I have often heard ultra-lefts describe Marxists who oppose settler-colonialism and uphold AES as being “Third Worldists”.
Looking at what people like Jason Unruhe have to say about the topic, Third Worldism does not seem entirely baseless (e.g. the proletariat in the imperial core more often being labor aristocrats).
So, what are our thoughts on Third Worldism?
I think bourgeoisification was something that happened when the empire was at its peak, and even then, the imperial core contained its own internal colonies where workers were superexploited for superprofits.
I also don’t think it’s necessarily useful to think of first world workers as bourgeoisified anymore. The superprofit are running out.
I would believe it when i see it, when the working class of the imperial core decide it’s enough and overthrow the goverment instead of joining the army to get their share of spoils abroad that is.
Army recruitment is down, unionization is up. Support for the government has fallen and support for imperial adventures has also fallen. Wages have been stagnant when measured against inflation for decades. This all means something, don’t you think?
Maybe it’s premature to say the first world workers have been fully debourgeoisified, but I think the process has begun.
The AFL-CIO have had two leaders so far to the left, one of which was enthusiastic about Evo Morales and even supported him during the coup.
Not saying much because it’s the AFL-CIO, but it speaks to a growing radicalization within its ranks.
The working-class in the imperial core has a police-state boot on their necks and it’s been there for a long-ass time and it isn’t going away and will only increase… Give it time.
It’s a lot easier to start Naxalbari (and even that lost its goodwill in the few areas they control or controlled, up to now) in a place like India or do a coup in Africa.
It’s a lot harder to topple a government like what happened with France in 1968 and even then it was just a bourgeois change of leadership in the long-run, albeit somewhat shaky in the case of Mitterand.
Latinx, Black, Asian, some poor whites, etc. don’t want the racist police and prison boot on their neck and that just makes it harder to organize; we need more organization more than anything.
We have too many activist groups and movements strewn all over the country if you check, say, Instagram (and whatever they’ll show on Facebook) in the local and maybe state level.
But barely any unity or collaboration.
This is straight up my problem, western leftists act as if they are the most oppressed people on earth and downplay the sacrifices other peoples had to make.
insane statement, the life of a person is worth absolutely nothing in these places. In rural India cops or thugs straight up murder your entire family if they think you stole something from an employer/master, and you think you have it rough because cops use rubber bullets on you.
“act as if they are the most oppressed people on earth and downplay the sacrifices other peoples had to make.”
I agree, some do think this, it’s true.
The problem is that Africa and India are less industrialized; there are places to hide.
The fact that Americans and Canadians are strewn about but also mostly coagulated in the same areas doesn’t help matters either.
Did you know that the USA has the highest prison population in the world?
Look i don’t want to keep talking about this because i will get pissed off.
The people from the US won’t have a revolution because there is no political will by the working class, it’s as simple as that. And i won’t change my views until the american working class does something to prove me wrong.
They’ve done near-mass uprisings, at least, like 1918 to 1919, but yes, no real socialist revolution, it’s true.
I suspect that as the USA and Europe lose more of their grip on Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, we will see more strife in the imperial core (well, I certainly hope they lose more of their grip, but I’m cautiously optimistic!)
Hopefully, we agree on that, at least.
Hinterland is a good book on this, though biased against China.
There hasn’t really been a labor aristocracy since the 1970s; everything changed then.
I think the primacy of the labor aristocracy (in the U.S., at least) has only really started to degrade much more recently. There was a fairly strong (though changing) economy in the 90s, the first dotcom boom, then the early tech boom, then the consolidation of the tech companies into 4-5 giants in the 2010s (after the Great Recession).
Now that even those jobs are drying up, and now that multiple generations are seeing the twin crunch of that + the cost of living explosion (in education especially), you’re finally seeing widespread, lasting pessimism about the economic future.
Yeah, definitely don’t underestimate the cost-of-living crisis; it’s developing rapidly at a rate that’s historic, at the very least.
I’m not saying the effects of the stagflation crisis and the economic reconstructing of the 1970s had an immediate effect, but certainly in the long-run, it did, and only accelerated during the 1990s with Bill Clinton.