Progress and Poverty: a response to Krul, Post and Hamerquist from Noel Ignatiev

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i often disagree with Noel Ignatiev - and the following essay is certainly no exception in that regard - however his reasoning is often provocative, which though a bit maddening is also not a bad thing. As such, it should not be assumed that the views in the following guest contribution are those of yours truly. However, it is worth reading in the context of the ongoing discussion of Zak Cope's book Divided World Divided Class. The other essays referenced here are by Charlie Post, Matthijs Krul, and Don Hamerquist. (Note that Krul also posted a further response to Hamerquist on his blog here.)


Progress and Poverty: a response to Krul, Post and Hamerquist (by Noel Ignatiev)
I enter into this discussion out of a sense of duty but also with hesitancy owing to my relative lack of knowledge about global investments, labor migration, transfer of values and other elements that some participants in the discussion seem familiar with and apparently consider essential. Refusing to be prejudiced by facts, and believing that the formulation of a question is its solution, I offer the following contribution.

Cope (like Don, I have not read him), Krul and Hamerquist share certain assumptions, although they differ among themselves on the political conclusions to be drawn from them. These assumptions are:

• The comparatively high standard of living of workers in the West is to some degree the result of their sharing in the loot extracted from the Third World. (I am foregoing the ironic quotation marks, hoping that people will bear in mind that West, Third World and standard of living are all ideological, as are our, their, wealth, poverty, center, periphery, relative privilege and other terms employed in the discussion.)
• Workers in the West are in general less revolutionary than the masses of poor in the Third World.
• There is a causal relation between 1) and 2), although – Don Hamerquist stresses this – it is not as determinant as some have claimed.

If either 1) or 2) is false, then 3) necessarily falls. In my opinion, both are false.

On 1): In 1890 a loaf of bread made from wheat grown in Minnesota cost less in Berlin than a loaf of bread made from wheat grown a hundred miles to the east. The difference was due to the mechanization of agriculture, storage and transport in the U.S., including trans-Atlantic shipping, compared to the techniques then used in Poland. The result was the ruination of agriculture in Poland (and much of Eastern Europe). Did the “shoals of roast beef and apple pie” in the U.S. (to which Werner Sombart in 1904 attributed the failure of Socialism there) depend on the destruction of Polish agriculture? Of course not. They depended on the accumulation of capital in the U.S. (at first based on the expropriation of the natives and the enslavement of Africans, and later on foreign investment in rails and canals) that made possible the cheap coal, timber, steel, tractors, railroads and steamships and ultimately the cheap food, houses, clothes, automobiles and appliances that constituted the famous American standard of living.

I remember reading an article around 1968 in Peking Review about how Chinese workers, using what the editors called the method of “ants nibbling at the bone,” that is, relying on hand tools, had built a stamping press. The editors, and apparently many Chinese, were proud of the accomplishment, as well they should have been. A few years later I worked in a medium-sized machine-tool factory in Chicago that had a couple of dozen presses equal in size to the one they had just built in China. There must have been five hundred factories like it in the U.S. (I make no pretense at numerical accuracy; what matters is the scale.) Didn’t the abundance of those presses in the U.S. explain more about the possession of refrigerators, washing machines, etc. by U.S. workers than the looting of China? Another example, again from China: at that time China, with six hundred million people on the land, was barely able, for the first time in modern history, to feed its population. The U.S., with three million people working in agriculture, was exporting food. Were the “shoals of roast beef and apple pie” consumed by U.S. workers taken out of the mouths of Chinese toilers? I don’t think so.

Cope, Krul and Hamerquist, following Emmanuel, point to unequal exchange as the mechanism underlying the transfer of value from Third to First World. (Emmanuel was the first to attempt to explain how the transfer took place. Lenin and others after him evidently regarded it as too obvious to require explanation. Charlie Post, who disagrees with them and with Emmanuel, gets it wrong: he has Emmanuel relying on transfers of value from industries with low organic composition to industries with high organic composition. Emmanuel actually adopted Marx’s formulation about transfers from low o.c to high o.c. industries and extended it to transfers from low-wage to high-wage regions.) A problem with Emmanuel’s argument and the arguments of his followers is that even if they are right about the process, until recently the output of the Third World was nowhere near great enough to account for the gap in living conditions. For most of the period the Third-Worldists are considering, the greatest portion – as high as eighty-five percent -- of U.S. investments were in a handful of developed countries, and the same is true for Britain, Germany, Japan, etc. If the Third-Worldists are right that U.S. relative privilege depended on low wages in the Third World, then wouldn’t it follow that as investment in the Third World increased the relative privilege would expand? Yet the opposite is true: nearly everything sold at Walmart is produced by low-wage (often prison) labor in China, yet the gap between U.S. and Chinese conditions has not grown but diminished.

I think I have shown that the poverty of the masses in the Third World cannot be the cause of the comparative wealth of workers in the First. But may not the reverse be true – that is, may not development in the First World account for its absence, and the misery that accompanies it, in the Third World? The reduction of the cost of producing wheat in North America and shipping it to Europe led to the ruination of Polish agriculture and the immiseration of the Polish peasants who, driven off the land, made their way to Chicago and Pennsylvania where they took up jobs in the industries that had destroyed their previous way of life. We are seeing similar phenomena today: the Rockefeller-sponsored Green Revolution has emptied the countryside of Asia, Africa and America, and sent millions of former peasants fleeing to swollen cities in those areas and to North America and Europe, but it has done nothing to elevate living standards in New York, London or Paris. On the contrary – it has increased competition for jobs in those places, with predictable results.

That is not the only way in which development in the First World retards and distorts development in the Third. In chapter 13 of volume 3 of Capital, Marx introduces the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which he says is of great importance to capitalist production and which has been a mystery whose solution has been the goal of all political economy since Adam Smith. The law posits a relentless downward pressure on profits. The point of the law for this discussion is that it demands ever-increasing quantities of investment in constant capital in order simply to maintain profits, quantities that are beyond the reach of all but the largest capitalists and which therefore lead to the concentration of capital in ever-fewer hands and the elimination of the smaller and weaker among them. According to Wikipedia, “There were over 1,800 automobile manufacturers in the United States from 1896 to 1930. Very few survived and only a few new ones were started after that period.” If Studebaker, Nash and Kaiser, which were fairly big and employed many people, did not have sufficient capital to compete with General Motors in the world market, how could Nigeria and Mexico, let alone Haiti, develop an automobile industry, except through foreign investment? And if those countries could not develop an automobile industry and the steel, rubber, glass and other industries that go along with it, how could they expand their domestic markets and create the American way of life?

In sum, the relationship between conditions in the First and Third Worlds is the direct opposite of what the Third-Worldists argue. The Third-Worldist view is a perfect example of the mixing-up of appearance and essence that Marx attempted to counter through his concept of the fetish. That many workers in the developed countries mistake appearance for essence is a political problem; so is it when revolutionaries do the same.

2) Are the masses of the poor in the Third World more revolutionary than workers in the U.S. and other countries of the center? The answer depends on what is meant by revolutionary. If by revolutionary one means engaging in armed struggle for explicitly political ends, then the Third World wins hands down: from Chiapas to Palestine to Naxalbari and in a hundred other places people in Third World countries have taken up guns in defense of land tenure, water rights, local autonomy and other causes great and small. I see no evidence that any of the struggles are motivated by a vision of communism (except maybe Chiapas, and it is significant that the EZLN has not fired a shot in anger in over ten years). By and large those movements are fighting to realize the promises of the bourgeois, French, Revolution of 1789. That does not make them any less worthy of support, but it does say something about how they should be measured against struggles elsewhere. Moreover, the widespread presence of bands of Kalashnikoff-bearing pre-adolescents pillaging and raping in the interest of one or another warlord ought to warn us against any easy identification of armed struggle and revolution, and give us cause to respect the reluctance of workers in Europe and North America, treasuring past victories in the reform struggle (often won through violence and sacrifice), to embark on a path from which it is difficult to turn back.

Or perhaps the criterion of revolution is the commitment to explicit anti-capitalist programs. By this criterion, too, the Third World is ahead: in contrast to the virtual collapse of Socialist and Communist Parties in Europe and the absence in the U.S. of a Socialist Party with a mass following (and the widespread tendency to denounce Obama’s healthcare plan as “socialist”) even the movement headed by Chavez declares its goal to be “twenty-first-century socialism.” Once again, a word of caution: “twenty-first-century socialism“ is not socialism, and the 80 million members of the Chinese Communist Party, whose leading role is written into the Constitution, bear no greater connection to communism (and perhaps less) than do the 60 million Americans who voted Democratic in 2012 to democracy.

Let me advance two criteria for measuring what is revolutionary. The first is the extent to which the preconditions for communism have been established, and especially the degree to which they are taken for granted by the general population. The communist society is characterized by, among other things, the elimination of the distinctions between urban and rural life and between intellectual and manual labor, by the rejection of class distinctions, and by the overcoming of patriarchy. I submit that in no other country have these conditions been fulfilled as in the U.S. and that in general they are more fully realized in the First than in the Third World. Automobiles, televisions, computers and cell towers have made sure that residents of the remotest village in the Ozarks are familiar with daily life in New York. The millions enrolled in post-secondary schools, including the various technical institutes advertised on late-night TV, testify to the overcoming of the distinction between intellectual and manual labor. (I recently had a conversation with a man who was shining shoes at the airport; he had a stack of books on his stand, and informed me that he was studying for the exam to get his realtor’s license; show me another country where that happens.). Even the naïve insistence by Americans that they are “middle-class” points to their refusal to accept class distinctions as permanent. As for the patriarchy, in no other country are the access of women to higher education, well-paying jobs and careers, political office, and the right to drive cars, rent apartments, control their own bodies and choose their associates as freely as men so well established and so widely accepted as in the U.S. Or consider race: The very bitterness of relations between blacks and whites is evidence of the mutual, if often grudging, respect that exists between them – no quarrel so bitter as a family quarrel -- and stands in contrast to prevailing attitudes in Latin America and Asia, where the upper classes do not hate the lower classes so much as look down on them as members of another species. John Bracey recounts the time CLR James was watching a football game on TV and called to him from the other room. “Look at this,” said James. “Black people beating up white people on TV. Capitalism is doomed.” Of course none of these tendencies can be fully realized so long as capitalist relations prevail, but the new society exists within the shell of the old. The U.S. is more ready for communism than any other country in the world.

My second criterion for judging who is revolutionary is the degree to which working-class activity has transformed the world. The Vietnamese people won what was arguably the greatest military victory in history over the world’s greatest power. And what changed as a result? On a world scale, not much. Global corporations are now reaping greater profits from Vietnam than they did before the fall of Saigon. Meanwhile, the massive resistance by U.S. workers to capitalist work discipline, which reached a peak in the 1970s, was an important factor compelling capital to introduce new methods of production that did away with workers, and shift industry from the First to the Third World (and contributed to the U.S. defeat in Vietnam). The struggles of the working class are the chief motor transforming society. Even before it overthrows capital, the working class compels it to new stages in its development. Looking back at U.S. history, the resistance of the craftsmen compelled capital to develop methods of mass production; the workers responded to mass production by organizing the CIO, an attempt to impose their control on the rhythms of production; capital retaliated by incorporating the union into its administrative apparatus; the workers answered with the wildcat strike and a whole set of shop-floor relations outside of the union; capital responded to this activity by moving the industries out of the country in search of a more pliant working class, and introducing computerized production to eliminate workers altogether. The working class has responded to the threat of permanent separation from the means of obtaining life with squatting, rebellion, and food riots. And so forth; this is a continuous process, and it moves the society forward ¾ ending, as Marx said, in the revolutionary reconstitution of society or the common ruin of the contending classes.

Over a century and a half ago Marx wrote:

It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today. There is no need to explain here that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity.

Of course, Marx’s last sentence is not without interest.

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Divided World Divided Class Reviewed and Discussed by Matthijs Krul and others

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Divided World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism is a book published by Kersplebedeb as part of the Kalikot Book Series  (and available from leftwingbooks.net) back in September of last year.

Divided World Divided Class charts the history of the ‘labour aristocracy’ in the capitalist world system, from its roots in colonialism to its birth and eventual maturation into a full-fledged middle class in the age of imperialism. It argues that pervasive national, racial and cultural chauvinism in the core capitalist countries is not primarily attributable to ‘false class consciousness’, ideological indoctrination or ignorance as much left and liberal thinking assumes. Rather, these and related forms of bigotry are concentrated expressions of the major social strata of the core capitalist nations’ shared economic interest in the exploitation and repression of dependent nations.

This kind of analysis strikes many of us as "obvious" on a gut level, however explaining how this occurs can seem tricky. That's one of the strengths of this book, which breaks down the process historically, but also in terms of economic data. Showing how the goods consumed by the metropolitan working class contain more hours of labour than First World consumers work, the shortfall being made up by the exploitation of workers in the Third World.

Of course, this flies against the prevalent dogma of broad sections of the left. Here in canada, for instance, the New Socialist Group is hostile to the idea and implications of studying the labor aristocracy. As such, it is not surprising that they published a review by Charlie Post, Workers in the Global North: A Labour Aristocracy?, which dismisses Cope's claims out of hand. Post's dismissal was then taken to task by MLM Mayhem, in a his The Theory of Labour Aristocracy and its Discontents: a meta-review of Cope's "Divided World Divided Class". (Note also that MLM Mayhem had reviewed DWDC previously, as had MIM(Prisons). Note also that Nikolai Brown of anti-imperialism.com also conducted a good interview with Cope about his book and his analysis.)

While the above debates can be of interest, by far the most thorough engagement with Cope's argument has come from Matthijs Krul on the excellent Notes and Commentaries blog. Rather than attempt to summarize Krul's appraisal and arguments, with permission i am reposting it below. Enjoy.


Divided World Divided Class Reviewed by Matthijs Krul

There are times when one encounters a book that is frustrating in a way particular to the intellectual life: that is to say, when one encounters a book that is precisely the book one wanted to write. Given the relative obscurity of my interests, this does not happen often to me, but Zak Cope’s Divided World, Divided Class is precisely one of these. I have harboured plans for the longer term to write a book on the history of the labour aristocracy and its interrelationship with the rise of social-democracy as the political expression of the imperialist rent required for the maintenance of that class, with all the necessary economic and historical detail; in fact, I almost undertook this as my PhD subject. If I had done so, I might well have been embarrassed. Cope has done just this, even up to much of the same bibliography I had had in mind! Be that as it may; these reflections are not to make myself seem important, but to underline the value I think this book has, being the only one of its kind and a real historical contribution to the critique of political economy under capitalism.

Cope’s book is a milestone in the current of Marxist political economy known as “Third Worldism”, that is to say, in developing an honest and realistic understanding based in Marxist value theory of what in the wider literature is called the divergence question: the long-standing division of the world between a small number of rich countries where even the working class has incomes in the top 10-20% of the world population, and a much larger number of poor countries lagging tremendously behind in all aspects of development. As is well known, this gap grows larger rather than smaller, and significantly from the Marxist point of view, it has led for the first time in world history to the majority of the world population actually being poor urban workers – in these countries. There is among socialists little disagreement as to the reality and significance of this fact. Nor of the corollary, the enormous significance of finding the right economic theory to explain and understand the mechanics of this divergence. Even the ‘well-meaning’ type of neoclassical economist would readily agree to this. As Robert Lucas once famously noted:

Is there some action a government of India could take that would lead the Indian economy to grow like Indonesia’s or Egypt’s? If so, what, exactly? If not, what is it about the’ nature of India’ that makes it so? The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else. (1)

For this reason it is remarkable with how little seriousness and honesty most Marxist economic theorists have been willing to analyze this subject. There is indeed some excellent Marxist literature in development economics, as exemplified by the works of Ben Fine, Patrick Bond, and others. There is also a wider literature more rooted in Marxisant versions of dependency theory, such as Samir Amin and Arghiri Emmanuel. These already go much further in trying to analyze not just the perpetuation of differences in wealth by immediate policies of imperialism and expropriation, but to also understand the historical reproduction of class relations corresponding to the phenomenon of global divergence. For this reason, perhaps, those authors are already somewhat marginal within Marxist economic theory. Generally it has been very acceptable to the various Marxist parties and political currents to expound upon the evils of imperialism and war and the poverty of the Third World, but it has been much less acceptable to try and understand those “mechanics” underlying this divergence, never mind the political conclusions to be drawn from these facts themselves. This threatens the political viewpoint of most intellectual Marxists, rooted in the politics of students and workers in the First World countries; those conclusions may not be compatible with that viewpoint, and it is hard to ignore the feeling that at some level this is sensed by many Marxist economists. Do not explore too far in this direction, they seem to say: for there be dragons.

It is therefore to the immense credit of Zak Cope (this may or may not be pseudonym) that he has done so regardless of the political consequences or palatability of this research for the Marxist mainstream in the West. Indeed, once one starts thinking about the perpetuation of divergence, the ever-declining interest in revolution and support for a meaningful socialism among First World workers, the rise of social-democracy as the ‘consensus’ of the First World even up to the neoliberal era, the logic of settler states and the inherent ‘workers’ chauvinism’ associated with them and the reproduction of similar ideas among the working classes of Old Europe in response to immigration; in short, all the unpleasant realities of Marxism today and one then notices how all these are contrary to the expectations of mainstream Marxist political thinking but entirely compatible with the Third Worldist perspective, one has a very strong case to be explained indeed. Cope does just this with great vigour and relentless scientific seriousness. What J. Sakai had done for American settlerism in Settlers, this Cope does more extensively and more scientifically for the position of the working class of the rich countries as a whole.

Cope’s case runs, briefly summarized, as follows. The imperialism of the Western countries (broadly taken), enabled initially by the plunder and exploitation of the Americas and continued by the increases in wealth, power, and technology enabled by these, have over time created the potential for systematic transfers of surplus value from the ‘imperialized’ ‘periphery’ to the imperialist ‘center’. These transfers then not only allow a great blossoming of labor in the countries of the center that is not immediately productive of capital, because it is compensated for by the external value transfers, but more importantly it permits the ruling classes of the center to buy off the exploited working class of the center with the proceeds of this imperialist rent. This labor aristocracy, so formed, then no longer fulfils the one special role the working class has in Marx and Engels’ theory of historical materialism: namely, to be unable to emancipate itself without overthrowing the conditions it itself reproduces with its labour.

In and of itself, this is not a new observation: it is the classic expression of the theory of the labor aristocracy as found in Engels and Lenin, among others. However, the real crux is that Cope then extends this theory by demonstrating, as only the obscure “H.W. Edwards” had done before him, that the natural ideology of the labor aristocracy is social-democracy, and that social-democracy is the means by which the imperialist rent is shared with a wider and wider section of the working class of the center. This First World generalized labor aristocracy thereby becomes almost entirely non-exploited in net terms, according to Marx’s theory of value, because the value of the surplus value produced by them is (more than) compensated for in the process of distribution through world trade. That is to say, the imperialist and neo-imperialist unequal exchange between the First World – defined by Cope as roughly the OECD and the non-OECD, excl. Eastern Europe – and the Third constitutes such a vast transfer of surplus value in the sphere of distribution that it permits, through social-democracy, an almost total compensation for the domestic exploitation of the First World working class.

Cope goes into considerable historical and economic detail to support this position. Almost always such a suggestion is immediately dismissed by doctrinaire mainstream Marxists as being impossible, or done away with by a kneejerk reference to the idea that the most productive laborers must be the most exploited. But not only does the theory of labor aristocracy have a considerable Marxist pedigree, as mentioned above, but it is vital to note that Marx himself emphasized that ‘world trade’ itself functions as an exogenous factor of distribution in the model of capitalist exploitation presented in Capital. Already early on, Marx criticizes the inability of Proudhon to take the global division of labor, as produced by world trade, into account, much like many Marxists today:

Mr Proudhon is so far from the truth that he neglects to do what even profane economists do. In discussing the division of labour, he feels no need to refer to the world market. Well! Must not the division of labour in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when there were as yet no colonies, when America was still non-existent for Europe, and when Eastern Asia existed only through the mediation of Constantinople, have been utterly different from the division of labour in the seventeenth century, when colonies were already developed?

And that is not all. Is the whole internal organisation of nations, are their international relations, anything but the expression of a given division of labour? And must they not change as the division of labour changes? (2) 

In Capital, too, the modification in the domain of distribution (affecting market prices) is recognized, for example by the classic case of differences in productivity:

But the law of value in its international application is yet more modified by the fact that on the world-market the more productive national labour reckons also as the more intense, so long as the more productive nation is not compelled by competition to lower the selling price of its commodities to the level of their value. (3)

Cope describes at length the formation of various labor aristocracies of settler kind, such as those of the American migrants in the United States (over and against the ‘racially inferior’ populations), of the English settlers in Ireland, and so forth. He describes how communism is subverted among these workers into a chauvinistic form, seeking the benefits of the capitalist system but shared with and among the labor aristocracy itself, not globally or with the lower ranks of the segmented labor market, and how social-democracy is the natural expression of this phenomenon, and fascism the crisis expression of it. (Which, incidentally, ought to do away with the Trotskyist canard about the supposedly evident ridiculousness of the theory of ‘social fascism’ proposed against social-democracy by the Comintern; in fact, this is precisely what social-democracy often is, seen from this global vantage point.) But, even all this accepted, Marx proposes above the usual mainstream Marxist explanation, that is, that differences in productivity and intensity of labour account for the very systematic and extremely widely shared wage differentials between the First World working class and the Third World working class. Merely pointing at imperialism and the remarkable ‘coincidence’ of this differential with the main imperialist countries or their primary trading partners is not enough, nor is historically describing the First World workers’ systematic rejection of revolutionary possibilities in favor of social-democracy, from which they benefit but nobody else. One must demonstrate the economic basis in unequal exchange and in direct exploitation of the Third World of this wage differential.

Cope then comes to the major economic contribution of his book, which is to do just that. Using the widely available statistics on working hours, male workers’ wages in OECD and non-OECD countries, the estimates of value transfer through undervaluation of Third World currencies compiled by Gernot Köhler, the estimates of value-added in production between the First World and the Third, and so forth, Cope makes a clear and convincing case suggesting strongly, although with some room for error, that it is not at all possible to account for the differentiation by productivity differentials only, and in fact that the overwhelming majority of the wage differential is composed of vast transfers of value from the developing countries to the developed ones, distributed there to the Western working class. The means of such transfer are unequal exchange in commodity trade (i.e. deteriorating terms of trade), unequal exchange in currency exchange rates, the substantial and systematic trade deficits of the First World (especially the US), FDI profit repatriation, and so forth.

The author has undertaken extensive statistical analysis of publicly available data from the ILO, World Bank, UN, OECD etc., and therefore cannot be accused of coming up with mere speculative estimates or handwaving it away, as is usually done by mainstream Marxists on this issue. Some may object that one cannot simply measure prices of production adjusted in the market and then conclude value transfers from these, but this misses the point: it is precisely the case that bourgeois measurements such as GDP, total factor productivity and so forth are merely based on existing prices, and therefore do not – as is the point of Marxist value theory – explain the causes and social origins of particular prices prevailing rather than others. Measures such as volume of trade within the First World versus between the First and the Third (the latter being much smaller at present prices) will not do as a common counterargument – they constitute a petitio principii, because it is precisely the low prices and low ‘value’ of the Third World production relative to the First World production that is reflected in such statistics, and that needs explaining in the first place.

It is tragic to note how little attention to these facts has been paid by most Marxist thinkers of the past decades, despite their enormous political and economic consequences. Perhaps this is because it is not very convenient to the outlook and strategy of many Marxist political organizations to acknowledge that the Western working class currently is not revolutionary, and in fact cannot be revolutionary without majorly violating the expectations of Marx and Engels’ theory of historical materialism. This would perhaps explain the systematic failure of many Marxist parties to analyze why they do not and cannot become ‘mass parties’ in the West, and why the ‘mass parties’ that did exist in the West did not make revolution at any point. (Although in being more serious about supporting the so-called ‘really existing socialisms’ elsewhere in the world, the Moscow line parties and ‘Eurocommunists’ were arguably still more useful than the current leading groups.) However, after the publication of this book the ball is in the court of the mainstream in Marxist political economy to do something with this, at the least to analyze it statistically, come up with new theories and new scientific research in this direction, and to not flinch from the conclusions these may offer. Socialism must be scientific or it is nothing, and there can be no partiality towards preconceived notions in science.

All this being said, I have some minor quibbles with the book, which should not detract from the great appreciation I have for its urgency and importance. At times, I fear – like many Third Worldist Marxists – Cope bends the stick somewhat too far. While he appears not to be wholly consistent in this, he suggests at some points in the historical section of the narrative that the labour aristocracy would have been relatively significant on the world stage for Britain and similar countries as early as the 18th century, due to the benefits of imperialism. This seems to me unlikely for two reasons: firstly, because social-democracy is the vehicle for the actual mechanics of ‘dividing the spoils’, and no such system was to be found anywhere but in the racial economy of settler states (including plantation Ireland). Secondly, because we know from refined economic history writing of the last two to three decades that the true ‘modern’ divergence between Europe and the rest of the world begins roughly between 1750-1830, depending on estimates, and reaches its complete form only with the conquest of India and its use as a cudgel to beat China with.

It seems therefore for a process of generalized labor aristocratization, so to speak, to occur, one would have to estimate this no earlier than the late 19th century – after the Berlin Congress, the complete colonization of the world by Europe, and the rise of social-democracy. It is important here for Cope and sympathizers not to bend the stick too far: imperialism as such is as old as the age of the first empires in Mesopotamia, and the mere fact of its presence even on a large scale does not thereby create the divergence nor generate a labor aristocracy. Ancient Rome had a labor aristocracy paid out of imperialist rent, among the plebeians of the capital city, but even this class was not numerous or politically significant enough to systematically alter the class relations underpinning ancient society, and it faded into nothingness.

It is also important to distinguish the particular political economy of settler societies from the larger set of labor aristocratic countries, and to sharpen these distinctions analytically. Cope does not fully do so. It is also for this reason that I disagree somewhat with his reading of Nazi Germany as a form of labor aristocratic imperialism. While Cope mentions the work of Adam Tooze in his footnotes, he does not seem to understand the significance of his work as counteracting Götz Aly’s claims of widespread German benefits from the very start of the Nazi empire. Of course, in Nazi Germany the programme of rearmament and re-industrialization virtually eliminated unemployment and inflation, and this made the fascist rule possible for most of the 1930s. But its basis, as described by Tooze as well as Sohn-Rethel, was not in a labor aristocracy, but in the expansionist sectors of industry, in the Junker class, and in the small and medium farmers, all classes greatly disadvantaged by the relative underdevelopment of Germany among the greater powers. A relative underdevelopment is not a basis for a classic story of labor aristocracy, but the contrary.

In my own three extensive articles outlining a preliminary Marxist political economy of Nazi Germany, I emphasize that the fascist policy of Nazi Germany was not primarily one of a ‘regular’, pseudo-social-democratic labor aristocracy in Germany, but an attempt at creating such a class; and not just that, but in the specific form of a settler society. The programme of colonization and destruction of Eastern Europe for ‘Lebensraum’ is, as Cope rightly notes, simply an application in Europe of the principles of colonial imperialism Europe undertook elsewhere; but he misses the significance of its settler form, which means a necessarily racial policy, a programme of genocide, and so forth. Cope seems to suggest that the Bismarck-Kautsky era had already created a greater labor aristocracy and that otherwise the presence of benefits from war plunder (including of Jewish assets), holidays and so forth pacified the working class of Germany.

I am not so convinced; precisely German relative underdevelopment prevented the full rise of such a labor aristocracy earlier on (hence the serious size and potential of the KPD, the various revolutionary moments, etc.), and the Nazi programme to create one was truncated by the war. It seems it was mainly a combination of repression, conscription, and the benefits of being employed in positions superior to the POWs and ‘undesirables’ that made large-scale working class resistance to the Nazis unfeasible until late in the war, but this only shows a settler society that failed to form, not one in real existence. More research is certainly needed into a serious Marxist explanation of this phenomenon, beyond opportunistic use of Götz Aly alone. The rise in the standard of living of Germans was in this way purely contingent on the first few war years and failed to materialize in a substantive way; in fact the rather austere ‘ordoliberalism’ of the Erhard period did more for post-fascist West German living standards, thanks to American value transfers(!), than the Nazi period ever did. It does, of course, all the more underline the great significance of destroying this attempt at creating the ultimate, perfect settler society in the heart of the imperialist center itself, an ultra-empire; and therefore the correctness of the Communist policy of ‘suspending the class struggle’ in favor of the anti-fascist effort.

Finally, Cope does not wholly avoid the common notion among Third Worldist Marxist writers (for example in LLCO) that the economic analysis as such necessarily generates a set of strategic political concerns. While it is certainly the case that these conclusions have major consequences for the evaluation of the possibility of revolution in Western countries, it does not follow, for example, that one must put an undifferentiated ‘anti-imperialism’ on the agenda as the only or main concern of all Marxist activity. Not that this is wrong per se, but one simply cannot make the leap from historical and political-economic analysis to strategy in this way, nor so close off the debate about the possible avenues of further political understanding. Just as the Trotskyists have a habit of reading clichéd conclusions about ‘socialism from below’ based on the experience of the Russian Revolution into every historical or economic analysis, so the Third Worldists tend to read into every event the necessity for Western Marxists to verbally or politically prop up any figure or group in the Third World that presents itself as ‘anti-imperialist’, however implausible; and this I do not think needs follow from accepting the conclusions of this critique of political economy.

These minor points being made, I cannot recommend this book strongly enough to all open-minded Marxists and people interested in development questions. Occasionally the prose is somewhat rote, but the points are extremely important and made with all scientific seriousness and are the fruit of an impressive amount of research and statistical calculation. In the current period, the capitalist classes of the First World seem inclined to go more and more against the historic compromise of social-democracy, and the social-democracy is therefore declining in historical vigour proportionally to the shift of capitalist production from the First to the Third World in search of lower wages and higher profits, pressured by ever-accumulating private debt. This death agony of social-democracy seems to me only understandable on the basis of a Third Worldist analysis as outlined in this book, if one does not want to fall back into unsatisfying and intellectually lazy clichés about “false consciousness”, “hegemony”, media dominance and whatnot to explain the current global political constellation. Nepal makes revolution while no British communist group has more than 3000 members, China and India ‘develop’ along capitalist lines because the Western working class has lived at their expense – that is the reality we must explain today. Divided Word, Divided Class is neither more nor less than an application to our time of the analysis Friedrich Engels made of the British working class in 1883, the year of Marx’s death:

Do not on any account whatever let yourself be deluded into thinking there is a real proletarian movement going on here. I know Liebknecht tries to delude himself and all the world about this, but it is not the case. The elements at present active may become important since they have accepted our theoretical programme and so acquired a basis, but only if a spontaneous movement breaks out here among the workers and they succeed in getting control of it. Till then they will remain individual minds, with a hotch-potch of confused sects, remnants of the great movement of the ‘forties, standing behind them and nothing more. And–apart from the unexpected–a really general workers’ movement will only come into existence here when the workers are made to feel the fact that England’s world monopoly is broken.

Participation in the domination of the world market was and is the basis of the political nullity of the English workers. The tail of the bourgeoisie in the economic exploitation of this monopoly but nevertheless sharing in its advantages, politically they are naturally the tail of the “great Liberal Party,” which for its part pays them small attentions, recognises trade unions and strikes as legitimate factors, has relinquished the fight for an unlimited working day and has given the mass of better placed workers the vote. But once America and the united competition of the other industrial countries have made a decent breach in this monopoly (and in iron this is coming rapidly, in cotton unfortunately not as yet) you will see something here. (4)

This world monopoly is now that of ‘the West’ so-called; and every day it is more broken, while every day the Western working class fights to maintain it. What will we do?


Notes
1) Robert E Lucas Jr., “On the Mechanics of Economic Development”, in: Journal of Monetary Economics 22 (1988), p. 3-42. http://www.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/docs/darcillon-thibault/lucasmechanicseconomicgrowth.pdf

2) Karl Marx, Letter to P.V. Annenkov (Dec. 28, 1846). http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1846/letters/46_12_28.htm

3) Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Ch. 22 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch22.htm

4) Friedrich Engels, Letter to August Bebel (Aug. 30, 1883). http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/letters/83_08_30.htm

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MLM Mayhem Reviews Zak Cope's Divided World Divided Class

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My comrade Josh recently wrote a review of Zak Cope's Divided World Divided Class on his excellent MLM Mayhem blog. You can read it here, but i am also reposting it on Sketchy Thoughts here:

These days, at the centres of capitalism, it is en vogue for leftists to attack Lenin's theory of the labour aristocracy.  Some marxist critics, feeling like they know better than the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, would like to remind us that Lenin's theorization of a term bandied about by Engels showed no understanding of what Engels meant in the first place––indeed, the same critics said much the same about Lenin's theorization of the dictatorship of the proletariat.  Others would just have us believe that this theory is utterly erroneous and that Lenin, regardless of his influence, was wrong when it came to labour aristocracies, super-profits, and maybe even imperialism.  These denials, usually vocalized by a privileged group of leftist academics at the centres of capitalism, are either rhetorical or a grand act of obfuscatory sophistry but still part of the zeitgeist at the imperialist centres. Where the rest of the marxist movement still believes in the theory, though perhaps in various ways, a bunch of privileged marxist "experts" in the so-called first world would have us believe otherwise.  Do these experts protest too much?  Maybe… Social circumstances are always enlightening: the difference in analysis between marxists at the centres and marxists at the peripheries might be just as important as the difference in analysis between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat––but I digress.

In any case, since asinine attacks on the theory of the labour aristocracy are now common amongst a sector of leftists who live in the centres of imperialism, it is about time that someone like Zak Cope wrote Divided World Divided Class, a book which re-theorizes Lenin's notion of the labour aristocracy from a thorough political economic perspective.  Indeed, Cope's book is the antidote to Charlie Post's somewhat recent bullshit and unscientific attacks on the theory.  The fact that Cope doesn't cite Post is only proof that a rugged political economist like Cope doesn't take the rhetoric of Post, which demonstrates no political economic awareness and is little more than a hatchet job filled with straw-person and red herring fallacies, very seriously.  Cope, after all, not only spends hundreds of pages tracing the historical emergence and meaning of the labour aristocracy, but he also expends appendices of economic data that thoroughly demonstrates the point.  Best to be scientific when you have to deal with rhetoricians who live at the centres of capitalism and don't want to admit that they're part of a movement that might be affected by imperialism!

Before writing some asinine comment about how you reject the theory of the labour aristocracy and thus don't like Cope's book, do yourself a favour and buy the book now so at least whatever critique you plan to level is not some straw-person and ill informed complaint, as is typical for so many of us internet leftists!

Cope really does provide the first full-fledged political economy of the labour aristocracy.  Amin has talked around this issue, especially in the re-issue of The Law of Worldwide Value, but even that wasn't about the labour aristocracy per se.  To date, there has not been a single and thorough book of political economy dedicated to the general theory's efficacy––not from those who support the theory, not from its detractors––and so Divided World Divided Class is an extremely important book.  If anything, it should reignite a debate that some leftists at the centres of global capitalism, terrified at being classified as ideologues of a labour aristocracy, have been hoping to avoid.

Due to this fact, Cope's Divide World Divided Class is monumental: it is a fully unified work of political economy about the theory of the labour aristocracy that synthesizes all of the analyses, along with quantitative data, in one book.  It proves without a doubt that there is such a thing as a labour aristocracy, that the working class movements at the centres of capitalism benefits from this labour aristocracy, and that all talk of its non-existence is little more than banal sophistry, an act of extreme denial.

Unfortunately, in its effort to prove the existence and persistence of a labour aristocracy, Cope lapses into an undialectical and unnuanced understanding of qualitative phenomena.  Absorbed in the positivism of political economy, he overlooks the necessity to grasp the theory of the labour aristocracy according to the scientific method of historical materialism––that is, like so many political economists, he is not a very good dialectical materialist.

Here, it is important to return to Lenin's approach to the theory.  Lenin might not have been a positivist political economist, but he was a dialectical materialist interested in making sense of his global conjuncture.  And when Lenin spoke of a labour aristocracy and imperialism he was indicating two interrelated facts: i) because of imperialism and the fact that the working-class movements at the centre were bribed by "super-profits"––that their material interests might not necessarily be invested in proletarian revolution––revolution was more likely to happen (and it did happen) at the "weakest links" of global capitalism; ii) because of the higher level of economic development, based of course on imperialist exploitation, at the "developed" centres of capitalism, revolutions at the peripheries could only sustain themselves if revolutions also happened at the centres.

But Cope, perhaps following the erroneous line of third world marxism, seems to assert that it is impossible for revolutionary movements to develop at the imperialist centres because, positivistically following the data of his analysis, he does not appear to believe that there can be revolutionary movements in the global metropoles.  For in these spaces, according to Cope, the working-class is so thoroughly bought out and invested in imperialism that there can be no proletarian movement.  Nor does he seem to care about a praxis that anticipates capitalist crises at the global centres––those moments where even the general labour aristocracy is reproletarianized––so he doesn't appear to care about a praxis at the global centres that would build the subjective forces capable of dealing with objective circumstances.  Indeed, his comments about praxis seem to indicate the third world surrounding the first world in a global peoples war solution, simplistically tendered by third worldist "maoism", though he doesn't precisely make this claim.  In two words: revolutionary abdication.

As mentioned in an earlier post, this kind of "third worldism" represents the very chauvinism it claims to reject.  To accept that there is no point in making revolution at the centres of capitalism, and thus to wait for the peripheries to make revolution for all of us, is to abdicate revolutionary responsibility––it is to demand that people living in the most exploited social contexts (as Cope's theory proves) should do the revolutionary work for the rest of us.  Even worse are the "third worldists" (and Cope is not one of these) who think they can theorize this revolution even though they benefit from first world privilege, who malign these "third worldist revolutions" for not following their theoretical line, and thus foster a division between theory and revolution: the third world will make revolution, the first world dedicants of third world revolution will provide the proper theory of this revolution––the mental and manual division of labour is thus reproduced.  And Cope, where he attempts to indicate praxis without demonstrating that he is practically involved with any significant political project (a general problem with first worldism which has always ended up promoting political abdication), justifies this banal third worldist end game.  Indeed, while the labour aristocracy is predominant a the centres of capitalism, this does not meant that possible revolutionaries at the centre have no other duty but to wait for third world movements to do the revolutionary work for them; nor does it mean that this labour aristocracy should not be understood contextually, that it does not articulate itself in very particular ways with its own gaps and fissures…

And yet these are only tangental problems, a product of Cope's positivism that is no less positivist than every modern political economy, and it is still clear that he has proved the existence of a labour aristocracy despite the angry mutterings of any "first world" polemicist who would think otherwise.  If the rest of the political economy universe, marxist or not, is going to play a positivist game, then you might as well do the same.  (Indeed, the only political economist I have ever encountered who has been able to escape this positivist game and practice dialectics is Samir Amin… and, by the way, he also believe in the theory of labour aristocracy!)  The problem, though, is it okay to be a positivist that rejects the very existence of a labour aristocracy and celebrates so-called "first worldism" while, at the same time, it is not okay to elevate "third worldism" by the same positivist logic.  Eurocentrist political economy, after all, is contingent on a lot of unquestioned assumptions; its third worldist counterpart, even if it is just as thorough (if not more so) in its research, is less acceptable.

In any case, Cope is extremely thorough in proving the existence of the labour aristocracy, the privilege of workers at the global centres due to the exploitation of workers at the global peripheries, and even more thorough in explaining why phenomena such as racism is a product of the material fact of imperialism rather than, as I have also complained, "simply presumed to conflict with the real interests of all workers and, thereby, to be a set of ideas disconnected from material circumstances." (p. 4)  He is able to cover a lot of territory, and provide a lot of data––so much so that if anyone reads this book and continues to lapse back on opportunistic rejections of the theory of the labour aristocracy I would bet tempted to suspect that they are living in racist denial.

But where Cope really shines, and what makes me hope that he will write another book dedicated only to this issue, is in his analysis of fascism.  This is only a side-point of his book, something that appears at the end, but it might even be more monumental than the fact that he has economically theorized the labour aristocracy.  Indeed, the fact that he uses the theory of the labour aristocracy to make sense of the emergence of fascism in Germany, and then draw out a theory of fascism from this analysis in order to chart the rise of modern fascism,  is extremely intriguing; it needs to be a book in itself.

Trotskyists have badly theorized fascism as a petty-bourgeois phenomenon.  Maoists have more correctly made sense of it as a monolothic capitalism.  But Cope knits these analyses together through the theory of the labour aristocracy:

"Fascism is the attempt by the imperialist bourgeoisie to solidify its rule on the basis of popular middle-class support for counter-revolutionary dictatorship.  Ideologically fascism is the relative admixture of authoritarianism, racism, militarism and pseudo-socialism necessary to make this bid successful. […] Finally social-fascism offers higher wages and living standards to the national workforce at the expense of foreign and colonized workers.  As such, denunciations of "unproductive" and "usurer's" capital, of "bourgeois" nations (that is, the dominant imperialist nations) and of the workers' betrayal of reformist "socialism" are part and parcel of the fascist appeal." (p. 294)

As regular blog commentator "jordachev" indicated in a comment on another string which ended up being about a discussion of the rise of fascism, there have been other marxist theorist who have noted that the Nazis were "actually able to appeal to a lot of what some would call the 'labour aristocracy', e.g. the highly skilled professionals, clerks, etc."  Cope synthesizes these analyses of the rise of national socialism, binding them to a more thorough theory of the labour aristocracy and fascism:

"First World socialists (whether communists, social democrat or anarchist) tacitly accept that domestic taxation affords the welfare state benefits of the imperialist countries without examining whose labour pays for the taxable income in the first place. By singling out ultra-rich elites as the source of society's problems and tailoring its message to the middle class and labour aristocracy, First World socialism becomes First Worldist left populism.  The latter is distinguishable from its right-wing variant only by its less openly racist appeal and its greater approval of public spending. […] As capitalism makes a transition from a social democratic welfare state to a corporate security state, it finds itself confronted with the need to dispense with the formal laws and political processes of bourgeois democracy.  Typically, the labour aristocracy… provides a patina of democratic legitimacy via elections and union organizing to the increasingly repressive police bulwarks of monopoly capitalism. It enables fascism by neglecting to challenge imperialism as the source of its relative prosperity and even its basic needs for health and shelter." (p. 296-297)

 While it is true that there are communists and communist organizations in the first world who do not "tacitly accept" welfare state discourse––and who definitely base a praxis round how social democracy at the global centres is only possible because of the greater exploitation of the peripheries––Cope is right in noting that it is the general state of affairs.  Indeed, most revolutionary communist organizations at the centres of capitalism (which are usually not part of the "mainstream left" in these contexts) have had to fight against a general opportunism and economism––finding ways to openly break with this ideology much to the distress of the surrounding left––in order to even begin organizing.  Moreover, the above quotation is extremely relevant in light of the recent #occupy furor that has now evaporated despite all the proclamations to the contrary: this movement did single out the "ultra-rich elites as the source of society's problems" (the so-called 1%) and tailored "its message to the middle class and labour aristocracy."  So Cope is even charting these confused attempts to resist capitalism's current crisis at the centre––which are often still square within petty-bourgeois territory and sometimes little more than evidence of a struggle to reclaim what the labour aristocracy might be losing––into the possibility of an emerging fascism… But this is only how the book ends, where he takes the theory of the labour aristocracy, and it is intriguing and important enough to demand a sequel.

All of this is to say that if you're a marxist political economist who is also an anti-imperialist, you should get your hands on Cope's Divided World Divided Class.  (Go buy it.  Now.  Here: I'll even give you the link again!)  I know that I will probably be going back to it, again and again, as a reference for my ongoing academic work.

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The Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Movement Interviews Dr Zak Cope

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The following interview appeared recently on anti-imperialism.com, the blog of the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Movement (RAIM), with Zak Cope, about his book recently published by Kersplebedeb,  Divided World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism.

Zak Cope is the author of Divided World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism, which was just published this past August by Kersplebedeb Press as part of their recently launched Kalikot series. The book “charts the history of the ‘labour aristocracy’ in the capitalist world system, from its roots in colonialism to its birth and eventual maturation into a full-fledged middle class in the age of imperialism. It argues that pervasive national, racial and cultural chauvinism in the core capitalist countries is not primarily attributable to ‘false class consciousness’, ideological indoctrination or ignorance as much left and liberal thinking assumes. Rather, these and related forms of bigotry are concentrated expressions of the major social strata of the core capitalist nations’ shared economic interest in the exploitation and repression of dependent nations.  I recently got the chance to interview Dr Cope about the project.

Nikolai Brown for Anti-Imperialism.com: Greetings and thank you for the interview.

Dr. Zak Cope: It’s a pleasure! Thank you for your interest.

NB: I first want to ask you about the book itself. Who did you write it for and why; and what can someone who is perhaps just discovering the subject expect to find out by reading your book?

I think that the ideas discussed in the book are accessible and of great interest to anyone concerned with international relations, poverty and inequality. As well as scholars and students researching in the fields of political economy, development studies, and the history of labour and socialist movements, I expect the book to have some appeal amongst teachers, lecturers, civil servants, social workers, counsellors, professional politicians, anti-capitalist, anti-racist and national liberation activists, and anyone at all interested in understanding and changing the grossly unequal and inhumane world we live in. Above all, I hope the book will have some appeal to English-speaking people in the developing countries and oppressed people in the developed countries. Ideally, the book will appeal to at least some working people in the latter, too.

I think that people will find out from the book about three things that are not often highlighted. First, that the depredations of colonialism and slavery provided not only the historical impetus for the rise of capitalism, and for the birth of the working class as such, but also a crucial source of food, employment opportunities and land for metropolitan labour. Second, the book highlights a historical shift whereby metropolitan labour first depends upon colonial labour for its existence, then, later, increasingly for its sustenance, and finally, now, upon neo-colonial labour for its entire lifestyle. Third, the book shows that the tasks facing workers in the developed countries are not those facing the workers of the underdeveloped countries. That fact may seem obvious, but the book goes further and shows that there is a deeply rooted contradiction between the aims and interests of the respective workforces, as demonstrated by metropolitan labour’s active engagement in colonial and neo-colonial politics.

NB: What was your initial motivation for writing this book? How did you stumble across the topic and what drove your research in this direction?

My initial motivations for writing the book were threefold. Firstly, I wanted to examine why workers in the rich countries seemed to have given up on socialism. As Donald Sassoon’s magisterial One Hundred Years of Socialism shows, the working class of the imperialist countries has for a century and more struggled to regulate and socialise capitalism, not replace it. If it is true that capitalism is an inherently exploitative and oppressive socioeconomic system how is it that workers in the rich countries have been so content to put up with it? Moreover, how is it that workers in the developed capitalist countries are so far from having, as Marx wrote, “nothing to lose but their chains”? My second motivation, then, was to counter those ideologies on the left which seek to explain these phenomena (that is, metropolitan working class conservatism and embourgeoisement). So, for much of the left, it is its militancy, its productivity or a combination of both, that explains metropolitan labour’s relative affluence. Paradoxically, however, the Western left has felt the need to explain working class conservatism by something other than this. Thus it has tried to excuse metropolitan labour’s conservative, complacent and fully reactionary politics with reference to its having been brainwashed or divaricated from its revolutionary tasks by all-powerful ideological state apparatuses (attempts to excuse it with reference to job insecurity and “precarity” notwithstanding). In short, for much of what passes for the left, it is “false class consciousness” that has led the Western working class to prefer social democracy, social partnership, and blatant national chauvinism (all these predicated on a political alliance with the capitalist class and its representatives) to socialism. Finally, and most fundamentally, the book was motivated by a desire to reinvigorate an internationalist perspective which had been sorely neglected by a Marxism deeply marked by a pernicious Eurocentrism. In that sense, the book was motivated by wholehearted opposition to colonialism and imperialism, which provide the real underpinnings of embourgeoisement, reformism, and racism alike.

The book is a continuation of my prior research into what I call the political economy of bigotry. My first book, Dimensions of Prejudice (Peter Lang, 2008) showed that unreasonable dogmatic beliefs are expressions of socially structured patterns of prejudice. I argued that beliefs about religion, gender, “race” and culture are not simply the product of personal ignorance or miseducation, but the ideological by-product of various types of group relation (patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism). The new book substantiates the older analysis by showing that the division between the rich and poor countries brought about by colonialism and imperialism is today the most fundamental “group relation” shaping peoples’ worldviews.

Fanciful ideas about toiling masses chomping at the bit for revolutionary change only to be misled by a corrupt union and/or political leadership or befuddled by capitalist propaganda are routinely trotted out by the Western left. Yet the “one working class” approach ignores both the political and historical facts of labour conservatism and the (parallel) economic facts of embourgeoisement. In short, it ignores the historical and contemporary inequalities created by colonialism and imperialism.

NB: How important do you think this question of understanding the role and history of the ‘labour aristocracy’ for radical, emancipatory, or socialist movements today? What kinds of errors do you see resulting from a failure to grasp this social reality?

There are several problems associated with the failure to understand how imperialism affects the global class structure. First, workers in the Third World must be careful when heeding the political or ideological leadership of First World organisations professing to help them overthrow capitalism. Labour and its representatives in the developing countries need to examine closely the deeply embedded character of the First World left in each and every one of its manifestations, so that they can better formulate their own independent strategies. Second, narrow appeals to self-interest on the part of the workers of the imperialist countries have historically tended only to result in trade unionist reformism and further descent into national chauvinism. Insofar as metropolitan labour’s demands for higher wages, jobs monopolies and industrial protectionism are met, they are met at the expense of workers and farmers in the Third World and serve only to make a subsection of the international workforce dependent upon imperialism. Third, understanding how the “labour aristocracy” is formed means understanding imperialism, and conversely. It is not a coincidence that those organisations which do not understand the embourgeoisement of labour play down the significance of imperialism. Even socialist organisations nominally opposed to imperialism very often miss their target. So, a handful of socialist organisations might prioritise peace work and opposition to militarism, equating imperialism with the exercise of brute force against one or more sovereign nations. Their foil may be a particular administration or its foreign policy. It may even be the military-industrial complex. Or, imperialism might be opposed as supposedly benefitting only a handful of ultra-rich bankers and foreign investors (even, at a stretch, a handful of very well-paid union bureaucrats and highly skilled professionals). In this case, only the richest 1-5% of society is seen as upholding the rule of monopoly capital. The multi-faceted approach articulated in my book, by contrast, is to treat imperialism as essentially involving the transfer of surplus value from one country to another and an imperialist country as a net importer of surplus value. Only this approach allows us to really gauge the size and boundaries of the labour aristocracy and, hence, the concrete possibilities of mounting effective opposition to capitalism and its military, legal, financial and political bulwarks.

NB: What consequences does such an accurate understanding of the division of labour under capitalism imply for radical and revolutionary praxis both in core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral economies?

In the developed countries, an accurate understanding of the division of labour under capitalism must impact on the aims, strategies and tactics of movements committed to genuine social progress, both globally and domestically. Hopefully the analysis in the book largely speaks for itself with regard to political conclusions, especially the possibilities of organising opposition to capitalism in the core nations. I don’t wish to sound a despondent note with regard to what workers in the imperialist countries ought to do, but what must be avoided are self-defeating prognostication and moralistic injunction without regard to social conditions. In the so-called “developing” countries, the main foci for what you call “radical and revolutionary praxis” have been clear for some time. What has not been so clear, I think, is the extent to which opponents of imperialism must necessarily confront the First World as a whole, and not just its very richest and most powerful members.

NB: Over the last few years, there seems to have been a resurgence in discourse on the stratification of labour. Within this context, what do you hope this book accomplishes?

I think you’re right that these debates are really coming to the fore again, in no small part due to the work of groups like your own. I hope that the book can be useful as providing a battery of arguments for people concerned to challenge the prevailing First Worldism of the left and, hence, better praxis on its part. I hope, also, that the book stimulates much needed research into imperialism and value transfer. There are several areas of research barely touched on in the book which must be integrated into any full analysis of how imperialism works. For example, how does global value transfer as described in the book relate to the systematic undervaluation of Third World currencies in terms of purchasing power parity? How, in turn, does this relate to “petrodollar warfare” (whereby the denomination of oil sales in US dollars forces countries to maintain large dollar reserves, thus creating a consistent demand for dollars and upwards pressure on the dollar’s value, regardless of economic conditions in the United States)? What have been the consequences of the current recession in relation to imperialism and what role has imperialism played in precipitating the recession? What alternative methods and means of calculating the transfer of value from the countries of the global South to the imperialist countries are there? My book should be considered a work in progress, in all of these regards.

NB: I know you don’t see a lot of potential in the way of progressive or revolutionary mass struggle in imperialist countries. However, I do wonder what kind of effect a wider, more systematic, and watertight discussion on global political economy occurring within or on the margins of imperialist economies may have on wider movements against imperialism. What potential significance do you see in wider discussions which expose these issues, even if for now this is mainly occurring among “English-speaking people in the developing countries” and “oppressed people in the developed countries?” In other words, do you think if discussions on how class is actually construed gain more traction, even among people who are generally themselves alienated from the day to day struggles of the world’s exploited majority, a more correct understanding of class can be imparted onto these struggles by way of osmosis? If enough people begin bringing up these issues in a critical way, even in the language of imperialism (i.e., English, French, Spanish, etc), at some point will nominally revolutionary or Marxist groups in the Third World, some of them engaged in armed struggles against neo-colonial states, ‘get it?’ Or, given wider engagement in the issues on the part of a broader section of the English-speaking left, may this embolden those in the periphery who already do ‘get it’ to take a more clear stand? Otherwise, what do you think the possible significance of a wider discussion of these issues among your main target audience may be? Finally, how does Marxism fit into your analysis? Why did you approach the topic from a Marxian perspective, and what do you think of its broader significance in respect to ideological trends like Anarchism or Radical Islam?

Firstly, it’s worth mentioning that these ideas about the global class structure are not as foreign to Third World revolutionaries as some might assume. Kwame Nkrumah, M. N. Roy, Sultan Galyev, Julius Nyerere and Che Guevara are just a few revolutionaries from peripheral nations who at one time or another espoused the idea that the workers of the core nations were receiving a portion of the surplus value extorted from their countries. (This does not imply endorsement of any of these men’s political lines, incidentally). Today, there are positive signs that trade union movements in the global South are becoming much more conscious of the conservative role played by Northern-dominated labour organisations and parties. In that sense, I agree that sound studies of class emanating from the developed nations can serve to strengthen and embolden workers and activists in the periphery determined to once and for all delink from imperialism, including its “left” standard bearers.

More generally, I think it vitally important that these issues be discussed with a view to clarifying the potentials inherent in various social struggles, wherever they might be happening. What, for example, must we conclude about the struggle to redistribute the wealth of the top 1% of the US population, when almost 1 in 10 of the remaining 99% are millionaires and the rest are in the top 10-15% of the world by income? What do we say about those groups on the left seeking to organise grassroots opposition to neoliberalism, even though some of the most popular anti-neoliberal parties are fascist? The same thing goes for the anti-globalisation movement, of course. The question people concerned with global inequality, including inequality within the working class, ask is: what does redistribution of wealth derived from imperialism amount to, politically speaking? What good does socialising imperialism do? If we can show just how much of the wealth of First World countries is predicated on superexploitation, we get a truer picture of the social, economic and political underpinnings of current realities.

Marxism teaches that consciousness does not determine life but, rather, life determines consciousness. This means that ideas about the basic inhumanity of large groups of people, our right to treat them with complete and utter disdain, do not simply drop from the clear blue sky. They are the product of certain conditions of life, primarily, the way in which societies wherein such ideas predominate organise their production. For several hundred years, production in the core nations has been organised on a capitalist basis, for which Marxism has provided the most in-depth and scientific critique. Nowadays, capitalist production has become truly global, but Marxism has largely failed to keep in step with it. In my view, this is mainly due to the phenomenon articulated in the book, namely embourgeoisement occasioned by a specifically imperialist capitalism. Yet by utilising the concepts (particularly value theory) and methods (dialectical materialism) developed by Marxism we can get to the roots of the matter, certainly much more so than were we to rely on religious and quasi-religious doctrines like Islam and anarchism to inform ourselves.

NB: Given how controversial these views are, how has reception been amongst academia and the wider ‘left?’

If ideas like those in the book have any currency anywhere, I would say that that it is within academia, and at the outer margins of the left. In general, however, both academia and the left are completely hostile to the ideas found in the book. To a great many socialists the working class has become a sacred cow. Any and all manifestations of chauvinism by metropolitan workers must immediately, and quite frantically, be explained away as “not their fault”. It is at least tacitly assumed that the workers of the developed countries are incapable of acting in their own rational self-interest. At all costs, it must never be admitted by the left in the developed countries that the economic struggles of the Western working class can, in the last instance, only be successful at the expense of the exploited nations. Persons and groups with perspectives like mine are criticised as severing the organic connection between struggles in the Third World and those in the imperialist countries. This is so even when it is impossible to see any link between, say, the struggle for Palestinian statehood and the struggles of UK workers for higher wages or a monopoly on jobs vis-à-vis foreign labour. It is so even when the workers themselves show no apparent sympathy, and even outright hostility, towards national liberation struggles at home and abroad.

Unfortunately, hitherto there has not really been a sufficiently watertight and rigorous analysis of labour stratification in the capitalist world economy. That fact has facilitated academic marginalisation of analyses like my own, but does not explain it entirely. The fact is, as I say in my book, whether it is for reasons of institutional self-preservation, well-intentioned “false cosmopolitanism” or avowedly conservative proclivities, by presenting the bifurcation of the world workforce into rich and poor as the natural and inevitable outcome of national differences in economic efficiency, educational attainment and cultural norms, the Western left, including in academia, effectively promulgates a mollifying, but self-serving, ideology that obscures the imperialist structures underlying international political economy. This must be faced up to.

With all that said, I am delighted that the book has been picked up by Kersplebedeb Press as part of its Kalikot book series. Kersplebedeb publishes and distributes a wide range of very useful work.

NB: Are there any other projects or books you are working on which we should be on the look out for? What’s next?

At the minute, I am preparing a couple of essays for publication. Hopefully, at least one will see the light of day this year. Otherwise, I have material on the history of the German labour movement that I may try to work up into a book. I also plan to make a more thorough study of political and economic conditions in Ireland today. I would encourage all your readers to keep up their study and add further substance to the analysis developed in the book.

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Workers Dreadnought Reviews David Gilbert’s, “Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond”.

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I must admit that it is difficult for me to write an honest review about Com. David Gilbert’s “Love and Struggle” (you can purchase your personal copy here), especially because of the enormous respect that I have for him and the sacrifices that he has made for the revolutionary cause, and a fear that any criticism of his work will be regarded as unfair, un-comradely and disrespectful. However, simultaneously I believe that such a review is absolutely necessary because Com. David’s life and politics have often intersected at key points in my own development as an activist, although completely unbeknownst to him. The first time was when I became involved around the anti-war movement against the second Iraq war, and some of us watched and hotly debated Sam Green’s documentary about the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), and saw me reading a lot of the existing literature at the time; the second time was during a difficult three-month strike that I was deeply involved in at my home institution during which I devoured Dan Berger’s authoritative book, Outlaws of America (which interestingly was the result of a long relationship with Com. David himself); and the third was when I returned from Nepal and became increasingly interested in the question of the universality of protracted people’s war, and the parallel between the WUO and the Jhapa Uprising. I will not discuss these points of intersection further because I think that they distract from the task at hand, but needless to say, Com. David’s politics and life experiences have been something that I have consistently wrestled with throughout my own political development, and thus I do not take this book review lightly.

Thus in frank honesty, I must admit that I did not care for the first third of the book. The first hundred and twenty pages suffer from two major problems: 1) Com. David very little new information about the development of the revolutionary movement on the campuses across the USA, except for the fact that Com. David was not as central to the SDS leadership and Weather Underground leadership as I had previously thought (although I was interested to learn about his initial theoretical work in New Left Notes which resulted in an early fall from revolutionary grace); and 2) I found it to be too pedantic, and structured through a series of lesson-plans. Indeed, often the first-third of the book, due to the little new information – especially for a reader familiar with much of the existing literature on the topic, including Dan Berger’s aforementioned excellent book – often came across as a kind of an Anti-Oppression 101 class with Com. David’s life serving as scenarios which ought to be discussed to develop a form of best practices that should orient our organizing. Indeed, this structure is replete with every sub-chapter heading being followed with a small-italicized synopsis that read like an Anti-Oppression 101 scenario, which we are supposed to collectively figure out, but without having Com. David present to debate with, which is less than ideal for any kind of revolutionary pedagogy. Furthermore, we are forced to replace such debate with Com. David’s own resolution. I am not trying to suggest that there is anything particularly wrong with anti-oppression training, although I do think that often this has replaced a critical revolutionary framework, however, the result was that the narrative became disrupted and choppy. This disrupted narrative with little new information made evident the lesson-plan structure to the reader, which in turn blunted the effectiveness of the structure itself. This unfortunately resulted in Com. David coming across as too eager to provide solutions through which to demonstrate his continued belief in a form of revolutionary humanism. I must admit that I found this to be quite annoying, partially because of my own theoretical suspiciousness about revolutionary humanism (a debate for a different place), but also became I did not want to have Com. David to serve as a revolutionary ideal type, but rather, as an interlocutor in the revolutionary struggle. However, luckily both of these problems recede to the background as the narrative becomes stronger and very interesting information is provided to the reader about Com. David’s time underground, in Denver and during the Brinks trial in the latter 2/3rds of the book.

I know the exact moment at which I became excited about the content of the book and it is on page 124 when Com. David discusses criticism/self-criticism. It was fascinating to read about the WUO’s attempts to implement criticism/self-criticism in their practice as professional revolutionaries, and Com. David’s own self-criticism about how said practice was carried out (indeed, Com. David mentions that only a few times did he feel that the self-criticism sessions were actually aiding his development as a revolutionary). Indeed, an endearing aspect of this book is how humble and self-critical Comrade David is, although as I mentioned earlier, these aspects can also be quite irritating within the best practices format. This moment is important, as it is the point in which Com. David, unlike in first part of the book, does not demonstrate that there is in fact some easy best practice that young activists can follow. Rather, it actually shows the ambiguities and difficulties that come with putting any of these political methods in practice. And reminds us about the need for us to be consistently being critical about, and bettering, organzinational practices and individual work. Furthermore, the pedantic lesson-oriented teaching plan, whilst remaining partly in place, takes more and more a backseat to the narrative and allows the reader space in which to develop his/her own critical opinions about a given matter, which is what I consider to be an absolute necessity for any revolutionary.

Additionally, it was truly eye opening to read the rudimentary methods that the WUO developed to deal with security issues, especially in the context of being underground. Com. David, himself admits that these the methods are largely outdated in our contemporary context, but demonstrate the creativity and vigilance of the WUO during their underground years, and reaffirm the possibility of actually going underground and fighting in the heart of the beast. It was also interesting to learn a little about the debates within the WUO and how, once again, Com. David was not, besides a very brief time, a central figure in the WUO. However, I would have liked to learn more about the debates inside the organization, especially about their practice and conception of their conjuncture, but was interested to learn about the summer schools that they organized to improve the ideological quality of their cadre. It was interesting to learn about the debate in the organization around its relationship to the white working class, and its liquidation of the original line of the organization regarding the relationship to nationality struggles, and the role that Com. David played in it. It was impressive to learn that Prairie Fire (of which I own a copy) had originally been produced without any fingerprints on it. But, I do wish that there had been more information about the infamous Hard Times conference, which seems to remain a truly traumatic and pivotal event in the development of the WUO, and resulted in the building of the May 19th Communist Organization which became important in the context of the Brinks Robbery.

Com. David’s life aboveground in Denver, after the dissolution of the WUO, and his involvement with Men Against Sexism and the subsequently painful experience of dealing with multiple movements that came into loggerheads with one another, was very informative and again reflective of the complexities that arise in the course of the struggle. At this point in the narrative the lesson-plan structure seems to have completely evaporated which results in the reader being left to grapple with the contradictions within the revolutionary movement, alongside Com. David. I am not sure whether this was something that Com. David intentionally wanted to do or was a byproduct of the difficulties in providing any best practices in such complicated and textured inter-group/political relationships. I found it be particularly informative to learn about this period of his life, and was surprised to learn that Comrade David too had gone aboveground with the collapse of the WUO.

In perhaps one of the shortest sections of the book, and one about which I was very eager to learn more about, Com. David discusses his second and last time underground, especially his involvement in what has come to be known as the Revolutionary Armed Task Force and the notorious Brinks robbery and trial. It was intriguing to learn more details about the actors and politics involved in the Brinks Robbery, and facts like the Black Liberation Army not having a central command thus allowing autonomous collectives in the BLA to organize actions on their own accord (something that Com. David himself only came to learn about during the Brinks Trial). However, I must admit that I hungered for more information about Com. David’s relationship with the BLA and members of the May 19th Communist Organization in this second period, but recognize that these and a number of other aspects of his second period underground is something that Com. David likely decided to omit for good reasons.

Finally, it is noteworthy that Com. David spends a good section of the last part of the book discussing his family life with his imprisoned partner and newborn son, because I too have a loving revolutionary partner and also would like to have children someday. Indeed, this aspect was particularly important as it demonstrated a ‘softness’ to which male revolutionaries are not allowed to admit to. This obviously speaks to the macho attitude in many revolutionary groups and organization about the role of the family in the struggle, especially the armed struggle. Indeed, unfortunately often the two are put into juxtaposition to one another and rendered incompatible, thus requiring the revolutionary to ‘sacrifice’ the former in favor of the latter. Indeed, I can think of several autobiographies and interviews well well-known revolutionaries in which the revolutionary figure fails to even mention that he has a partner and children! And if and when they are mentioned, it is only in passing, and always in the context of sacrificing a relationship with them in the name of the revolutionary struggles. Thus, it was particularly inspiring to read about how Com. David was able to forge a relationship with his partner and son during his time in prison, despite all of the obstacles, and how this relationship was something that was negotiated with a revolutionary politics playing a central role. The only thing that one can say that is neglected in this last section of the book is the role that Com. David has played in the prison movement, both in his correspondence with activists outside, and with prisoners and political prisoners inside the prison system.

In closing, this is not a book to be simply read, enjoyed and tucked away on some bookshelf, forgotten, although it is an enjoyable read. It is a book that simply begs to be put into practice. What aspects a given reader wants to be put into practice is something that Com. David leaves the reader to decide, but he provides us with a wealth of life experience which we should all seriously consider. He gives us both the good and the bad. Comrade David is humble about his accomplishments and readily admits to his faults, he is an honest storyteller, and eager with his lessons for a new generation of activists.

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