Inflation is mostly due to higher wages, and savings. Savings are reinvested by banks and turned into new constant and variable capital (hiring more workers). It can be turned into new consumption (like video games, social media, more advertising). It can be turned into student loans, and mortgages (if there is a surplus of money-capital all of these things will get more expensive relative the the unit of money), and “gentrification” re-developments or new suburban developments. Your savings become a smaller share of the MOP because they got invested elsewhere and more things were made or labor paid because of it!

“Savings savings savings” you say, and yet the rate of savings has been declining since the 60s and right now is on par with the period just before the 2008 financial crash. Savings are not an explanation for the inflation we are seeing and this is another contradiction to your claims: if savings are a source of inflation, and savings are down, where is the inflation coming from? Is it only coming from wage increases like is being claimed by bourgeois economists? I’m skeptical, and so I’m hypothesizing that the inflation is geopolitical.

You’re right that if not enough surplus-capital finds a home, that the value of dollars goes down, this is effected by dollar demand but also capital exports can take the form of bombs, ultimately the destruction of capital, which allows for demand to be re-established. New sources of consumption counter-balance inflation, essentially, which is why the US is the least susceptible state to inflation.

And yet, the state is grappling with inflation despite being the least susceptible state to inflation. Does this not indicate a change?

Do you think the bourgeois want a high interest rate environment? Do you think they want the global South to turn to other countries for loans?

In an Imperial economy where wages are already built from stolen labor of the global proletariat, cutting hours in Imperialist states comes at the expense of the global proletariat, it’s ultimately reactionary organizing unless it doubles with demands of a shorter working day globally for all workers, i.e. proletarian internationalism.

One thing that stood out to me was the demands for an end to understaffing, which necessarily means hiring more people. It’s not quite internationalism, no, but it does benefit the internally colonized people who could gain employment instead of being forced to fill the ranks of the gig economy and reserve army of unemployed workers.

I will acknowledge the labor upsurge lacks enough international character. I’ll be watching for who starts to organize migrant temp workers first.

Where? Outside of the walk-outs of academics who some happened to be in the UAW, there hasn’t been any anti-Imperialist actions by US unions.

UAW International is calling for a ceasefire, a full list of unions who have signed on can be found here. I’m not overly impressed by their calls, they only call for Israelis to be released when they should be calling for a hostage exchange and acknowledge that the Zionists have been taking Palestinians hostage by the thousands into detention centers, but they aren’t just silently supporting Israel either.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union recently shut down the Port of Oakland to prevent ships carrying weapons bound for Israel from leaving the docks. In fact, the ILWU has a long history of being interested in and supportive of Palestinian liberation going back decades because of their internationalist character that was cultivated during the anti-apartheid struggle against South Africa.

It’s not just academics. The labor upsurge is gaining a political character. Something is happening.

When union workers start destroying weapons manufacturing equipment I’ll have to change my mind, but that seems to be far from where we are, and the “toughest actions” have been climbing (office, not factory) buildings and tagging them with paint.

I’ll cheer when that happens, and you’re right to point out the lacking radicalism in US unions. Yet, you’re underestimating the importance of public demonstration and should recognize that even non-destructive acts still act as propaganda for further radical action. Tagging a building with paint can be a precursor to tagging it with… something else.

I don’t share your pessimism for the white US working class. I think we’re on the brink of a change and these are all signs.

We’ll see.

Nothing has fundamentally changed from the 60s

Bold statement!

You seem to think inflation is anything other than more wages than can be spent or reinvested (if in savings banks and credit unions).

Yes? Inflation, as experienced by the worker, is the cost of goods and services and housing rising faster than wages. Which is happening. Inflation does not automatically equal higher wages. Inflation, again as experienced by the worker, means higher prices. If that comes with higher wages then the worker can keep up with inflation and no one notices much other than the fact that their savings literally lose value over time, but debourgeoisification has disrupted this process. We are now seeing inflation actually outpace workers, they are not just making more to pay their higher bills and it’s lead to the recent labor upsurge.

This is not universal, obviously. The wages of managers, cops, so-called skilled laborers, bureaucrats, etc have risen in pace with inflation. We have seen some workers keep up and other workers fall behind, splitting off those workers and debourgeoisifying them as they fail to save and fail to attain property and fail to get “ahead.” I’m not sure why you’re insisting this isn’t happening.

Do you think there isn’t a labor upsurge and that class consciousness isn’t rising?

An exploited Proletariat literally cannot save money, and globally luxury spending does not mean they are exploited!

You’re right! And would you look at that, the savings rate in the US has been declining since the 60s, supposedly the period when things stopped changing. The savings rate briefly went up after the financial crash and bucked the trend of decline (i.e. when capital destruction created new avenues for investment) and obviously spiked during the period when people cared about COVID, but on the whole there has been a steady decline that coincides with the way real wages have stagnated.

Inflation is not in “luxury spending” it’s in fucking groceries and rent and housing.

The US is a more advanced British Empire + French Empire in one. It’s not a surprise since the US inherited every Imperial relationship the former great powers had!

Okay, so you are speaking literally of currency being exported. But you’re contradicting yourself and I’m confused.

You say “capital exports bring down the prices of goods” yet we are also talking about conditions of strong inflation. Is this not a contradiction? Does this not indicate that capital exports are falling, and that demand for USD is falling? You say nothing has changed, but despite the harshest sanctions regime in history we have seen Russia’s economy continue to grow! We are seeing nations make deals with each other in national currencies, totally bypassing USD. We are seeing alternatives to the World Bank and IMF, which offer loans in currencies other than USD.

The world is changing, and the conditions for white workers will change with it. Maybe it’s too early to say

Cops are petty booj, more cops means more petty booj.

What productive assets do they own? I think they’re a special protected class created by the State, and while their class interests align with business owners and independent farmers they are still distinct and it’s worth recognizing it.

This is copium and you’re universalizing your position within the Settler economy.

Maybe. Some of the trends I’m noticing have only been around for a few years, it could just be a blip and the white working class will go back to feasting on the superprofits of the global South soon enough. But-

Outside of Economistic practices focusing on wages and prices, the great thing this new wave has brought through the pandemic is organizing around workers’ health and wellness, as well as property abuses such as AI likenesses for performers. These are still material problems and the pandemic exposed them, but still this unions are hitting Economistic dead ends in organizing energy.

We’ve also seen the contract fights have not focused on wages. While the companies have been throwing record wages at workers the contracts still get rejected because what they actually want is time away from work and time where they can’t be scheduled and an end to understaffing, or like you say, workers’ health and wellness.

But we are also seeing union locals organizing against the Zionist genocide. That’s huge! The labor upsurge might be gaining a political character and you seem to be ignoring it in favor of pessimism. The union leadership is still in lockstep with the Democrats, and as long as that is the case they will hit those dead ends, but if I’m right and the rank-and-file are being debourgeoisified then we are going to either see the leadership change or we’ll see the NLRB declared unconstitutional and unions will have to go back to illegal strikes.

Surplus capital is not a “libertarian thing”, it’s a Lenin thing, it’s the reason why capital is exported.

Sorry, we’re miscommunicating I think. Are you conflating “dollars” with “capital” here?

My reading tells me the export of surplus capital refers to the export of productive machines, not the literal national currency. But I am, in fact, talking about the demand for the literal national currency i.e. not surplus capital specifically. Yes, US productive capacity is still high and there’s still a lot of unequal exchange happening between the US and its imperialized holdings as it forces them to use its machines and proprietary software etc etc, but notably interest rates have needed to remain high (so no more historically low interest rates) and this has put incredible downward pressure on the value of loans in USD.

At the same time, the sanctions regime has bifurcated the global economy. There’s now a parallel economy that exists outside of USD and this is adding additional downward pressure. Nations can now get loans from elsewhere (notably China), trade with national currencies for commodities and even resources like oil, and avoid unequal exchange with the declining hegemon because of the large and growing non-USD economy. The value of US dollar and demand for dollars can still decline despite US exports.

So, between nations not wanting loans from the US and being able to trade without USD, literal demand for dollars has fallen. This is, in part, where the inflation is coming from.

Where is the money going? Police, judicial, and carceral costs are increasing year over year. […] Did I mention that over half of the money spent on incarceration and policing (reaching a quarter trillion dollars every year, chart ends in 04, $261B spent in 2018) is wages for cops, guards, and judicial staff?

Is this not a sign of the debourgeoisification of the rest of the working class? The empire needs to spend more and more on policing and incarceration of exploited and superexploited workers at home, to the point that those high costs of control are now eating into quality of life of the rest of the working class due to inflation. At the same time it needs to keep elevating the lifestyles of pigs higher and higher to keep them showing up to work, as the act of policing itself becomes more reviled and more mentally taxing (I’m reminded of Fanon talking about how colonialism dehumanizes the colonizer). This is the other side of where the inflation is coming from.

As the cops, guards, judicial staff, and all the other carceral employees demand more wages they’re acquiring investments and housing and special legally protected status. They’re being further bourgeoisified, developing into their own special class and totally separate from the rest of workers who are beginning to be debourgeoisified (they can’t acquire housing, they can’t build savings, they don’t have investments, they certainly can’t seclude and segregate themselves away from the rest of the working class into white enclaves).

This special class of carceral workers is being elevated at their expense. They’re being turned from national police to colonial police, many white workers are being turned from settlers into… not natives, but something adjacent?

These aren’t conditions to wait around for! Don’t wait for shit to get worse! There is revolutionary potential now! You have hundreds of national liberation struggles and 100 million oppressed nationals across Black/Indigenous people and Chicanos/Latinos. These struggles could have been turned into revolution in the 60s but revisionist Communists at that time said “wait we need white workers!”.

When did I give this impression? I merely contend that shit is getting worse, not that we need to wait for anything!

Yes, the internally colonized people of the US are the most revolutionary force within it. I work in a factory and I can see how all the positions of management are only given to white English speakers, while the production floor is dominated by nonwhite people whose first languages are French, Arabic, or Spanish. I can see what you’re talking about every day.

I guess I’m just optimistic that the white working class has finally entered its own decline, but as you say, the embodied and generational wealth that they’ve accumulated will take quite some time to disappear. This is not a call to wait around, merely an observation that the time those misguided white communists were waiting for might be happening.

All of this is to say that the recent labor upsurge and rise in class consciousness has a material basis and isn’t just a fad.

Am I to understand that your point is nothing has fundamentally changed?

Okay, so I should clarify what I’m hypothesizing.

I’m not saying that bourgeoisification has already been eliminated or that we have reached the end of superprofits and their redistribution to the US working class, I merely contend that it’s begun its decline and is stratifying into even smaller and smaller subsections of the white working class. It would also be some time before we see the effects on things like air conditioning because of the inertia from previous development. The already installed air conditioners don’t just go away - people just stop running them.

US inflation used to be something that could be exported onto the rest of the world, but now the chickens are coming home to roost. The surplus of dollars is a poor explanation (kind of libertarian tbh), it only explains half the problem. The other side of the surplus comes from declining demand for dollars. The US sanctions regime has overreached on Russia and is now bifurcating the global economy into “countries that can trade with the US” and “everyone else” which created a boom in non-dollar trade. The high interest rate environment, too, is hurting demand for loans in US dollars as countries look for other sources of capital and deleverage themselves from US loans and debts.

The US is still superexploiting those workers in Brazil and Mexico; US workers are not going to be living like them in the near future! Yet as worker’s struggle in Latin America brings a new pink tide we are going to see more trade in national currency, more internal development, more investment from outside the US, and ultimately less superexploitation.

This is a trend, that’s all I’m saying.

Every day of inaction after the Court basically gave him unlimited authority is proof Biden doesn’t actually see these people as a threat.

“Some of you may die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make Jack!”

Women being forced into the labor force (they were already working before they had jobs!) means that the unpaid work of the reproduction of labor becomes a second job. You know why family size has declined? It’s because everyone has to work and no one can afford childcare while they’re all at work because they’re not bourgeoisified anymore!That’s a sign of the decline of the quality of life for white workers i.e. debourgeoisification.

It’s like you think nothing has changed.

Incomes have been “increasing” but when you factor in inflation they’ve been essentially flat since the 70s.

Now this new inflation and high interest rate environment and loss of USD supremacy is actually eroding wages in relation to the cost of living. The result is white workers being debourgeoisified. Note I’m not saying they’re kicked down into a position of superexploitation. That’s not really possible, obviously, since there’s no imperial core to benefit from superexploitation of white US workers.

Times are changing.

I’ll also note that internal superexploitation also exists within the prison industrial complex in addition to undocumented migrant labor.

I think bourgeoisification theory is generally correct: the white American working class has largely benefited from the redistribution of superprofits from imperialism and internal colonization, and so the labor movement has stood with the military in all of its adventures and stood with the carceral system and stood for the flag etc etc. Bourgeosified workers have a material interest in maintaining capitalism, at best they might favor some social democratic reforms to help redistribute superprofits more equitably.

I think the recent labor upsurge and (hopefully!) rise of class conscious in the US is coming from the end of the empire. White Americans are being debourgeoisified and kicked back down the class ladder into the rest of the working class, child labor laws are being rolled back, the NLRB is being defanged even further, the decline of the dominance of USD is causing painful inflation, etc etc.

Or in other words, all is in chaos under heaven. The situation is excellent.

You mean how they keep forgiving billions of dollars in loans that they’re using to build infrastructure and industrial capacity?

How terrible!

Contest that with the IMF, which bleeds countries dry until they have to auction off all their state assets and impose brutal austerity onto the people in order to repay their loans.

African and South American countries with lithium and cobalt deposits, pay attention!

Preserve your vital fluids. Don’t let them fool you!

This ruling gives him the power to do basically anything as long as it’s through the office of the president.

And hey, if he “clears” the bench and replaced them with better Justices then the new Court can just decide to not hear challenges to his actions clearing the bench. Or, if they heard it, make a special ruling i.e. it was legal this one time but actually unconstitutional every time going forward. Or even rule that he broke the law and force him to resign, but still not reinstate the previous Justices. Lots of options for solving this problem.

Or ‘game’ for the millennial crowd.

With this ruling Biden can “clear” the Judicial bench and nominate new Justices, who would then reverse this ruling. One and done.

Now if you’re worried about civil war, yeah, that’s a legitimate concern. I’m pretty sure this ruling already puts us on the path towards civil war, though? As soon as we have another Republican president they’re just going to start killing people!

Is your answer to just never elect another Republican president? I hope you can see why that’s not going to work in the long run!

Yeah, and we defeated Medicare.

People aren’t going to vote for this. The country is fucked if they don’t replace him at the Convention.

He was literally four years younger in 2020.

We all saw the debate. 🙄

it will become evil.

So nothing will fundamentally change?

And instead of gracefully resigning due to his obvious mental decline and nominating someone else at the convention, Biden has decided he’ll take us all down with him.

🤔