“… The sincerity of people in the First World desiring a more human and less terrible world is tempered by an inability or refusal to champion the interests of oppressed nationalities as opposed to simply using their plight as a crude ideological analogy to point to a “common” oppression or as a bargaining chip in a cynical strategy to pressure the ruling class to grant heightened privileges. There has been no truly popular labour internationalism in the core nations. Instead there has been a history of labour complicity in the corporate and imperialist control of Third World trade union movements, electorally vouchsafed imperialist aggression, voluntary service in the imperialist army and often murderous supremacism on the grassroots level. Amongst the academic and intellectual left, both within the core nations and without, this benighted record has its counterpart in a determined and virtually universal refusal to account for the value of superexploitation and its significance to the transfiguration of the international class structure. In highlighting as we have the radically divergent remuneration of wages for the same labour on a global scale, we are effectively aiming to reorient Marxian and socialist praxis toward popular movements for democratic sovereignty in the Global South as the locus in quo of working-class ascendancy. In addition, we affirm that political demands for full and equal citizenship have become central to the labour movement where the monopoly capitalist class is able to continue appropriating surplus-value only by systematically oppressing subject populations. At the same time, we are aware that the (partial) fulfillment of these demands within a burgeoning system of (neo)colonialist capitalism may ensure that surbordinated groups within the First World both ameliorate and reinforce their relative marginality at the expense of the exploited workforce whose surplus labour must provide for their assimilation. Other than the obvious moral implications of group disadvantage within the First World, its relevance is primarily located in the enforcement of the political conditions for imperialist rule at the conjuncture, including by guaranteeing that the core-nation working class be afforded a larger share of socially pacifying superprofits. It is in this regard crucial to assert that the facts of the demographic spread and composition of relative disadvantage in the rich countries are bad enough without either being exaggerated (as they routinely are on the “left”) or offered as prima facie evidence of exploitation. Challenging discrimination and oppression is not to be confused with class struggle as such, which principally revolves around the exploited section of the working class’ retention or otherwise of the surplus value it creates. Since economic betterment for the people in the rich countries is today intrinsically dependent on imperialism, militant struggles against institutional discrimination everywhere and for decent living standards in the poor countries must recognize the centrality of opposition to imperialism. In the Third World, the labour movement and its representatives must become fully conscious of the bourgeois class interests of First World workers and their organizations. Although explicitly social imperialist doctrine is as rare on the left today as the colonialist ideology of “the white man’s burden” is on the right, the workers’ movements of the First World are at least as politically aligned with imperialist foreign policy and its institutional vehicles as they were a century ago. Third World labour organizations, for their part, have long been aware of where the loyalties of Western unions lie. …” pp. 303-304 Cope, Zak. 2012 Divided world divided class: Global Political economy and the stratification of labour under capitalism. Montreal, Quebec, Canada: Kersplebedeb
Posted on: Tue, 30 Jul 2013 15:32:19 +0000
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