Is 'the working people' Obsolete?

[Rafiq]

As a form of agitation of course. With the rise of the precariat, the swelling of the so-called "Lumpen" (a term which gravely needs re-evaluation as far as how we conceive it in today's society) are appeals to "working people" not in themselves in JUXTAPOSITION to the unemployed?

One hundred years ago, to speak of "working people" was in direct juxtaposition to the passivity of the bourgeois class. In pertinence to present methods of possible propagation, is this rhetoric not obsolete? Does not not ring direct connotations of reaction? To speak of 'working people' today, does this not antagonize the immigrant welfare recipients, the permanently unemployed, the slum-dwellers, rather than the bourgeois classes (i.e. capitalists and small business owners) who have, at least on an ideological level made themselves the class of hard-working individuals?

Many of you THEORETICALLY can try and argue that they are still of the working class - which is of course true - but how RELEVANT practically is this as far as agitation goes? does being a "worker" for say, the average slum-dweller actually relate more keenly, more abjectly to one's experiences than to "left behind", "deprived", and so on? The struggles of the industrial working class are generally defensive struggles, struggles which insinuate that yes - they do have something to lose. What makes the INDUSTRIAL proletariat more susceptible as a starting point for agitation, mobilization and so on than the precariously employed? The proletariat is not an affirmative category. For Marx, the proletariat was a NEGATIVE category, it meant the particular expression of the UNIVERSAL negation of the bourgeoisie as a class, it stood for the UNIVERSAL category of the subject whom had nothing to lose, whose negation would be the end of all classes.

Communists must ask these questions - for example, during the tenant farmers' struggle in the 1930's, the line of the Communist party is that the farmers must simply tail the industrial working class. However, once they abdicated from this position, they were easily able to mobilize the tenant farmers, who flocked to any organization which could fight for them in some way. Perhaps all that is needed is to somehow RE-APPROPRIATE the category of the "working class" at the level of political language by somehow linking it with the masses of the MARGINAL, the unemployed, and so on? But how to do this? Please do not reply to this thread if your answer is somewhere along the lines of the obvious, i.e. "They're both of the same class, they both share a common enemy" and so on. I am not asking for a THEORETICAL explanation of how they link together, I'm asking how practically we can use the political language to do this - what issues do we specifically encapsulate, how to we present this in the form of agitation, clear and simple political language, and so on?

[Hatshepsut]

I don't know precisely how today's classes should be identified, characterized, and compared one to another with respect to their current functions in the historical system. The nature of class relations has undergone considerable change since 1900. The "working-hard" distinction made between factory and construction workers holding physical jobs and an idle bourgeoisie is outdated as you've suggested. The working-hard notions also bring in moral connotation about who is deserving which I feel cloud the issues of revolution. The bourgeoisie remain class enemies regardless of how hard they work, because they act to retard historical progress. The proletariat is to win because it represents onset of the next historical stage, not because its members are deserving of it.

I think the peasantry has disappeared in the middle-income and advanced nations due to farming's conversion to the factory system, that is, there is no longer a significant difference in class interests between city and countryside.

The marginalized, long-term unemployed can probably be grouped into two categories for purposes of analysis: Those for whom the condition is due to personal factors (abusive upbringing, mental illness, drug use, personality disorder, etc.) and those for whom it is due to structural factors (changes in the economy). Although this analysis is considered politically incorrect in many leftist circles, I don't think the existence of both these categories should be denied. The structurally unemployed are much more amenable to radicalization than is the other group. Of course I don't see the former group as hopeless nor advocate writing them off, but their participation and effectiveness in revolutionary activities can only come after the personality factors bothering them are addressed, a project likely to keep their hands full as well as demanding of guidance and time. They are the wounded in our class wars. Organization might proceed with structurally under- and unemployed people who live in the same ghetto areas yet nonetheless have retained something of a resource base to work from: friends, families, benefits or inheritances, small-time street enterprise, etc.

As for the language, I suggest encroachment by capital into the living areas and private spaces of the marginalized. This occurs literally, when their housing is torn down to make room for highways and new commercial property, notably in the form of obnoxious chemical plants and recycling dumps. It occurs financially, as predatory credit arrangements enter their neighborhoods: Look at all the payday loan and car-title shops in these parts of town. It occurs repressively as police officers raid the areas and shoot at them. A cruel psychological baiting game plays in the USA when governments offer social welfare to the poor, then yank it away abruptly in "get tough" campaigns. The physical conditions of oppression are generally less severe today compared with the 19th century, yet they are everywhere and all the time in a way they've never been before. Proletarians are now alienated from their free time as much as from their work.

The way I imagine it, in Engel's Manchester capitalism took the proletariat into the factory buildings to extract from it. Today, I see capitalism on the roam, chasing the proletariat to extract from it outside the buildings. It's not a field I claim expertise in, however, only my own impression.

[Rudolf]

As a form of agitation of course. With the rise of the precariat, the swelling of the so-called "Lumpen" (a term which gravely needs re-evaluation as far as how we conceive it in today's society) are appeals to "working people" not in themselves in JUXTAPOSITION to the unemployed?

One hundred years ago, to speak of "working people" was in direct juxtaposition to the passivity of the bourgeois class. In pertinence to present methods of possible propagation, is this rhetoric not obsolete? Does not not ring direct connotations of reaction? To speak of 'working people' today, does this not antagonize the immigrant welfare recipients, the permanently unemployed, the slum-dwellers, rather than the bourgeois classes (i.e. capitalists and small business owners) who have, at least on an ideological level made themselves the class of hard-working individuals?

Yes, yes it does. An interesting example of this has been the labour party in the UK as of late. Various MPs of that party have used this very thing as a ruse for attacking and supporting the attacks on the unemployed. To talk of working people (often with the adjective of "hard" before it) in the current climate of the anglosphere atleast is the same juxtaposition as the deserving and undeserving poor. I think the 'toiling masses' is less open to this as there's the implicit negativity.

I think it could be useful to try to understand how this came to be. I suspect it is linked to the historic use you pointed out as being the juxtaposition to the passivity of the bourgeoisie and the appropriation of it being useful.




What makes the INDUSTRIAL proletariat more susceptible as a starting point for agitation, mobilization and so on than the precariously employed? I think this is a result of two things: first is historic. That has been the notion since well before the current formation of capital. Secondly, i think it's also due to them more likely having some sort of combative organisations, you know the service-model unions. I'd consider this section of the proletariat as less likely to be at the forefront of the development of the movement which abolishes the present state of things. Its quicksand for revolutionaries because there's some organisational structure yet it diverts time and resources from the most marginalised, the most destitute.




Communists must ask these questions - for example, during the tenant farmers' struggle in the 1930's, the line of the Communist party is that the farmers must simply tail the industrial working class. However, once they abdicated from this position, they were easily able to mobilize the tenant farmers, who flocked to any organization which could fight for them in some way. Perhaps all that is needed is to somehow RE-APPROPRIATE the category of the "working class" at the level of political language by somehow linking it with the masses of the MARGINAL, the unemployed, and so on? But how to do this?

I think that can only be done as a result of agitating with the unemployed and precariously employed. I'd expect it would seem common sense the moment you start linking up the struggles of the unemployed and precariously employed.

Although when i see communists more comfortable having a stall in the city centre talking to people in suits than walking 10 minutes down the road to the jobcentre really makes my heart sink.

[ComradeAllende]

Many of you THEORETICALLY can try and argue that they are still of the working class - which is of course true - but how RELEVANT practically is this as far as agitation goes? does being a "worker" for say, the average slum-dweller actually relate more keenly, more abjectly to one's experiences than to "left behind", "deprived", and so on? The struggles of the industrial working class are generally defensive struggles, struggles which insinuate that yes - they do have something to lose. What makes the INDUSTRIAL proletariat more susceptible as a starting point for agitation, mobilization and so on than the precariously employed? The proletariat is not an affirmative category. For Marx, the proletariat was a NEGATIVE category, it meant the particular expression of the UNIVERSAL negation of the bourgeoisie as a class, it stood for the UNIVERSAL category of the subject whom had nothing to lose, whose negation would be the end of all classes.

Depends on the political context in which its used, although lately it's use is exclusively for reactionary purposes. Yet I don't really understand the relationship of the "precariat" viz-a-viz the "proletariat." The unemployed and partially employed are, in my opinion, economically-inactive proletarians, and the former are enlisted into the so-called "reserve army of labor." Farmers are few and far between nowadays, and most are either agro-conglomerates or petite-bourgeois in class orientation. The urban poor are the biggest reason (in my opinion) to support this concept of a "precariat," because they do not co-opt the revolutionary message, as opposed to including impoverished or temporarily-disaffected salary-men/professionals. Not to mention that their plight, which directly contrasts with the prosperity of nearby urban districts, serves as a poignant indictment of the status quo.


Communists must ask these questions - for example, during the tenant farmers' struggle in the 1930's, the line of the Communist party is that the farmers must simply tail the industrial working class. However, once they abdicated from this position, they were easily able to mobilize the tenant farmers, who flocked to any organization which could fight for them in some way. Perhaps all that is needed is to somehow RE-APPROPRIATE the category of the "working class" at the level of political language by somehow linking it with the masses of the MARGINAL, the unemployed, and so on? But how to do this? Please do not reply to this thread if your answer is somewhere along the lines of the obvious, i.e. "They're both of the same class, they both share a common enemy" and so on. I am not asking for a THEORETICAL explanation of how they link together, I'm asking how practically we can use the political language to do this - what issues do we specifically encapsulate, how to we present this in the form of agitation, clear and simple political language, and so on?

I tend to side with Orwell when it comes to this type of categorization. Terms like "proletariat" and "petite-bourgeois" are useful in a primarily abstract and theoretical environment but are useless when actually trying to gather a mass-movement. Most people aren't familiar with these terms, and even if they are they make us sound dogmatic and open us to reactionary populist attacks. If it were up to me, I'd boil down my message to a simple statement: if you have no say in your workplace and/or the policies of your employer, we stand with you. Of course this is, at best, a colossal over-generalization, but I think it's much more effective at attracting newcomers than the old cliche terminology.

[Patchd]

The working people as a category for those specifically in work is used to deter from the working class as concept to define specifically a social relationship. It's symbolic of our general shift from a class-based political paradigm to one based on abstracted and ever-changing individual identity. Even class itself has become co-opted, with the middle class being a term to muddle up sections to group those with proletarian and bourgeois interests together (partly thanks to our various traditions' obsession with the petit-bourgeoisie treated as a class in its own right).

The lumpen were never distinct from the proletariat and were merely a section within it that generally composed of those not in a position to survive based primarily on their ability to exploit the labour of others, but were at the same time not involved in a typical proletarian relationship where they sold their labour in exchange for a wage as a primary for their survival. Likewise, the petit-bourgeoisie were never a class in its own right, but merely a strata of the capitalist class in ambivalence to the haute (big) bourgeoisie. They were useful as definitions for theory in their own historical contexts, but we have probably moved beyond their traditional meanings.

Not to say new classes have emerged, nor that they don't exist, but rather that they have expanded. Either way, the definitions of various levels within the capitalist and working class are largely irrelevant except for a bit of mental masturbation. The working class is still fundamentally composed of those who are dependent on their *ability* to sell their labour power (whether past, present or future) ~ pensioners receive deferred wages, workers presently earning wages, most students and unemployed rely on their future ability to sell their labour power etc. etc... Whereas the capitalists as we know are those whose survival depends on their continued ability to extract capital from the labour power of workers, whether directly or indirectly.

There's even still a bit of confusion with some workers, for example, you have workers who receive bonuses as shares in their companies and by virtue are considered joint owners (although in most cases have no real authority in the direction of the company and as a result, their own continued labour). This doesn't make them capitalist just because they own a few shares, nor if they are members of a workers' co-operative as their primary source of survival is reliant on their subordination to capital.

Furthermore, things got slightly muddled in the 20th century when it became more apparent that political entities which seemingly have got rid of capitalists (the people) were still enforcing a capitalist mode of production ~ wage labour and capital accumulation even in the form of nationalisation/state ownership of industries ~ in absence of the capitalists, but in preparation, knowingly or not, for their eventual return.

I don't think we have to worry about our agitation so much currently. It's not like our movement is in a position to be able to agitate effectively anyway. Right now, and as it has always been, the capitalist class through their maintenance of this social relationship, are the best agitators for communism.

... and at any rate we get class traitors from both sides.

[Sewer Socialist]

I've been wanting to have something write something useful or insightful in this topic for about a week now, but I haven't really come up with any good suggestions.

I can say that rhetoric about "working people" has been co-opted by reaction. There have been a lot of transient people coming through Portland this month (many likely heading south to go trim weed in California), and a couple people I know, working people, have been complaining about them. They're everywhere, they're lazy, one was seen with a laptop, "they trash the towns and make life hard for the farmers", "if they had real work ethic, they'd find work," etc. This from someone who needed a GoFundMe for dental surgery, and who showed up drunk to work one day. It is no stretch of the imagination to imagine some bourgie fuck saying the same things about us.

Friends of mine suddenly turn into Rush Limbaugh in talking about them, with some weird chauvinism about being working class that never seems to involve talking about the rich.

Another friend, perpetually getting fired, thinks unions are for lazy people, thinks me being on food stamps and unemployment is some sort of cheating, and has all sorts of other weird ideas.

Anyway, when I think about it, leftist rhetoric about workers and parasites is easily co-opted for this kind of garbage, and even confusing to differentiate.

I know what side I'm on. I'm perpetually getting laid off and fired, my landlords sell what affordable housing I can find, I get evicted, I have mental health issues that are exacerbated by all this. These friends of mine are no different from me in any way other than their delusional reactionary identities.

And yet there is really no counter to this specifically from the left. Of course we must be on the side of people who have nothing, those who sleep on the streets, those plagued by drug problems, teenage runaways, the chronically abused, those who live daily in privation. But how, rhetorically, can that be made clear? What can replace the positive of "the working people", and emphasize the negative? Not the working, but the lacking?

[SocialismBeta]

The issue might be better put as a case of exploitation or entrapment, rather than a particular class. Looking at it in that way, the problem of the wage worker in a Chinese sweatshop is not so estranged from the unemployed or underemployed in the United States, because their common suffering extends from the same thing.

The concept of entrapment can even be extended to capitalists themselves, CEOs, business elites, managers, and so on. Even they are trapped because, the instant they stop working according to the dictate of profit, their direct competitors will plow them over.

Obviously socialists would start from the poor and exploited, rather than the exploiters, however trapped they are as well. However this concept of mutual entrapment under capitalism (and the resultant woes) may require a bit more theoretical knowledge that can't be easily encapsulated in an easy to understand slogan.

Yet, poverty, understood not merely as a lacking but also a continual cycle of debt, is an idea that I feel is very quick to communicate. Juxtaposed to the absurd concentrations of wealth a few have, this point might drive home the need for a populist, collectivist answer to capitalism. The Occupy movement did this very well with it's rhetoric of the "99%" vs. the "1%", and succeeded in implanting that terminology into the American psyche.

So perhaps the concept of "class", however important theoretically, should be put aside in favor of this: "Hey, look, most of us are poor, yet there is no need to be poor. We may suffer differently but we can find a common solution to our problems."

That would emphasize not what the exploited ARE ("I am working class") but what their relation to the system is ("I am being manipulated").

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

And yet there is really no counter to this specifically from the left. Of course we must be on the side of people who have nothing, those who sleep on the streets, those plagued by drug problems, teenage runaways, the chronically abused, those who live daily in privation. But how, rhetorically, can that be made clear? What can replace the positive of "the working people", and emphasize the negative? Not the working, but the lacking?

I've always been partial to "the dispossessed" (also works without quotes).

But I think it's a bit too optimistic to imagine word choice has a significant impact on our organising.

[Comrade Marcel]

It's interesting that some Marxists are puzzling over class labels when things are so clear at this stage in history. There is a tremendous proletarian class all over the 3rd world and it's hard to miss them if you look. What that means accordingly is that there is a causal relationship with the 1st world.

To use the term "working people" is certainly outdated in the sense that even the term "bourgeois" doesn't fit technically anymore when looking at who is the ruling class... One can argue that CEOs, landlords, etc. are "working", 1st world labour aristocrats are "working"; but this doesn't necessarily tell us anything in terms of their relationship with the means of production and their role as either exploiters or exploited.

[Guardia Rossa]

Just a quick question, has anyone ever tried to do some kind of calculation/study and/or proposed the labour aristocracy is paid with the surplus value the bourgeoisie takes from the proletariat?

[LeninistIthink]

Just a quick question, has anyone ever tried to do some kind of calculation/study and/or proposed the labour aristocracy is paid with the surplus value the bourgeoisie takes from the proletariat?

This is the closest I have found http://maoistrebelnews.com/2015/07/05/the-gluttony-of-first-worldism/

That isn't an endorsement of Unruhe btw

[LeninistIthink]

oh and this http://www.revleft.com/vb/rough-estimate-value-t108379/index.html and anything tagged with MTW or maoism third worldism probably has some stats

[Guardia Rossa]

The second is more like it.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I personally still identify with 'the working class'. That is my home.

I agree that the language of 'hard working people' and by extension 'working people' has been hijacked a little, but it's the same old divide and conquer, deserving v undeserving.

It's crystal clear that all workers, whether unemployed, employed, precarious, salaried, white or BME, straight or from the LGBT community, able-bodied or not, all are fucked over by capitalism right now more than ever, so there is a great need to reclaim positive language. We are all workers and we all have a common interest in unifying rather than being pawns in the old divide and conquer game.

[Rafiq]

There is a tremendous proletarian class all over the 3rd world and it's hard to miss them if you look.

Wrong. In fact, upon further evaluation of the industrialization of third world countries, what you see substantially more common are great swaths of the population excluded from the economic domain in general - people who are no longer even 'exploited' in the traditional Marxist sense, but relegated to ghettos, slums - in other words, emerging forms of economic, cultural and political apartheid. This was not the case one hundred years ago in Europe or the US. The precariat is a global phenomena, there is not one region of the world where it is demographically insignificant.

Of course, there are undoubtedly proportionally more industrial workers in the so-called "third world" then say service sector workers, but the proletariat as a category was never defined on these terms - it was defined as a negative category that stood as the universal negation of the class with nothing to lose - those with no property.

Of course, in Marx's time one could assume those who lived in western countries lived far better than the enslaved, starving masses in the colonies of their respective countries. But nevermind this: the notion that a global revolution would amount in a reduction of the standard of living in the first world to "compensate" for those in the third is beyond stupid: Mass consumption does not simply refer to how much is consumed per capita, it refers to the mass production and waste of commodities.

Furthermore, the very logic is reactionary: Third worldism, exclusively a western phenomena, as a means to oppose the technical and social advances in the "first world" in the midst of a fundamental inability to actually address these in Marxist terms, is not only anti-Marxist, it puts one in bed with the western petite-bourgeois reaction in general. In fact it is a classic tactic by the reactionary bourgeoisie to curtail the aspirations of Western working people by prattling of "how much better they have it" than those third world countries how they should be grateful and quit whining, and so on. If Communism does not SUPERSEDE present conditions, it does not exist at all.


To use the term "working people" is certainly outdated in the sense that even the term "bourgeois" doesn't fit technically anymore when looking at who is the ruling class... One can argue that CEOs, landlords, etc. are "working", 1st world labour aristocrats are "working"; but this doesn't necessarily tell us anything in terms of their relationship with the means of production and their role as either exploiters or exploited.

Well no, the term "bourgeois" certainly is still relevant, as the capitalist class has always "worked". The point is that their labor was and is passive. It was all rhetoric anyway, however. And I hope you are aware: Exploitation does not concern a moral category, but an economic one. The point Marx makes is not that workers are not compensated for their value - quite on the contrary, wages equal labor value. Exploitation is a category that concerns relations to property, finally, not the degree that which X population lives at the expense of another.

[Comrade Marcel]

Wrong. In fact, upon further evaluation of the industrialization of third world countries, what you see substantially more common are great swaths of the population excluded from the economic domain in general - people who are no longer even 'exploited' in the traditional Marxist sense, but relegated to ghettos, slums - in other words, emerging forms of economic, cultural and political apartheid. This was not the case one hundred years ago in Europe or the US. The precariat is a global phenomena, there is not one region of the world where it is demographically insignificant.

I'm wondering what sort of "bar" you are setting here to fit people into the category of proletarian. I take it you mean to exclude those you consider the precariat and that you think this class exists to the relatively same degree worldwide and is separate from the classification as proletarian proper.

I have to disagree.

First I don't think that we can consider that any significant precariat exists in the first world at all. We can look at the stats to confirm this:

http://www.un.org/en/globalissues/briefingpapers/food/vitalstats.shtml

Now how many of them are working and how many of them are scavenging, living off the land, begging, etc. whatever it takes to survive? I think it would ridiculous to say that none of them are working for wages in industrial factories and fields though.

In any case, we could assume most of these people would take jobs if they could get them. Most Marxists would include unemployed among the army of labourers. We know that the capitalists like to keep a certain amount of people unemployed in order to keep an air of desperation among workers.

As far as their conditions, I think they fit almost to a 'T' what Marx and Engels described in Das Kapital and The Condition of the Working Class in England.


Of course, there are undoubtedly proportionally more industrial workers in the so-called "third world" then say service sector workers, but the proletariat as a category was never defined on these terms - it was defined as a negative category that stood as the universal negation of the class with nothing to lose - those with no property.

I do not agree. M & E gave several characteristics for the proletarian, not owning capital/property was just one definition. Most 1st worldist Marxists seem to lay it down to just that one or the other: wage labourer.

From reading M & E we have nailed things down to about 5 characteristics. Of course not all need to be present, but the majority of these should be there:

1.) You are paid below the value of labour
2.) Wage labourer - you don't work you don't eat
3.) No private property / capital is owned or can be accessed
4.) Works with the means of production and do not own it
5.) Works in manufacturing i.e. they actually produce value not just abstract surplus

Further, the conditions of the proletarian are generally shit. They don't live a nice existence. 1st world workers only fit #2 generally. I don't think 1 characteristic is enough.


Of course, in Marx's time one could assume those who lived in western countries lived far better than the enslaved, starving masses in the colonies of their respective countries.

Sure, and M & E saw this as far back as 1848 and commented that the English workers were (to paraphrase) "living of the avails" of the workers in the colonies. Lenin commented on this later on as well, I can pull up the quotes if you like.


But nevermind this: the notion that a global revolution would amount in a reduction of the standard of living in the first world to "compensate" for those in the third is beyond stupid: Mass consumption does not simply refer to how much is consumed per capita, it refers to the mass production and waste of commodities.

If you intend to create egalitarianism, then yes it does.

http://llco.org/real-versus-fake-marxism-on-socialist-distribution/


Furthermore, the very logic is reactionary:

Sure, it seems "reactionary" to a 1st worldist to have to give up iPhones and big screen LEDs so that a "precariat" could have something to eat for a change. ;)


Third worldism, exclusively a western phenomena,

This is pure hyperbole. By your own logic then Marx, Engels, Lenin and Che are all examples of a exclusively "western phenomena" because they all support the position of 3rd worldism objectively to one degree or another. 3rd worldists haven't said anything that can't be found in traditional MLism.

Putting aside the fact that this is pig baiting for information on where/who are 3rd worldists, you could search for yourself and find out that the LLCO, for example, has sections and supporters world wide.

Even if that wasn't the case, it wouldn't make what they say wrong anyhow. It would just show that it hasn't spread far and wide yet in the short span of less than a decade of existence.


as a means to oppose the technical and social advances in the "first world"

Sure, we seek to stop "technical and social advances" via imperialism and off the backs of proletarians of oppressed nations.


in the midst of a fundamental inability to actually address these in Marxist terms, is not only anti-Marxist, it puts one in bed with the western petite-bourgeois reaction in general.

This actually more or less describes the 1st world labour aristocracy. It's easy to turn and point your finger at someone as a reactionary when they talk about taking food out of your mouth, isn't it? Only in this case it's first worlders taking food out of 3rd worlder's mouths so that they can have the luxury of air conditioners and luxury automobiles.

I also fail to see how this position would benefit the 1st world PB at all.


In fact it is a classic tactic by the reactionary bourgeoisie to curtail the aspirations of Western working people by prattling of "how much better they have it" than those third world countries how they should be grateful and quit whining, and so on. If Communism does not SUPERSEDE present conditions, it does not exist at all.

What are the "aspirations" you are referring to? To exploit more?

I find your pie-in-the-sky socialist ideals to be utopian and unscientific. You can't have more without taking it. The 1st world has more than enough already and the earth can't handle the amount of raping it would take to elevate everyone to that level.


Well no, the term "bourgeois" certainly is still relevant, as the capitalist class has always "worked". The point is that their labor was and is passive. It was all rhetoric anyway, however. And I hope you are aware: Exploitation does not concern a moral category, but an economic one. The point Marx makes is not that workers are not compensated for their value - quite on the contrary, wages equal labor value. Exploitation is a category that concerns relations to property, finally, not the degree that which X population lives at the expense of another.

I said that in passing and superficially. What I meant is that since the advent of the corporation who the bourgeois is in the traditional sense is not as clear. Certainly they still exist, but as capitalism/imperialism expanded sub-classes and divides have emerged differently than what M & E anticipated, so we have to look at things through a new lens.

In the end it comes down to the fact that:

1.) we don't agree on the definition of proletarian
2.) we both have a different prospective on how much production can be made available and distributed equally
3.) I assume we also would not agree on the likely roots of possible revolution

[John Nada]

First I don't think that we can consider that any significant precariat exists in the first world at all. We can look at the stats to confirm this:

http://www.un.org/en/globalissues/briefingpapers/food/vitalstats.shtml

Now how many of them are working and how many of them are scavenging, living off the land, begging, etc. whatever it takes to survive? I think it would ridiculous to say that none of them are working for wages in industrial factories and fields though.I don't think the precariat is anything different than the proletariat and is a redundant concept. But the proletariat isn't the only class. Thought the majority of the proletariat is in the third-world, due to imperialism a lot in the third-world are peasant, petit-bourgeoisie, lumpenproletarian and even slaves. Does not change change the necessity of the proletariat leading all to victory.
In any case, we could assume most of these people would take jobs if they could get them. Most Marxists would include unemployed among the army of labourers. We know that the capitalists like to keep a certain amount of people unemployed in order to keep an air of desperation among workers.Yes, you do not have to currently be employed to be part of the proletariat.
I do not agree. M & E gave several characteristics for the proletarian, not owning capital/property was just one definition. Most 1st worldist Marxists seem to lay it down to just that one or the other: wage labourer.

From reading M & E we have nailed things down to about 5 characteristics. Of course not all need to be present, but the majority of these should be there:

1.) You are paid below the value of labour
2.) Wage labourer - you don't work you don't eat
3.) No private property / capital is owned or can be accessed
4.) Works with the means of production and do not own it
5.) Works in manufacturing i.e. they actually produce value not just abstract surplus

Further, the conditions of the proletarian are generally shit. They don't live a nice existence. 1st world workers only fit #2 generally. I don't think 1 characteristic is enough.No, the proletariat must sells their labor-power. Whether she or he sells his or her labor-power for productive labor which creates value is not always the case, such as being in the reserve army of labor or unproductive labor not employed for commodities. Productive relations of society remain the same.
If you intend to create egalitarianism, then yes it does.

http://llco.org/real-versus-fake-marxism-on-socialist-distribution/That's not based on dialectical materialist, but on crude empiricism and Malthusianism. The law of value is not going to remain the same post-revolution, and eventually not at all under communism.
This is pure hyperbole. By your own logic then Marx, Engels, Lenin and Che are all examples of a exclusively "western phenomena" because they all support the position of 3rd worldism objectively to one degree or another. 3rd worldists haven't said anything that can't be found in traditional MLism.They did not. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao all thought there was a proletariat in the first world. They weren't just trying helping start revolutions in imperialist countries for the fuck of it. All any significant Marxist-Leninist orgs in the third world say there's a proletariat in the first world. Third-worldism is first-worldist revisionism.
Putting aside the fact that this is pig baiting for information on where/who are 3rd worldists, you could search for yourself and find out that the LLCO, for example, has sections and supporters world wide.

Even if that wasn't the case, it wouldn't make what they say wrong anyhow. It would just show that it hasn't spread far and wide yet in the short span of less than a decade of existence.Good, let it stay that way. It clearly is not based in the third-world, not even the Black Belt or Azlan.
Sure, we seek to stop "technical and social advances" via imperialism and off the backs of proletarians of oppressed nations.Revisionism is not going to help oppressed nationalities.
This actually more or less describes the 1st world labour aristocracy. It's easy to turn and point your finger at someone as a reactionary when they talk about taking food out of your mouth, isn't it? Only in this case it's first worlders taking food out of 3rd worlder's mouths so that they can have the luxury of air conditioners and luxury automobiles.This is the petty-bourgeoisie attitude of hypocritical pittance Marx criticized. Not a dialectical materialist outlook but moralism.
A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch06.htm
What are the "aspirations" you are referring to? To exploit more?

I find your pie-in-the-sky socialist ideals to be utopian and unscientific. You can't have more without taking it. The 1st world has more than enough already and the earth can't handle the amount of raping it would take to elevate everyone to that level.This is Malthusianism, which Marx and Engels specifically combated. Abolishing the law of value does not involve bringing everyone down to the level of being superexploited. There's more than enough for everyone, if not for the "anarchy of the markets" guiding production for profit and not use.
I said that in passing and superficially. What I meant is that since the advent of the corporation who the bourgeois is in the traditional sense is not as clear. Certainly they still exist, but as capitalism/imperialism expanded sub-classes and divides have emerged differently than what M & E anticipated, so we have to look at things through a new lens.

In the end it comes down to the fact that:

1.) we don't agree on the definition of proletarian
2.) we both have a different prospective on how much production can be made available and distributed equally
3.) I assume we also would not agree on the likely roots of possible revolutionThere's a proletariat(not lumpenized or precariat, redundant concepts), in both the oppressed and oppressor nations. There's a labor aristocracy, but a small minority of the proletariat in oppressor nations like Lenin pointed out. And revolution can happen in the peripheral and centers of imperialism.

[contracycle]

Looking at it in that way, the problem of the wage worker in a Chinese sweatshop is not so estranged from the unemployed or underemployed in the United States, because their common suffering extends from the same thing.


Psychologically, true enough. But there is one important difference: that Chinese waged worker can down tools and cause things to happen in the real, physical world.


--
To the OP: I see no need to "update" anything. I do not accept any of the arguments that there are "new" classes, or that the relations between classes have changed, or anything of that ilk. For my money, the original statement that capitalism eroded differences between a multitude of classes until there were only proletarian and capitalist is absolutely correct. And yes, maybe you need to take a few minutes to explain some of the jargon, but I've never found it a significant impediment when actually talking to workers.

[Sewer Socialist]

Some reading I've been doing lately is putting this discussion on my mind.


...upon further evaluation of the industrialization of third world countries, what you see substantially more common are great swaths of the population excluded from the economic domain in general - people who are no longer even 'exploited' in the traditional Marxist sense, but relegated to ghettos, slums - in other words, emerging forms of economic, cultural and political apartheid

Just as Marxism was improved and updated by Lenin's theory of Imperialism, and the role of underdevelopment, it is further improved in that direction by recognizing the role that the most negated segments of society serve in the economy. This unwaged sector of humanity, confined to shantytowns, is neglected similarly to the unwaged homemakers, confined to the home. The "reserve army of labor" (unwaged or on unemployment) adds to bourgeois profits by driving down wages, providing a cheap pool of labor chased by the global bourgeoisie; the unwaged work in the home reproduces the proletariat's ability to work.

These two neglected segments of society may not have been recognized by Karl Marx, but they have been a real force on the left in the twentieth century onward. From Silvia Federici's essay, The Reproduction of Labor Power in the Global Economy and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution: (http://www.countercurrents.org/federici290513.htm)



At the center of this critique is the argument that Marx’s analysis of capitalism has been hampered by his inability to conceive of value-producing work other than in the form of commodity production and his consequent blindness to the significance of women’s unpaid reproductive work in the process of capitalist accumulation. Ignoring this work has limited Marx’s understanding of the true extent of the capitalist exploitation of labor and the function of the wage in the creation of divisions within the working class, starting with the relation between women and men.

Had Marx recognized that capitalism must rely on both an immense amount of unpaid domestic labor for the reproduction of the workforce, and the devaluation of these reproductive activities in order to cut the cost of labor power, he may have been less inclined to consider capitalist development as inevitable and progressive.

As for us, a century and a half after the publication of Capital, we must challenge the assumption of the necessity and progressivity of capitalism for at least three reasons.

First, five centuries of capitalist development have depleted the resources of the planet rather than creating the “material conditions” for the transition to “communism” (as Marx anticipated) through the expansion of the “forces of production” in the form of large scale industrialization. They have not made “scarcity” – according to Marx a major obstacle to human liberation – obsolete. On the contrary, scarcity on a world scale is today directly a product of capitalist production.

Second, while capitalism seems to enhance the cooperation among workers in the organization of commodity production, in reality it divides workers in many ways: through an unequal division of labor, through the use of the wage, giving the waged power over the wageless, and through the institutionalization of sexism and racism, that naturalize and mystify through the presumption of different personalities the organization of differentiated labor regimes.

Third, starting with the Mexican and the Chinese Revolution, the most anti-systemic struggles of the last century have not been fought only or primarily by waged industrial workers, Marx’ projected revolutionary subjects, but have been fought by rural, indigenous, anticolonial, antiapartheid, feminist movements. Today as well, they are fought by subsistence farmers, urban squatters, undocumented migrants, as well as industrial workers in Africa, India, Latin America, and China. Most important, these struggles are fought by women who, against all odds, are reproducing their families regardless of the value the market places on their lives, valorizing their existence, reproducing them for their own sake, even when the capitalists declare their uselessness as labor power.


That is only the beginning of the essay, which links the role of the wageless in the 3rd world to the role of the wageless reproductive laborers, and identifies both as real anticapitalist forces. And yet, rhetoric of the "working class" generally refers to the waged. It is even sometimes used as a bludgeon against the unemployed, the underemployed, the "welfare queens" (ie, single mothers), the houseless, and other negated members of society. I don't really have anything to add to Federici, but I'd like to hear what others think.

[Comrade Jacob]

The workers in the west are a bunch of lumpen bastards, that's all I can really say about them.

[Lord Testicles]

The workers in the west are a bunch of lumpen bastards, that's all I can really say about them.

What's wrong with "lumpen bastards" you craven wage-slave?

[ACME_MAN]

I think it is very clear that the gap between the top 1% and everyone else in the US at least has grown enormously over the past couple of decades. About 50-60% of Americans are reportedly living paycheck to paycheck. CLEARLY, the working class or more apty "the STRUGGLING class" is VERY REAL.