Hud955
Richard, Here’s my take on the article you linked to and the conclusion it reaches viz “that the share of value (labour time) that "first world" workers consume is greater than the share they produce. The article then calculates that most workers in the "first world" are not exploited at all”. This is just plain wrong. Never mind that the article uses a quite ridiculous definition of the working class whereby “only 65% of those who receive incomes in the First World are actually workers”, the facts of the matter speak otherwise. I can cite tons of evidence to support the contention that workers in the so called First World are indeed exploited like their fellow workers in the so Third World. For instance, Bonnie Kavoussi, writing in the Huffington Post, points out that while the average hourly cost of employing factory worker was $23.32, these same workers produced on average an hourly output of $73.45 In other words, your average American factory worker produced over three times as much wealth as she received back in the form of wages. (Bonnie Kavoussi, Mar 8, 2012,“Average Cost Of A Factory Worker In The U.S., China And Germany”,Huffington Post) Another proxy indicator of the rate of exploitation is the gap between wage growth and productivity growth Over the past few decades wage growth in the US has been noticeably sluggish, though still on an upward trend, while productivity has soared. According to the Economic Policy Institute, between 1979 and 2009 U.S. productivity increased by 80 percent, while the hourly wage of the median American worker went up by only 10.1 percent. ("The Sad But True Story of Wages in America", Lawrence Mishel and Heidi Shierholz, Economic Policy Institute, Issue Brief no.297, March 14, 2011). Relatedly, in an article for the New York Times in 2013, Steven Greenhouse notes: "Wages have fallen to a record low as a share of America’s gross domestic product. Until 1975, wages nearly always accounted for more than 50 percent of the nation’s G.D.P., but last year wages fell to a record low of 43.5 percent. Since 2001, when the wage share was 49 percent, there has been a steep slide" (Steven Greenhouse, "Our Economic Pickle", New York Times, Sunday Review, January 12, 2013). The main beneficiaries of all this productivity growth have been the top 1% of the population in terms of wealth ownership –essentially the capitalist class – in what is becoming increasingly unequal society. The imperialism.org article you linked to seems to base its whole argument on the premiss that while some workers in the First World are clearly exploited, as the example above shows, most workers in this part of the world are not productive – that is to say, they do not produce surplus value in the sense that they do not produce commodities that are sold on a market with a view to profit. Rather they are financed out of surplus value. For example, workers employed in some government department or a teacher in a state school. But this is a completely non Marxist way of looking at the matter. Just because a worker is employed in the non-productive sector of the economy does NOT mean that this worker is not exploited. Rather, the process of exploitation is an economy-wide phenomenon in the sense that fruits of exploitation – surplus value – is something that is, as it were, pooled and redistributed to ensure an average rate of profit across the (global) economy as a whole (and the very fact that there is tendency for profit rates to average out argues against the notion of any kind of fixed or localised phenomenon of “super exploitation”) The non-productive worker may not directly produce surplus value but he or she is just as essential to the process by which surplus value is generated and extracted as the productive worker. That teacher in that state school is involved in a process of equipping pupils with a skill set that they will later sell to employer in exchange for a wage perhaps earned working in a factory or a some McJob somewhere. Then we have the absurd claim by imperialism.org, “that a majority of workers in imperialist centers have been “bought off” using super-profits generated from Third World labor, and thus they have a material class interest in maintaining the order of capitalist-imperialism”. This demonstrates very well the utterly reactionary character of these Leninists who seem to have an overriding mission to sow divisions among the global working class which, naturally, can only work to the benefit of the global capitalist class If there was any semblance of truth in this nonsensical Leninist idea that first world workers are “bribed” by the metropolitan capitalists in the “imperialist nations” (actually, all nations are technically imperialistic, latently or manifestly, since all nations, even the little ones, are capitalist and therefore subject to capital’s self-expanding thrust) then we are entitled to ask – where is this mythical bribe that Lenin went on about? Does it come in a little brown envelope furtively handed over to the “labour aristocracy” of the First Word by their capitalist employers? No, of course not. If such a bribe exists it would surely be incorporated into the wages received by these workers. But that then begs the question – why when these workers ask for a wage rise would their employers so ferociously resist this? Why is there this constant downward pressure on workers’ wages in the First World as in the Third World? Why have wages in the First world stagnated while productivity has soared? The Leninists have no answer to these questions Their whole reactionary way of looking at this matter is to provide a pretext for support for petty bourgeois third world nationalism. That is their agenda. Leninism is the ideology of the frustrated comprador bourgeoisie of the so called Third World looking to expand their sphere in influence and market share. The guy who has done most to demolish the Leninist inspired of Third Worldists like Zac Cope and others is Charlie Post . Here is a link to some of the stuff he has written http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/128