Re: labour aristocracy--answer #1 to Tom

[Ben Courtice <benj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Tom's first question:

> *what is the mechanism by which surplus value from super-exploiting
> the 3d
> world working class, or women in the west, or American blacks, ends up in
> the bank accounts of the labour aristocracy?

First, I'm not arguing that women's oppression or that of
African-Americans is the cause of the labour aristocracy. Both of these
have existed for a long time, longer than imperialism in fact, and the
labour aristocracy is a feature of imperialist nationsI won't address
these issues here; someone else can examine them if they wish (I think
Kim Bullimore already made some interesting comments regarding women's
oppression).

Further, what the labour aristocracy is NOT: bowdlerised and mistaken
versions of the theory assert all sorts of outlandish things. That
workers in the imperialist countries are, if not venal parasites, at
least too conservatised to play a revolutionary role, is one such.
Another mistake which leads to confusion is to suggest that it's simply
a matter of income and money transfers (which Tom wants me to reveal "in
the bank accounts of the labour aristocracy").

As to the transfer of wealth from the Third World to imperialist
nations: does it end up in workers' bank accounts? Well, plainly it
would be hard to trace a direct path. However, we can quite conclusively
see that there is a massive flow of value from the Third World to the
First. A good starting point on this matter is Mandel's "Late
Capitalism" -- see especially Chapter 11. I won't go into the mechanisms
by which value flows one-way to the First World; Mandel's book is
reasonably available at university libraries and such. I'm no economist
and to repeat it here would only be to paraphrase Mandel anyway.

But not only is value being transferred from the neo-colonies. The very
structure of imperialism, with monopolies (and their skilled workforce,
and most production) centred in the First World is a shackle on the
development of the third world. As Mandel says:

"As long as the accumulation of capital proceeded principally by
disruption of pre-capitalist processes of production and social classes
on the domestic market, it detroyed more jobs than it created, so that
the industrial reserve army tended to grow, and workers were
consequently unable to build a strong trade union movement -- in other
words, to achieve a relative monopoly of supply on the market for the
commodity of labour-power, and to integrate the satisfaction of new
needs into a socially acknowledged standard of living (value of
labour-power). Real wages therefore sank in the long run. As soon,
however, as the accumulation of capital ceased to advance principally
through the displacement of pre-capitalist classes on the internal
market and turned instead to the expansion of the external market, it
started to create more jobs than it destroyed in the metropolitan
countries, *because the jobs it destroyed were henceforward located in
the underdeveloped countries.* It is this that explains why the secular
trend now came to be a gradual reduction of the industrial reserve army
in the metropolitan countries and a gradual swelling of the industrial
reserve army in the underdeveloped lands, which in turn explains the
increasing discrepancy of real wages in the two parts of the world. Far
from being independent variables, the two divergent trajectories of
wages in the semi-colonies and the metropolitan countries were mutually
determined. For they represented two complementary movements of a
single, worldwide process of capital accumulation, or two fundamental
aspects of the reprecussions of this process on the social and economic
development of mankind in the grip of capital. The formula, used by
various authors, of the mutually determined development of the
capitalist centre and underdevelopment of the capitalist periphery is
perfectly apt."
(From Late Capitalism, chapter 11; footnotes omitted; emphasis in original).

What exactly constitutes the "bribe" that the labour aristocracy is
given? It may indeed be that they can easier win wage rises, since their
employers are making such huge profits from abroad, and can ill-afford
their highly productive home workforce taking industrial action. But as
the above passage points out, their situation makes life easier. And the
development and high-productivity prosperity of the First World would
not exist without it's obverse in the Third World.

So all first world workers do, in fact, benefit from being in the first
world. They do not all benefit equally or constantly. The benefit is
relative because they are still, when it comes down to it, exploited and
oppressed. They do not benefit by crudely stealing money from the bank
accounts of Third World workers (who mostly don't have bank accounts, of
course) and transferring it to their own. It does not make them
incurable counter-revolutionary parasites. It just gives imperialism a
little more *material basis* to convince first-world workers of all
sorts of opportunist politics. How this plays out, and how socialists
should respond to it, I'll take up in another post (replying to further
of Tom's challenges/questions).

Ben Courtice


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