel's data shows that Southern wages are 87-95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill. Southern workers contribute 90% of the world's labor but receive only 21% of global income. That isn't just a difference in rates of exploitation, but rather a structural transfer of value that subsidizes the reproduction of Northern labor-power. How does that not demonstrate a qualitative difference in the direction and function of the value transfer (but not in the labor performed)? And nobody claimed imperial core workers are "members of separate classes."
>In fact he is even more general than that, speaking mainly of the flow of wealth between entire states and economies rather than analyzing their distribution within individual countries.
And? The fact that Hickel measures state-to-state flows doesn't mean those flows don't have class effects. The surplus appropriated from the South is redistributed through the Northern state—funding real wages, social wages, infrastructure, consumer commodities, etc.
>Once again you are conflating "North and South" for Northern workers and Southern workers, as if their interests are necessarily aligned with their bourgeois states and economies.
Nobody said Northern worker's "interests are necessarily aligned with their bourgeois states and economies." I said Northern workers have a material stake in the imperial system, which is precisely why their interests often diverge from Southern workers. That isn't the same thing, no matter how much you want to strawman me.
>Its actually a profoundly bourgeois perspective that doesn't account for class differences in either the North or South.
I counter that and say the bourgeois perspective is the one that treats the global working class as a flat, undifferentiated mass with identical interests regardless of position in the imperial hierarchy.
>The flattening I'm talking about is happening due to the decline of first world proletarian living standards, not the closing of the overall gap between the North and South. As Northern experience increasing rates of exploitation, the quantitative differences between themselves and those of the South necessarily decline.
No, this is still false. You admit the absolute gap between the North and South is only widening. Moreover, meaningful relative convergence is not happening and the core is becoming more exclusive.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2026.2659076
Where is your evidence that living standards are converging? The absolute income gap has increased by 170% to 270% since 1960, depending on the currency measure used, with the core capturing 4 to 10 times more income growth. That isn't a trend of a convergence in living standards.
>Being exploited requires you to appropriate from the productive process less than you contribute to it. Therefore whatever a Northern worker consumes in whatever format (wages, benefits, social programs, etc) must necessarily be less than their productive output.
No, the second point does not follow the first; yet another non-sequitur. The value the worker produces and the value of their labor-power are two different quantities. Exploitation only tells us that the value of labor-power is less than the value the worker produces, but it doesn't tell you whether that worker's total consumption is less than their production. The value of labor-power is not determined by the worker's output, but rather the historically and socially specific costs of reproducing the worker. Your argument only holds true if the worker's consumption comes solely from their own production, but that isn't the case in the global economy. My original claim holds: a Northern worker can be exploited by Northern capital and still be a net beneficiary of global surplus extraction.
>Therefore their own production accounts for the entirety of their consumption, and they are subsidized by nobody.
>Of course imperialism is what allows this, but you are erroneously framing it as Northern workers getting a piece of the imperialist surplus, rather than a bigger piece of their own surplus.
You have not demonstrated this. The fact that the worker receives less than they produce (v < v + s) does not mean that v is self-financed. It means the capitalist appropriates s. The question is whether v itself is higher than it would be without imperialism (the answer is yes).
>This framing obscures the fact that the imperialist bourgeoisie remains the ultimate enemy of both, and assigns guilt to Northern workers for wanting (or even just having) a bigger piece of their own product.
No, it doesn't obscure that at all and no one is assigning guilt.
>However massive it may be, the consumption of Northern workers cannot exceed their own productive output.
Unequal exchange does not mean that Northern workers consumes more than they produce for their employer. It means the North as a whole, both bourgeoisie and proletariat, appropriates more value from the South than it gives back. That surplus value accrues first to Northern capital, which then redistributes part of it to Northern workers.
>If that were the case then their bosses would be losing money on them.
No, they wouldn't, as the capitalist still extracts surplus value.
>Even if that value is accruing to northern *economies* (i.e. bourgeoisie) this doesn't mean they are accruing to the workers.
It does so indirectly.

CONTINUED
>>2928142
>>2928109
>You're taking that statement way too literally. I'm simply pointing out that any struggle waged by workers to reclaim their own surplus is not a struggle to obtain a portion of imperial plunder.
No, I'm not. it was a dumb statement. Of course a strike over wages is not consciously a struggle for imperial plunder. That was never the claim. The claim is that the material conditions under which Northern workers function, i.e., the wage levels demand, the social wage they access, and the commodities they consume, are largely sustained by imperial rent. The struggle may be presented as reclaiming their own surplus, but the terrain of that struggle is shaped by imperialism, even if those workers are not consciously aware of it.
>Come on man, if you saw those kinds of opinion polls in Europe or the US you would trumpet it as irrefutable evidence that Northerners are all unreformable treatlers.
No, I wouldn't. I'd call you an "unreformable treatler" because you're a psychopath piece of shit that joined a homocidal, imperialist military, but I wouldn't call the average Northern worker that.
>You can't just handwave away evidence that flies directly in the face of your assertions about more advanced forms of class and anti-imperialist consciousness in the South.
I never said the South had a more "advanced" consciousness. I said it had "a more immediate and structurally grounded anti-imperialist consciousness" because it directly experiences it on a day to day basis. However, I was pushing back on your careless interpretation that polling data because it did not evidence a "piss poor" anti-imperialist consciousness.
>These people saw the US attack their neighbour, kidnap its president, and impose a puppet government and they cheered for it.
The poll you cited does not show "they cheered for it." On the contrary, it showed they understood the real threat of American imperialism to their country.
>And it's not just that, Brazil is on the verge of electing another Bolsonaro. Argentina elected Millei. Clearly open Ameriphile fascists are entirely capable of winning elections in the global South.
So? Reaction is a global phenomenon. That does not prove that Southern workers are structurally identical to Northern workers.
>I'm not talking about catching up in the sense of eliminating the gap. Rather I'm talking about tendencies that begin to emerge once a state has surpassed certain markers of development in absolute terms.
Great. What are the thresholds? What are the markers? Which countries have crossed them? Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, India are all fairly urbanized with an industrial proletariat, and yet they do not have the stable labor aristocracies comparable to the North.
>What I'm suggesting is that features which were originally thought to be unique to imperialist countries (e.g. labour aristocracy) have actually proved to be effectively universal once states surpass a certain threshold of development. They only appeared unique to imperialism in the 20th century because the third world had not yet passed that point, but they are now doing this.
Where? The Global South has been urbanizing and industrializing for decades, and yet the vast majority of them have not produced a broad labor aristocracy comparable to the North. The mechanism is thus not development, but rather imperial rent. The North's labor aristocracy is funded by the extraction of super-profits from the South. This is because Southern industrialization has been largely dependent, export-oriented, and disciplined by Northern capital.
>This is a better explanation than the one you are offering because it accounts for why Southern workers increasingly exhibit the same tendencies and attitudes you criticize in Northern workers and attribute to imperialism.
No, it isn't. It asserts a correlation without proving causation. You need to show that the Southern workers exhibiting these tendencies are concentrated in the most urbanized, industrialized, and proletarianized sectors, and that these sectors are expanding in a way that produces stable labor aristocracy dynamics. The data shows the exact opposite.
>Sure, I should have been more precise in my description.
Your claim was categorical that the South has failed to demonstrate substantially greater revolutionary potential since the end of the Cold War. When confronted with evidence that it has, and that there were no contemporary Northern equivalent, you replaced it with a new one. That's moving the goalposts, not being "precise."
>Some of these movements persisted after the Cold War, but that doesn't alter my overall point, which is that they are universally in severe decline and nowhere close to taking power.
It absolutely alters it. Your original point was about revolutionary potential because potential is demonstrated by the existence of sustained movements that challenge power, and those movements did exactly that. The fact that they haven't taken power doesn't negate their potential. But let's take your new position seriously that they were "nowhere close to taking power." Who are the contemporary Northern equivalents? No one. So even by your own (flawed) standard, the North is absent entirely.
>It's precisely the structural difference between the two in the imperialist system that sustains my argument. These countries occupy different positions in the imperialist hierarchy, and yet they seem to be increasingly manifesting the same political trends.
So? Two countries can both experience a decline in socialist movements and still have completely different reasons for that decline. Your argument assumes that similar outcomes must have similar causes. The South's socialist movements faced US-backed coups, death squads, IMF conditionality, the USSR's collapse, etc, all of which were not present in the North. So your comparison to Western Europe is still retarded.
>You say the analogy is stupid but you didn't actually make any arguments for how the political situation in the South differes substantially from the North 50 years ago. At least in terms of the state of the socialist movement.
I did. I said the North was in the imperial core, enjoying the postwar boom, Bretton Woods, Marshall Plan reconstruction, full employment, rising wages, expanding welfare states, and imperial rent. While the South experiences debt crisis, IMF conditionality, sanctions, war, etc. That's a difference in the material foundations of political life.
>If they are heading down similar paths despite the differences in the imperialist hierarchy, then something else must be the cause rather than imperialism itself.
Another non-sequitur. Different positions can produce similar outcomes through different mechanisms. For example, a rich person and a poor person can both be depressed, but the causes for their depression can be different.
>This is why I think it's a function of an absolute level of development rather than relative differences between imperialist and colonized countries.
And yet your thesis fails empirically.
>FARC is laying down their weapons
They signed a peace deal in 2016, but that didn't end the conflict itself. Splinter factions and the ELN remain active. A peace deal is not necessarily a resolution of contradictions, and it took decades of US-funded war to force that peace deal. That is literally the exact opposite of no potential.
>Naxal activity has collapsed
Yeah… because of massive state repression, not because they just gave up, you fucking retard. The conditions that produced the Naxalites still remain.
>the NPA is down to as little as 1000 fighters by some estimates
These guys have been fighting for over 50 years, surviving martial law, counterinsurgency, and repeated peace talks. Like what are you expecting from these guys? And 1,000 fighters still represents more armed revolutionary activity than the entire North combined.
>Meanwhile the electoral communist parties display the same revisionist tendencies as European communists in the 60s and 70s.
Similar form, different cause.
>The CPI backed the most recent war against Pakistan and didn't even bother to mention India's oppression of Kashmir in their statement on the issue.
And? That’s chauvinism, not labor aristocracy.
>They back the armed repression of the Naxals, while their deputies carve out a comfortable political niche in Kerala that is indicative of labour aristocracy in Lenin's original meaning.
Not a product of labor aristocracy.
>The SACP sat in the ANC's orbit for literal decades and has only now begun to take tentative steps into some form of political independence.
Not a product of labor aristocracy either.
>Most other countries don't even have communist parties large enough to be worth mentioning.
That's a measure of organizational weakness, not of revolutionary potential. The North has no communist parties worth mentioning either. By your own metric, the North is even more barren.
>It denies them to the extent that it retards their development, but the poor state of the socialist movement in the third world shows that these tools are still able to develop over time.
You're conceding that imperialism denies stable bourgeois rule, but then you're using the weakness of socialist movements as evidence that the tools of stable bourgeois rule are developing anyway. How many non-sequiturs is that?
>That's how pretty most class struggles play out most of the time everywhere in the world.
That's a truism that dodges the actual point. The point is whether the potential for revolutionary rupture is greater in one place than another.
>Truly revolutionary struggles are the exception rather than the norm, even in the global south.
Another truism. Revolutions are always the exception, but the exception is more frequent in the South.
>This is increasingly the case there as the Southern bourgeoisie develop the necessary tools for managing class conflict.
The Southern bourgeoisie is developing more sophisticated tools of repression, co-optation, and debt management. They are fragile, dependent on external support, and prone to crisis. The data shows the opposite of what you claim.

>>2928142
>>2928143
>>2928109
TL;DR another abomination of misrepresentations, faulty logic, and outright falsehoods. You're still conflating exploitation with net benefit and repressive capacity with stable bourgeois rule; inferring structure from consciousness; ignoring data; and treating repression as refutation.

>>2928142
>You haven't not actually presented the "asymmetry" is minor.
Fuck sake, I'm illiterate and tired.
*You haven't actually presented this "asymmetry" as minor.