Especially in the modern context in the year of our lord 2024. Is it relevant? What do I need to know about it ?
EDIT : Thanks everyone for this really informative thread.
Especially in the modern context in the year of our lord 2024. Is it relevant? What do I need to know about it ?
EDIT : Thanks everyone for this really informative thread.
It’s not zero sum. We could be in relations that multiply our effectiveness. We are not. This is real. Those landlords in the imperial core get their money from rent. That rent comes from salaries. Those salaries come from the value of commodities. The majority of the value in those commodities is not created by spreadsheet jockies, cold email biz dev specialists, social media influences, PR firms, marketing agencies, website design consultancies, logo rebranding exercises, corporate event planning, change managers, business analysts, strategy consulting, and thousands of other jobs and activities that dominate the imperial core.
You could reduce the price of housing to its actual cost, but it won’t help if you can’t get fuel to travel the scores or miles daily that American life requires.
I am confused - the decline in material conditions for the global north will arise because landlords and capitalists can no longer get the same rents as before?
Of that list of occupations, how many contribute to improving your material conditions? I don’t need a reallocation of labour from bullshit jobs to productive and useful work as a decline, and I doubt the normal workers in those professions would either. Historically the global north did a lot of manufacturing (aided by cheap energy and agricultural outputs from the global south - two factors largely solved with appropriate capital allocation).
To invert it, if imperial domination is the only way to sustain an advanced economy, how did China become as advanced as they are today without imperial domination and without 150 years of capital accumulation?
These are rhetorical questions - my view is that any decline in material conditions (beyond a couple of very specific things like coffee or cocoa) will be short lived as the new material conditions will drive political and economic changes.
You said most of the value is extracted by the bourgeoisie. I said that the way they extract it passes through the labor aristocracy. They could extract it without the labor aristocracy but they’d have revolutionary conditions on their hand. So instead they pay salaries from the surplus value generated by the periphery and then reclaim those salaries through rent, taxes, etc.
If the surplus value is retained by the periphery, the salaries cannot be paid from that anymore. That means rent cannot be paid from it, therefore we go through a potentially revolutionary adjustment in cost of living.
The problem is that there’s very little surplus value domestically. Yes, historically the USA had industry, but they built it on top of genocide and land theft. Now, though, the USA doesn’t make much of anything from raw to finished. Everything that it does make, like food, relies on major inputs from the global south like fertilizer. But more importantly, it relies on massive road infrastructure to maintain it’s imperial dominance over the continent. That road infrastructure is highly dependent on global exploitation.
How did China build industry without imperialism? Self-exploitation. It did not retain the surplus value of the labor of its proletariat. It intermediated the flow of value but it did not revolutionize the flow of the value. It attracted capital investment from the global bourgeoisie explicitly by maintaining their ability to profit from exploitation, that is, extracting surplus value from the labor of the Chinese proletariat.
As China increases wages, it is partnering with countries who also have been exploited by the imperialists and it is intermediating that value stream now. This allows the Chinese proletariat to improve their conditions and the Chinese state and Chinese bourgeoisie to allocate capital without triggering destructive reactionary behavior from the global bourgeoisie.
The value streams are remaining mostly intact, the global bourgeoisie is still extracting surplus value through China, and China has not chosen to shutdown the exploitation of its people.
Which brings us back to the North Atlantic labor aristocracy. European society is unsustainable. They devastated their peninsula of Eurasia and had no land left to exploit, so they went to sea. They spread like a cancer all over the planet, but they didn’t find anything to replace their land until they arrived at Turtle Island. Once here, the European cancer devastated two entire continents and the people on it. Completely unsustainable, just like Europe, but the land was vast. It’s only been 530 years since then. Conditions change. The USA is a completely unsustainable economic system on top of a completely unsustainable settler system on top of a completely unsustainable genocidal system.
If the flow of surplus value were to stop immediately, America would face total catastrophe, and in the face of total catastrophe it would launch a massive war campaign, just like the Euro virus always has when faced with catastrophe. Such a war would be in service of maintaining the flow of surplus value for generations to come by destroying the productive capacity of the rest of the world, forcing them to rely on the imperial bourgeoisie for rebuilding and thus ensuring surplus value is extracted by the imperialists.
What would not happen is sudden domestic investment to build production in the USA and a re- proletarianization of the labor aristocracy. And the reason that wouldn’t happen is because the capabilities no longer exist in ready form in the USA and because the native population and the formerly enslaved population will force the issue of liberation, forcing the USA to allocate resources to domestic control and genocide instead of production and reproduction.