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.
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.
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.
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.
Always a good time to read QinShiHuangsShlong‘s responses. Every day my respect for my Chinese comrades grows
I love reading your analysis, thanks for sharing o7
o7
🎯
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.
So everyone secretly hates the
elitesgovernment, but is too stupid to understand class themselves? Certain enlightened rebels are the only ones who can save the unwashed masses from their own stupidity?lol no. It’s not that most people don’t have the capacity. They are rational and many can figure it out themselves. But we really lean on their rationality when giving our arguments (or at least we should, instead of thinking of it like manipulation). Plus, many of the people who think they’re above the masses don’t actually understand capitalism.
You recall the part of Masses Elites and Rebels where Day says that all the proles are inherently revolutionary and knowledgeable and there’s no education to be done?
Elites, Masses, and Rebels reads to me as a Leninist position against the spontaneity of revolution. The takeaway is emphatically not that education is unnecessary, but the opposite: the spontaneous understanding by proletarians of their own exploitation has limits and is easily co-opted by counter-revolutionary forces. A vanguard is essential in these conditions to counter the organized propaganda of the bourgeois.
This is a re-hashing of the section on spontaneity in What Is To Be Done
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: