Some time ago I supported Third Worldism and consumed various media explaining it’s theories, but at this point it just seems like one of many copes for a lack of revolutionary energy that place blame outside the self-proclaimed “vanguard” groups and displace the need for actual self-criticism. “Westerners are labor aristocrats” is just a form of complaining that “the proles have it too good” which is a subset of the classic Marxist dogma that "conditions determine consciousness and poeple will spontaneously become revolutionary when things get bad enough.” This is something that many accept, even when rejecting the particular claim that there is no white working class. This position seemingly grants the liberal assumption that regular capitalism is fine and it’s only crises and such that are bad; failing to account for the way in which people in poor conditions often follow false explanations for their problems and pursue actions that do not lead to liberation.
“The proles have it too good" is often a claim evidenced by the expanded set of goods that people have access to. As though capitalism didn’t continually manufacture new needs. As though access to cars and microwaves weren’t mandatory for a modern alienated worker with no time not dedicated to either the reproduction of capital or the reproduction of their own labor capacity.
“The proles have it too good” resembles the sentence “kids have it too good these days.” That is not an accident, but it’s not surprising that Marxists would have an aversion to that association. Each judgement’s purpose is to serve as explanation for something one does not like to see. The boomer sees kids with “poor manners” and explains that they have not faced enough hardship to adopt proper virtuous behavior. The marxist sees people going on with the everyday slog of capitalism and “failing” to revolt and explains “only with worse material conditions would they become revolutionary and pursure their historic mission.” It’s the same moralist logic.
Alas, the worker (however “aristocratic”) does not face the decision everyday of whether to contribute to the existing hegemony or do away with it. One works because one must feed oneself – regardless of how tasty the food is. The third worldist supposes that people are bribed into going down a certain path when in fact there was no decision before them. When the conditions finally worsen, there is no guarantee of revolution. If there is revolution, there is no guarantee of socialism. Why would people attempt to establish socialism if they don’t understand what’s wrong with capitalism? When things get bad people have often gone “our rulers are no longer treating us well. Let us change things so that we may have more benevolent rulers once more.” People have indeed been driven by poor conditions to revolt but their was no necessity binding them to the pursuit of revolution.
The third worldist claims that people have it better in the west because prices have dropped.
Of course, the price of commodities have dropped. This is the natural result of competition as well as particular aspects of capitalist competition such as the development of technology. This is elementary marxism. By no means does a decrease in profits imply a decrease in exploitation. Capitalists still seek an increase in absolute profit even as relative profits drop, and all profits come from the exploitation of workers. I’m not sure how imperialist super-profits are special or imply a widespread lack of exploitation.
The third worldist cites the New Deal and such as evidence of westerners coming to benefit from capitalism. Yes, workers fought hard and were ultimately placated or met with a compromise of certain reforms. This somewhat improved the conditions of certain people for some time. I have certainly not seen enough evidence to conclude that a significant amount of people, a whole “nation” had their interests shifted in favor of their former exploiters.
There have been “leftist movements” in the west since that time, and yes, they have not accomplished revolution. Why would they have when the dominant rhetoric and explanations are about states that don’t benefit the nation enough and immoral elites who are so much worse than the petty bourgeois, or even more abstract idealist complaints like many leaders of May 68. Most people did not have a marxist critique of capitalism and their critiques only reinforced the status quo.
Everyone’s “material quality of life is dependent” on the current system. We’re still exploited. We go to our jobs because we receive money in exchange for our labor. People would fight to destroy this system if they understood exactly how capitalism exploits them. People don’t rise up in many places right now despite the fact that they are “exploited more.” Paul Cockshott has shown that baristas, for example, are still very much exploited. https://youtu.be/dEsuQyyv5hc
White people in revolutionary america were not proletarian insofar as they were homesteaders and slave owners. I don’t see why proletarians couldn’t also be reactionary based on reactionary ideas. The fact that people have acted in a counterrevolutionary manner does not make them less proletarian – an argument Sakai used time and time again (yes, I have read Settlers). An argument presupposing the classic dogma of a revolutionary “historical mission” for the proletariat. Any complaint that there is a lack of revolutionary activity can be easily rationalized by the explanation “there aren’t enough (inherently virtous) proles.”
If products are really systematically sold to people in the imperial core at prices “below their labor value” that strongly implies that prices for consumer goods on the whole are much cheaper in the west than outside. Is that the case? Is there some purpose or explanation for this aside from “bribing the workers?” Obviously, there are professional-managerial workers who play a vital role in the circulation of capital and get payed more for it, but I do not see the labor-aristocratic side of that dominating. Anyway, people buy certain commodities that they did not used to based on manufactured needs, as I have already explained. https://en.gegenstandpunkt.com/article/ideologies-about-consumption-and-consumer-market-economy uses workers in the north and south for different purposes, requiring different things of them, and they are both exploited.
On the whole, it seems like Third Worldists largely repeat liberal talking points about how the modern liberal democratic citizen is liberated from the perils of so-called capitalism, except, twisting it with moral condemnation because we have forgotted about “the little guys” in the global south.
I will say, I see two main points of confusion that recur on this subject: one is from the end of people underestimating just how bad people in imperialized countries can have it compared to imperial core workers and the other is from the end of people overestimating how much of imperial core workers have it easy and have good financial padding (but this will also vary some by country).
I think labor aristocracy makes sense as material analysis, but takeaways from it can get bogged down at times in speaking about the imperial core working class almost as if every single member of the working class in an imperial core country is comfortable and is on more or less the same level as other members of the working class, and that they would never aspire to better beyond reform because of this. Rather than that they specifically struggle to embrace anti-imperialism because of the relationship between imperial exploitation and what little they do have, and because of this, their revolutionary efforts sometimes get bogged down in failing to address the primary contradiction, leading them astray in purely internal fights with local capital that, historically, tend to lead to minor concessions (more of the spoils of empire) rather than upheaval that threatens the imperial system.
So in other words, the picture of reality tends to be warped. People in the imperial core more tend to think of exploitation as purely “the boss extracting profit from their labor” and more tend to pass over “where the abundance that does exist is coming from” (not all of it’s from advances of technology or local labor). Or you’ll have people reverse the problem somehow and say that things like outsourcing are robbing the local working class, rather than seeing it as exploitation of the working class somewhere else. The international view lacks because of both upbringing/media and material interests against having an international view that produces material solidarity with the international working class, especially those of more exploited nations.
Does that make sense?
Disclaimer: I am not a “Third Worldist.” However even from a standard ML position your analysis has flaws.
Your separation of “regular capitalism” from crisis ignores the law of motion of the system. Capitalism’s normal operation requires continuous value transfer from periphery to core. The tendency for the rate of profit to fall is offset by super-exploitation abroad, cheapened constant capital from the Global South, and the externalisation of ecological costs. When these outlets narrow through national liberation or interimperialist rivalry the contradictions return home.
The question is not whether western workers “have it too good” in some moral sense but where they stand in the global valorisation chain. Core workers receive a fraction of surplus value extracted from the periphery via state transfers, social wages, social security nets and cheapened goods. This does not erase their exploitation but it does create a material basis for reformism and national chauvinism. Imperialism structurally allocates a portion of super-profits to stabilise class relations at home.
Consciousness is not a mechanical reflection of hardship. The average illiterate peasant in Yan’an or along the Neva did not study Capital. They understood exploitation. They followed a line that delivered land, dignity, and power. The vanguard’s task is to meet spontaneous fervour with direction, to raise immediate struggles to political clarity. As imperialist benefits fade and contradictions sharpen at home, even sections of the labour aristocracy will come to understand their position not through abstract theory but through the concrete experience of losing what imperialism temporarily lent them.
Your claim that lower profits mean less exploitation confuses rate with mass, relative with absolute. Imperialist super-profits arise from monopolistic control of high-value labour, intellectual property, finance, and military power. Non-monopoly capital in the periphery competes by depressing wages, enabling monopoly capital in the core to capture disproportionate shares of global surplus value. Lower commodity prices in the core reflect this extraction, not its absence. Exploitation is a social relation, not a price tag.
Class interests are determined by objective position, not individual consciousness. The New Deal was not a gift. It was a concession wrung by mass struggle, made possible by the super-exploitation of colonies and Cold War containment needs. When accumulation regimes shifted and the periphery fought back, those concessions were rolled back. The material basis for cross-class unity in the core was always contingent. It is unraveling now because the imperialist relation is intensifying.
Class position and class consciousness are distinct. The labour aristocracy is a stratum whose privileges create a tendency toward reformism. This tendency is not absolute. Crises, war, and sharp struggle can rupture it. To ignore the tendency is to disarm the movement ideologically. The task is not to write off core workers but to break the material and ideological chains binding sections of them to their exploiters. That requires an internationalist line centring periphery struggles and exposing how imperialist profits fund domestic pacification.
Cheapened goods, social programs, and wage differentials serve the reproduction of the imperialist system. They manage class struggle in the core while maintaining global extraction. This is a structural feature of monopoly capitalism, not a moral failing of workers.
To mistake a materialist analysis of global value transfer for liberal moralism is to project. The point is not to condemn core workers for having refrigerators. The point is to understand why those refrigerators are cheap, who paid the real cost, and how that arrangement blocks a unified global class consciousness.
Your argument rests on an idealist method that treats consciousness as primary and abstracts capitalism from its global uneven development. A materialist approach starts from the concrete: the global division of labour, the flow of surplus value, the historical record of reformism in the core and revolution in the periphery.
Excellent explanation of the Marxist-Leninist position on this topic!
You say there’s some special basis for national chauvinism and reformism in the west, but is there more of such tendencies here than elsewhere? There’s a ton of reformism across South America, and I shouldn’t have to say that nationalism is a plague practically everywhere. Just look at India. There’s a huge amount of poverty and yet the BJP heavily dominates. Yeah, the Naxals used to exist, but today 0.07% of the population is in the communist party.
The average Chinese peasant knew what it was like to be exploited by a landlord. They didn’t like landlords. That doesn’t mean they understood “exploitation” in general or the reasons for abolishing private property. Similarly, most Amerikans know what it’s like to have a “shitty job” and hate their boss or even the “elites.” That does not mean they are revolutionary, as they do not understand capitalism.
Nowhere did I claim fewer profits meant less exploitation. The average worker does not receive some great benefit from cheap goods. It’s required to have certain goods be cheap for the sake of the reproduction of labor capacity. Plus, automation constantly drives down prices while continuing to keep people exploited. More stuff does not mean less work and more “freedom to buy” does not mean a lack of systematic harm. That is liberal logic.
The New Deal was made possible by the massive destruction of constant capital during the world wars. There was not more colonial exploitation, but in fact unprecedented independence from colonialism. And yes, I know independence from colonialism doesn’t stop exploitation. Only the abolition of capitalism in the core can do such.
Anyone who’s read Sakai knows exactly what I’m talking about with moralism.
Cheap refrigeration is a necessity for life alienated from the production of food, and with very little free time to cook or collectively eat food. You are essentially giving the liberal argument that “all this nice stuff means we aren’t really oppressed by capitalism” but you think that’s a bad thing because the people “over there” are still oppressed by capitalism.
I already gave my historical materialist analysis (see the reply to cfgaussian). Have you noticed that there haven’t been any notable socialist revolutions in the periphery in the last forty years? Do you recall that there was a ton of revolutionary momentum in Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th century that, in some places succeeded, while others succumbed to counterrevolution. Heck, there was a large socialist block in Europe after WWII.
The fact that reformism and nationalism appear globally is correct but incomplete because it abstracts phenomena from their material basis. Reformism in the periphery stems from the weakness of the national bourgeoisie under imperialist domination. Reformism in the core is sustained by systematic value transfer from the periphery. This is not a difference of degree but of kind. The BJP’s dominance in India reflects the failure of the national bourgeoisie to break imperialist chains, not evidence that core workers share the same objective position as the Indian peasant. One is oppressed by imperialism; the other receives a fraction of its spoils. Conflating the two disarms internationalist strategy.
You state that the average Chinese peasant knew the landlord but not the theory of exploitation, as if this contradicts my argument. It does not. That is precisely the point I made: the vanguard’s role is to take that concrete, immediate grievance and raise it to a political line. The peasant did not need to read Capital to follow a line that delivered land and power. The same process applies in the core as imperialist benefits erode. When cheap goods become expensive and social wages are cut, the contradiction between lived experience and bourgeois ideology sharpens. Consciousness develops through struggle, not through abstract comparison of poverty levels. You are describing the mechanism I outlined, then treating it as a rebuttal.
On cheap goods and automation, you assert that the average worker gains no great benefit and that automation drives down prices while maintaining exploitation. Agreed. But again you miss the global relation I specified: automation in the core relies on rare earths mined in the Congo, assembled in Foxconn factories, shipped via imperial-controlled sea lanes. The price falls because social and ecological costs are externalised to the periphery. This is not liberal logic. It is the labour theory of value applied globally. The core worker needs refrigeration. The question is whether their access to it depends on the super-exploitation of others. If yes, then that access is a structural feature of imperialism, not a neutral fact of technology. You treat my analysis as if it claims core workers are unoppressed, when I explicitly stated the opposite.
Your claim that the New Deal relied on wartime destruction of constant capital while colonialism receded inverts history. The post-war boom was built on neocolonial extraction. Bretton Woods, dollar hegemony, IMF conditionality, and military bases replaced formal empire with financial and military domination. Decolonisation in form did not end exploitation in substance. It changed its mechanism. The concessions won by core workers were funded by this new imperial architecture. When that architecture faced crisis in the 1970s, the concessions were withdrawn. To ignore this is to abstract capitalism from its global uneven development, which undermines your own historical materialist framing.
Invoking Sakai on moralism is selective and misdirected. Moralism is judging workers for their conditions. Materialism is analysing how those conditions are produced. To note that a portion of surplus value extracted from the periphery flows to stabilise core class relations is not moral condemnation. It is a description of the imperialist mode of production. Dismissing this analysis as moralism because it complicates a simplified view of proletarian unity is itself idealist. You are conflating a structural account with a moral judgement, which is a category error.
You note that cheap refrigeration is a necessity under alienated social reproduction. Agreed. But necessity under capitalism is always mediated by class and geography. The core worker’s necessity is met through global exploitation. The periphery worker’s necessity is often unmet because value is drained away. This unevenness is not an accident. It is the system’s design. Again you frame my point as if I am denying core workers’ oppression, but I explicitly acknowledged their exploitation while analysing how imperialism fractures international class consciousness.
Your claim that there have been no notable socialist revolutions in the periphery in the last forty years arbitrarily narrows the field to ignore the primary contradiction of the modern age: imperialism versus oppressed nations. South Africa’s mass movements against neoliberal austerity and neo-apartheid economics directly challenge the financialised imperial order. Palestine’s steadfast resistance against settler-colonial genocide is the sharpest anti-imperialist struggle alive today. Iran’s defiance of US hegemony, despite internal contradictions, has materially disrupted imperialist encirclement in West Asia. Burkina Faso’s revolutionary rupture under Traoré has expelled French troops, reclaimed national sovereignty, and advanced pan-Africanist anti-imperialism. None are socialist in a textbook sense, yet all are objectively progressive assaults on imperialist domination. You also sweep under the rug the persistent people’s war in India’s Red Corridor, the Zapatistas’ autonomous project in Chiapas resisting neoliberal enclosure and state repression, the ongoing anti-imperialist mobilisations in Ecuador and Bolivia defending national resources, the New People’s Army in the Philippines confronting US-backed reaction, and the mass uprisings in Sudan and Haiti against imperial puppet regimes. These are not footnotes. They are the living front of anti-imperialist struggle.
Your malformed analysis rests on three recurring errors: abstracting capitalism from its global relations, treating consciousness as primary rather than forged through struggle, and evaluating theory by whether it matches a preconceived notion of proletarian virtue. Then, you repeatedly misread what I actually wrote, claiming I deny core workers’ oppression when I explicitly acknowledged it, treating my description of the vanguard’s role as a contradiction when it is the core of my argument, and conflating materialist analysis with moralism. Please read what i actually wrote, not what you assume is being said.
When cheap goods become expensive and social wages are cut, the contradiction between lived experience and bourgeois ideology sharpens. Consciousness develops through struggle, not through abstract comparison of poverty levels.
Very well put, especially about how class consciousness emerges in the process of struggle. This is precisely what Lenin always points out. Revolutionary movements do not begin fully formed on the basis of certain ideas, rather, as Mao also notes, correct ideas develop on the basis of lived experience.
Your malformed analysis rests on three recurring errors: abstracting capitalism from its global relations, treating consciousness as primary rather than forged through struggle, and evaluating theory by whether it matches a preconceived notion of proletarian virtue.
I think this perfectly sums up my issues with the OP’s analysis.
There is a global supply chain. What’s your point? People around the world can buy phones made with materials from the same places.
Paul Cockshott is probably more eloquent than me, but unequal exchange is not at all a Marxist theory. Marx set himself against the notion that profit in capitalism was generated from anything but equal exchange. The difference between the core and the periphery is that labor in the periphery is far less developed. Socially necessary labor time is the same globally, but in the US, say, wheat production is far more mechanized and productive than in india.
Modernity started in the 1600s. It was the era of bourgeois revolutions, independence revolts, and such. I don’t see any of those nowadays. And even if I did, that would not imply they are a way global socialism could be achieved.
There have been tons of movements against “neoliberalism” (aka the “bad side of capitalism”) in the east and west. Just look at occupy wall street or the yellow vest movement.
The fact that people die to fight imperialists does not imply that national liberation is on the horizon. Just like anarchists doing adventurism doesn’t imply immanent anarchist revolution. Even if national liberation succeeds, it tends to result in the native bourgeoisie doing the exploiting instead of the foreign one. Is that an improvement? None of the movements you noted are even Marxist. Yeah, people struggle along national lines under capitalism, but I fail to see how that is a real path to liberation moving forward. Granted, I was on your side for the longest time, but after reading some more theory and understanding nationalism and modernity more, I’m just not inclined to cheerlead bourgeois movements anymore.
Your denial of unequal exchange rests on a fundamental misreading of Marx’s method and historical context. Marx did not live through the age of imperialism. His analysis of value formation assumed a nationally bounded capitalist economy with relatively free movement of capital and labour. Marxism-Leninism was synthesised precisely to bring theory into the imperialist age, to account for monopoly capital, finance export, and the global division of labour. To cling dogmatically to orthodox formulations while ignoring the concrete developments of the last century is not fidelity to Marx. It is a fool’s errand that disregards the soul of scientific socialism: the unity of theory and practice, the constant development of analysis in light of changing material conditions.
You state that labour in the periphery is “far less developed” and less mechanised, as if this were a natural fact. But you skirt the question of why. Why is labour in the periphery less mechanised? The answer is imperialism. The same system that concentrates high-value production in the core actively deindustrialises the periphery, extracts its surplus, and blocks autonomous technological development through debt traps, imposed monoculture, and military enforcement of unequal trade terms. To treat the productivity gap as a neutral starting point rather than a produced outcome is to naturalise imperialist domination. This is not analysis. It is apology.
Equating Occupy Wall Street or the Yellow Vests with anti-imperialist struggles in the periphery is a category error that reveals your idealist method. OWS made demands on the bourgeois state within the imperial core. It did not challenge the global structure of value extraction. Anti-imperialist movements in the periphery confront the very mechanism that allows core capitalism to function: the drain of surplus value from South to North. One seeks reform within imperialism. The other seeks to break imperialist chains. Conflating the two shows an inability to distinguish primary from secondary contradictions.
Your point that national liberation may produce a native bourgeoisie that exploits instead of foreigners is shallow historical materialism. Yes, breaking imperialist domination does not automatically equal socialism. But it is a necessary precondition for any socialist project in the periphery. To dismiss anti-imperialist struggle because it may pass through a national bourgeois stage is to impose a sectarian timetable on history. The Chinese revolution (originally beginning as a national liberation movement under Dr.SunYatSen and the KMT not as a pure communist movement), the Vietnamese revolution, the Cuban revolution, all advanced through stages. To refuse to support objectively progressive anti-imperialist movements because they are not “pure” socialist is to abandon the actual movement of history for abstract purity. Theory that cannot account for this is not more advanced. It is more dogmatic.
You note that the movements I listed are not “even Marxist.” This is irrelevant. Marxism is a method of analysing concrete conditions, not a label to be stamped on movements. Movements are judged by their objective role in the class struggle, not by whether they quote Capital. The peasantry in Yan’an did not quote Marx either. What mattered was the line that led them to transform society. To demand ideological purity before offering solidarity is to privilege theory over practice, which is the essence of idealism.
You claim to have moved on after “reading more theory.” But theory read in isolation from struggle becomes abstract scholasticism. The test of theory is whether it can explain why imperialism persists, why crises return to the core, why reformism dominates in some places and revolution in others. Your analysis cannot. It abstracts capitalism from its global relations, treats value formation as if it operates the same in Detroit and in the DRC, and then wonders why revolution does not happen where you expect. This is not a more sophisticated Marxism. It is a retreat into idealism.
Finally, you frame this as about “sides.” It is not. It is about whether your analysis can explain and predict how and why things happen as they do. Mine can. Yours cannot. When you deny unequal exchange, you cannot explain why the core maintains relative stability while the periphery bears the brunt of crisis. When you conflate OWS with anti-imperialist struggle, you cannot explain why revolution has repeatedly broken the chain at its weakest link, not its strongest. When you dismiss national liberation because it is not immediately socialist, you cannot explain the actual trajectory of 20th century revolutions. Your analysis is malformed not because it reaches different conclusions, but because it starts from abstraction rather than concrete reality.
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If you believe that national liberation is impossible nowadays, or that, even if successful, national liberation would not help to bring worker liberation closer (even though the primary contradiction today is imperialism), and that changes in material conditions of the core proletariat caused by national liberation in the periphery do not make revolution more likely, then what do you have left but the wishful thinking that “maybe somehow we can say the right things to convince people to develop class consciousness”? Apart from the fact that it is not very materialist, it is also a very bleak outlook that will lead to quick demoralization of revolutionaries when that class consciousness fails to materialize despite their efforts.
How is that wishful thinking? It’s a rather realistic thought that revolution will never come and establish socialism if people do not oppose capitalism. Everyone hates the government, but how many of us actually understand how the state works as a tool of the ruling class?
The question is whether it’s correct, not whether it makes you personally feel good.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
If I can add my own two cents, i feel like third worldism is the inverse of ultra-leftism [bordigaism]. Of course you can explain XYZ with material conditions and that should be your basis of analysis, but it’s never the case people should just throw their hands up and say it’s too hard. The same way how people in the 1900s said China and Russia were too underdeveloped to have a revolution, thirdworldists basically say the US and western Europe are “too developed” to have a revolution. Why Should we wait for the history of Nazi Germany to be repeated in the west?
Holy shit, someone here can name an actual explicit ultra leftist tendency. The content of this essay is strongly inspired by reading various works of Bordiga and strongly disagreeing with his historical moralism.
Leaving aside the label of “Third Worldism”, which i don’t fully understand the definition of, what i am getting here is this: you reject the “labor aristocracy” theory and the theory of superprofits as an explanation for why we have so far only observed successful revolutions outside of the imperial core. You say this is liberal moralizing. Ok. What is your alternative explanation? You’ve so far explained things that you don’t agree with - fair enough - but what is in your view the more logically consistent analytical framework which explains the observations? What is the main obstacle to class consciousness and which actions would you suggest need to be taken so that revolution can happen in the imperial core?
you reject the “labor aristocracy” theory and the theory of superprofits as an explanation for why we have so far only observed successful revolutions outside of the imperial core. You say this is liberal moralizing. Ok. What is your alternative explanation?
One alternative explanation is that there were seeds of revolution throughout the imperial core around the time of the October Revolution, they were just successfully rooted out before they could grow.
Take the U.S. as an example. I don’t know nearly enough about the U.S. and Imperial Russia in the 1910s to fully compare their domestic surveillance and repression capabilities. But it seems reasonable to infer that that the U.S. – no lengthy war on its front porch; a more modern country; a long history of repressing sizeable black, indigenous, and immigrant communities; recent colonial counterintelligence experience in the Phillipines and elsewhere – was in a much stronger position to bring the hammer down on leftists at the end of the decade. They did, they never let up, and the weight of the internal security state only increased.
Maybe that’s why the left never got off the ground in the U.S.: they got beat by a stronger state than the Bolsheviks faced, then kept getting punched when they were down.
spoiler
Is this cope? Could easily be. But I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the late-Imperial Russian government was in much worse shape in 1917 than the U.S. government of the time.
There’s also some support for this explanation if you look at the history of the Communist Party of China, which rose to prominence at the end of a national crisis so bad it’s dubbed the Century of Humiliation.
Take the U.S. as an example. I don’t know nearly enough about the U.S. and Imperial Russia in the 1910s to fully compare their domestic surveillance and repression capabilities. But it seems reasonable to infer that that the U.S. – no lengthy war on its front porch; a more modern country; a long history of repressing sizeable black, indigenous, and immigrant communities; recent colonial counterintelligence experience in the Phillipines and elsewhere – was in a much stronger position to bring the hammer down on leftists at the end of the decade. They did, they never let up, and the weight of the internal security state only increased.
Maybe that’s why the left never got off the ground in the U.S.: they got beat by a stronger state than the Bolsheviks faced, then kept getting punched when they were down.
I actually think it was the opposite. The surveillance and repression apparatus was much more developed in Tsarist Russia than it was in the US at that time. Tsarist Russia had a lot of experience in surveiling and uncovering revolutionary cells, and they were far more brutal in their repressions than the US was (toward its settler population at least). At that time the US the state was fairly weak compared to European states, and the emptiness and sparse population of most of the US made it hard to police.
I think the real explanation lies in two factors: one is instability and the other is ability to externalize societal contradictions. Revolutions don’t happen simply because conditions are bad (people can actually endure a lot of hardship so long as there is a feeling of stability), they happen when there is a drastic upheaval, a disruption in the status quo that makes continuing “business as usual” all but impossible. For Russia that upheaval was WWI. The US on the other hand was virtually untouched by the conflict. Therefore there was no catalyst for revolution in the US.
The US had already experienced that instability decades earlier with the civil war, in the aftermath of which there was actually a period (Reconstruction) when there was genuine revolutionary potential for possibly the only time in the history of the US. They eventually managed to dissipate that revolutionary energy by externalizing the contradictions through westward settler expansion domestically and imperial conquest abroad. Racism of course also played a big role in preventing working class solidarity but racism alone would not have been enough.
So i think the US is not that interesting of a case study because you can fairly easily understand why the conditions throughout its history have generally not been suitable for revolution and why the ruling class there has been able to diffuse dangerous contradictions through outward expansion and inward growth (though now that seems to have finally reached a limit, so it will be interesting to see what happens going forward). The more interesting case in my opinion is Europe, and specifically the losing powers of WWI.
We look now at Germany, Italy, etc. and say, “well they didn’t have a revolution so obviously the same theory doesn’t work”, but actually virtually all of the losing powers (Italy switched sides to the winners, but it was nonetheless badly affected) experienced some kind of revolutionary upheaval.
In Germany there was the Bavarian Soviet and the Spartacist Uprising, and it took the betrayal of the SPD and their enlisting of proto-fascist paramilitaries to crush the revolution. In the Rheinland there was even foreign occupation. In Italy also there was a period of almost constant unrest until the fascist seizure of power, which was of course the reaction of the national bourgeoisie to the threat of revolution. The Austrohungarian empire dissolved and there was “Red Vienna”. Hungary also came very close to having a revolution which had to be crushed with outside help. And finally the Ottoman empire dissolved and had a bourgeois revolution under Attatürk.
Why did the winning powers of WWI in Europe, Britain and France, despite also experiencing great instability and social upheaval, not go through the same kind of period where revolutions almost succeeded? It wasn’t because their mechanisms of repression domestically were better than those of, say, Germany or Italy. It was because they were able to externalize the contradictions in their society through their still intact empires. As one of the architects of the British empire openly admitted, the Empire was not a vanity project, it was a necessity if the ruling class wanted to prevent the workers from rising up against them!
What lessons we can take from this? Well one is that generally revolutions need a catalyst, some kind of crisis usually brought about through external factors to act as the “spark”. Even the Haitian revolution came in the wake of the French revolution opening up a window of opportunity. The other lesson is that it is still possible for the ruling class to suppress revolutions if they manage to resolve, even temporarily, some of the contradictions by externalizing them, or if the revolutionary forces are not sufficiently organized and are unprepared to mobilize the people and seize power when the time comes.
In Russia the Bolsheviks were disciplined, organized and ready, having spent years building up connections with the working class base and winning credibility. Germany did not have a Bolshevik party. They had the spontaneous energy from the masses but the revolutionary organizations were too weak to lead the masses decisively. The masses put their trust in opportunist Social Democrats who were long embedded in the working class movement. In the end the German socdems fulfilled the same counter-revolutionary function as the Italian fascists (this is why we call social democracy objectively the moderate wing of fascism).
The surveillance and repression apparatus was much more developed in Tsarist Russia than it was in the US at that time… and the emptiness and sparse population of most of the US made it hard to police.
I’m no expert, but I’ve read enough about internal repressions in the U.S. that I don’t think it can be taken for granted than Tsarist Russia was more effective. In that 1916-1920 window you had Pinkertons and other private detectives in every possible meeting (and working closely with official law enforcement), you had frequent arbitrary arrests and at least occasional lynchings of labor leaders, and you had political action from the highest levels of the federal government aimed at quashing dissent. You had widespread censorship, surveillance of mail and phone communications, torture, mass arrests, and deportations.
Unlike Russia, you did not have a segment of the ruling class in favor of wholesale changes to the national government (or when you did, they were in favor of proto-fascist changes). And while I really don’t know how this would compare to Russia, all of the above repressive forces could be (and often were) supplemented by vigilante violence at least tacitly supported by the state. Any argument about the U.S. being large and difficult to police would apply to Russia as well.
I think the real explanation lies in two factors: one is instability and the other is ability to externalize societal contradictions.
I agree these are big factors, too. As you suggest, I think instability is probably the biggest, but of course all of these affect each other.
In Germany there was the Bavarian Soviet and the Spartacist Uprising, and it took the betrayal of the SPD and their enlisting of proto-fascist paramilitaries to crush the revolution… They had the spontaneous energy from the masses but the revolutionary organizations were too weak to lead the masses decisively.
Leftist parties being too weak and the repressive organs of the state being too strong are two sides of the same coin, right? And at the risk of overgeneralizing, I’d lump the German paramilitaries in with the armed vigilantes of the U.S. and the Whites who would fight in the Russian Civil War. Maybe the main reason the Bolsheviks won in Russia is the ultimate tool of state repression – the army – had been degraded so much that you had significant defections, all the way up to the garrisons of major cities during the October Revolution. I agree, though, that no small part of this was due to “the Bolsheviks [being] disciplined, organized and ready, having spent years building up connections with the working class base and winning credibility.”
There are some labor aristocrats in the west, but yes, it’s not a great explanation for the lack of revolution.
I think my “alternative explanation” was fairly explicit—and repeatedly contrasted to the false explanation: plainly, however much rebellious energy there is, there will be no movement that abolishes the present state of things if people do not grasp certain insights about the nature of capitalism and fight that as the source of their suffering. In the U$ today 2/3rds of people are living paycheck to paycheck, yet they mostly blame evil immigrants/woke elites/jews or just an insufficiently benevolent state. Similarly, we have seen many overthrown governments in the last twenty years in the global south, but all of them have just established new rulers and new exploiters. Nothing fundamentally changes because people do not grasp the root of their problems and fight it.
The logical solution is, then, to actually promote class consciousness instead of just protesting the current thing or trying to get your own party popular. One of Marx’s major contributions was the notion that the proletariat must liberate itself, but they will not do so if they place blame incorrectly.
But isn’t “there is no revolution because people don’t have a correct understanding” a more idealist explanation than one which references material conditions as a cause? Did people in countries where successful revolutions happened just a priori have a better understanding of the nature of capitalism than people in the West, or were they forced to develop that understanding because of material conditions? Have revolutionaries in the West simply not had a good enough educational outreach? Has revolution not happened because we did not use the right words? Do you not think that people can be more or less receptive to certain explanations depending on their material conditions?
How do we go about promoting class consciousness? And shouldn’t we also be asking: what conditions are most conducive to the organic development of class consciousness?
Forgive me for asking so many questions, i’m just trying to understand your thinking on this.
Is the explanation wrong?
If we want to talk about history, then let’s note that it was a different era when most socialist revolutions happened. People were rebelling against colonialism, and the national bourgeoisie was pursuing liberal independence and the establishment of a government more suitable for the interests. In some cases communist groups took the helm of the anti-colonial struggle and ultimately founded their own governments. In many cases, the new government allowed the new bourgeoisie to have some power for the sake of developing the productive forces. People didn’t have insight capitalism here. They didn’t blame capitalism or the commodity form. They blamed explicit colonial oppressors. And they succeeded in achieving nominal independence around the world regardless if it was done by communists.
There are no more bourgeois revolutions to ride off or take advantage of. Capitalism is a powerful and legally widespread force. We have to actually abolish it. Colonialism in its blatant form is mostly gone, although exploitation remains. In Engels’ words (the Principles) “The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.” This task can only be achieved by the proletariat’s collective refusal to feed the machine, instead taking control of the means of production and pursuing the abolition of wage labor and commodity production.
This is the real “gap” between the east and west that used to exist. In countries under blatant colonial domination vanguard groups could ride the coattails of bourgeois revolution, whereas in the imperial core we had to do the work of organizing the proletariat. This gap doesn’t really exist any more. We are all exploited by the same international capital.
Insight into capitalism typically only works if one’s interests are violated capitalism, obviously. But it is everyday capitalism that oppresses us, not just the crises. We cannot rely on bad conditions to make class consciousness easier to spread, because people can just as easily take up racist explanations or the idealist complaint that “this couldn’t be real capitalism. If only we could return to the decent time when the economy didn’t go to shit. Maybe one day we could have a true free market again.”
I mean both Engels and Marx would disagree that crises in the current mode of production aren’t the tinder that sets alight the fires of a revolution. You cannot hit a critical mass of people wanting to upend things if most people are, while exploited, broadly comfortable and willing to take their lumps thinking that things will probably continue to improve if they don’t rock the boat. Crises create flash points where people can’t see a moderate and easy way out, where the only safe bet is actually to overthrow the current rulers because they’ve used up whatever good will they had gained from their subjects. Consciousness building is simply the work that is done to ensure that, of that critical mass of revolutionary subjects, there is a sizable portion who can steer the masses, who understand why things are happening and can thoroughly explain it to the masses. Many of the rest of the masses may never actually become ardent communists, or have any great level of communist consciousness besides what the communists are currently telling them to get out of their shit situation they are currently in.
People can be driven towards extremes during crisis yes. We must take advantage of that. However we cannot count on inherently revolutionary conditions coming out of nowhere. We must spread class consciousness. Additionally, we must critique crises not as aberrations where capitalism went “too far,” but as one more horror in a long line. Capital harms the proletariat whether there’s a crisis or not.
The last time I was on here I said I’d write something on this soon. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in a writing mood for a whole, but luckily I happened to enter an argument (where I actually convinced the third worldist) and fully fleshed out my critique.
I was driven to Third Worldism after repeatedly following and then discovering terrible takes from proto-ACP “patriotic socialists.” I even joined a patsoc party and argued with them over Amerikkkan nationalism. Unlike then, as you can see, I have found no reason to center the issue of the “national question.”
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
