The following is from a YCL bulletin we intercepted which tells us something interesting about the YCL, we see that there is at least one person (Philip F.) who has solidarity with the 3rd world in that organization, and that he grasps a good understanding of our line. However we believe the comrade suggests fence sitting by trying to bring the two lines together, which is impossible. Two fundamentally opposed forces simply can not unite on such a bases and will inevitably conflict.
Also this comrade seems to conclude after all the evidence to the contrary there is some sort of revolutionary potential in white kanada even though he admits the 1st world working class is thoroughly reactionary. We also consider Philip F. to be displaying small bits of kanadian national sentimentality by suggesting ameriKKKa is worse. Our line is that we should be even harder on klanada and expose it's bullshit, which has been hidden under a woven maple leaf blanket for far too long. In many ways, such as the Native question, klanada is worse than amerikkka both historically and in contemporary struggles.
Philip F. should stop fence sitting and turn towards advocating against imperialism and for 3rd world struggles!
The 3rd World Comes First! Not the 1st World! Death to Klanada!
We will be responding to both articles in full soon.
Red Salute!
3W1
Marxism, Third-Worldism, and Revolutionary Potential, Submitted by Philip F from Toronto YCL
The Third-Worldist Challenge
For some time in the modern history of Marxism there has been a school of thought which suggests the First World (FW) working class has been bought off with the super-profits of imperialism and as such has lost all revolutionary potential. Today one can find ‘Third-Worldist’ groups which claim that the only way to uphold the legacy of Marx and Lenin is to reject political work among the FW working class and accept that it is delusional to think that workers in the rich countries can be won over to the struggle for Socialism and Communism. Although I do not think this line is correct, it does pose some challenging questions which should force us to critically examine our outlook, tactics, and expectations.
What follows is a deliberately provocative attempt to challenge our political line and an assessment of this challenge. The hope is that through engaging in critical analysis of some of our fundamental assumptions we sharpen our revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist politics. I welcome the most strident and thorough criticism.
Firstly, how do the Third Wordists reach their conclusions? Their starting point is that workers in the rich countries are not exploited, and so have no material interest in overthrowing capitalism and imperialism:
· FW workers enjoy massively inflated wages, putting even the lowest paid in the top 13% richest, globally. For example, a worker earning the Canadian average wage of $36,000 is in the top 5% richest people in the world. Conversely, over half the world’s population (more than 3 billion people) live on $2.50 per day or less; 80% of the world’s people are living on $10 a day or less; and there are more people in India living on $0.80 cents a day or less than there are people living in the US overall (i.e. over 300 million people, approximately 10 times the population of Canada).
· FW economies are ‘mall economies’; workers here are engaged, overwhelmingly, not with producing value but with the realization of capital. So if they are not producing value, and the cash for wages in the FW is ultimately derived from the profits of imperialist super-exploitation, then one can say these workers are not having surplus value extracted from their labour and are therefore not exploited.
· An improvement of conditions in the FW necessarily involves deterioration in the Third World (TW), as the superior material conditions in the rich countries depends on the impoverishment of the poor ones. FW and TW workers do not, therefore, share a class interest.
In the light of these material issues, should we be surprised if FW workers reject Socialism, which by its very nature would entail an end to the super-exploitation of imperialism and the decadent ‘Western life-style’ it has afforded?
And crucially, Communists are meant to be on he side of the oppressed, not the side of the oppressor. This is what class struggle is about. If the FW working class is consciously and willingly collaborating with imperialism, that suggests they are a class enemy, not a revolutionary class which will have a role in the global shift to Socialism.
Marx described the proletariat as having “nothing to lose but their chains” – does this accurately describe a worker in Canada, living in a cozy apartment, perhaps driving a car to work everyday, indulging in a rich diet to the point of heart failure; whilst the proletariat in the TW subsists from one day to the next, living in total squalor, illiteracy, and desperation, surrounded by the chaos and destruction of imperialist immiseration, with a life-expectancy of about two-thirds that of their counterparts in the FW?
This should not be taken as suggesting that there are not multifarious oppressions, humiliations, and indignities in the lives of FW workers. There clearly are. But there are degrees of suffering, and this Third-Worldist line provides some compelling reasons for why the working class in the FW does not shift to the Left even in the face of a clearly moribund capitalism which has produced nothing but human misery and ecological annihilation. In fact, it explains why FW workers overwhelmingly shift to the Right, embracing religious fundamentalism, war, racism and all manner of chauvinism and bigotry, thus facilitating the FW bourgeoisie’s consolidation of a fascist system to protect their wealth and power. This analysis seems to hold particularly true in the United States, where these ultra-Right tendencies are highly popular, deeply engrained, and well advanced.
A Marxist Leninist Response
I suggest that we embrace the challenge provided to us by this Third-Worldist analysis, without accepting it in its entirety. We should constantly be examining and re-examining the conditions created by global capitalism and how this affects our struggle – this is the only scientific and dialectical-materialist way to go about political work. If we ignore some of the material facts pointed out to us by the Third-Worldists we run the risk of becoming utopians and idealists – seeing the working class in Canada as we would like it to be, and not as it is.
However, if we adopt the outlook of the Third-Worldists wholesale, we will end up simply polemicizing on internet forums and doing little else; completely separating ourselves from the conditions affecting the people in Canada, missing opportunities to develop the potential for a people’s coalition (which is a feasible and viable) and simply be another weird, self-involved cult, much like the various Trotskyite factions.
Third-Worldism does force us to look at what we are doing here in Canada, an imperialist country with a population that is relatively very rich indeed and seems largely devoted to capitalism as things currently stand. But it fails in certain key respects:
· Revolutionary potential does exist in Canada, and even in the US. The question may be ‘how much’, but should not be ‘does it exist at all’ (which the Third-Worldists answer in the negative). Communists have a duty to seek out allies, work for the advancement of Socialism, and reject defeatism.
· Third-Worldists, in their ultra-revolutionary fervour, reject solidarity with the ‘revisionist’ Communist Parties in Socialist countries such as Cuba, Nepal, Vietnam, etc. and also totally dismiss Communist Parties as they currently exist in capitalist countries. They also refuse to support movements such as those led by Chavez in Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia. In this they end up being much like the Trotskyites who have undermined and split the Communist movement and reinforced imperialism. This is to be condemned unconditionally.
· Third-Worldists are incorrect when they posit that the workers in rich countries have more in common, materially, with their own ruling class than with the proletariat of the exploited nations. Even though the income gap between FW and TW workers is enormous, it is not bigger than the gap between FW worker and FW capitalist – the ratio of a FW worker taking home approx. $125 per day (i.e. average Canadian salary of $36k) to a typical TW worker earning $1.50 per day is 83:1. But, the ratio of a typical FW CEO at $20,800 per day (i.e. approx. $5 million per year) to a FW worker at $125 per day is 166:1, i.e. the ratio doubles; and to a FW minimum wage worker that same ratio jumps to 260:1.
· The question of relative cost of living does not seem to feature in the Third-Worldist analysis, at least not prominently. A FW minimum wage worker may be far wealthier than even a well paid TW worker, and will certainly have a higher standard of living, but that does not mean they are living a life of opulent indulgence as costs are far higher in the FW compared to the TW.
· As Communists in the FW we realise and accept that Socialist construction here would necessarily involve an end to imperialist domination and exploitation, but we reject the idea that an improvement of conditions in one part of the world leads to an impoverishment elsewhere. Once workers in rich countries are engaged in constructive work to better the condition of humanity at home and abroad, and not engaged in the realisation of profits for their ruling class, all peoples can look forward to a better future.
· In the light of the Third-Worldist challenge, Marxist theories around alienation, reification, commodity fetishism and class consciousness provide a strong basis for more thoroughly understanding what it is exactly that is keeping the workers in the FW generally hostile to Socialist ideas, in opposition to their class interest
Third World-ism is Not a Challenge but Rather is “Challenged”, Submitted by Saleh Waziruddin from Niagra YCL
A Toronto Comrade writes that Third Worldism, the idea that the world can be divided into three income brackets and wealth is produced by those who are in the poorest countries, has some facts to offer us and explains why there is less of a fight-back in imperialist countries like Canada. Actually Third Worldism is not based on facts at all and does not challenge us into recognizing realities but instead tries to confuse us to accept the boss’s lies about ourselves. The outcome of believing the boss’s lies that many Canadian workers have it too good already is to give up any hope of fighting Canadian capitalists, perversely in the name of helping people exploited by our capitalists in other countries when what they need most is for us to bring Canadian capitalists to their knees, something Third Worldism says we can’t do because we are bought off.
The lowest paid Canadian does not make $36,000 a year, but $0 a year. The fact is most Canadians are not comfortably well off, many are either starving and homeless or one cheque away from it. It’s not scientific to take the average income and say this represents the bottom income. The 2004 Stats Can Survey of Household Spending shows that the bottom 20% of Ontarians by income spend about 140% of their income on basic necessities.
But there is a bigger fact Third Worldism gets wrong, which is that even though it is on a small scale, the Canadian working class and youth ARE fighting back. We are going on strikes, supporting picket lines, protesting the G20, organizing solidarity campaigns despite not even having the right to use the word “Apartheid”. Third Worldism is blind to this reality and tries to make us ignore the real fight-back as it is and the potential for growing it, by telling us we are all bought off by the labour of workers in neo-colonies, which itself shows a completely muddled interpretation of Marx.
Third Worldism mixes up income, which is how much physical money we get, with the social relationship we are in. Capitalism is not defined by income but by the social relationship of producing wealth. As far as understanding capitalism goes it’s not so important whether your income is high or low, but whether you are producing wealth for the capitalists or if someone else is producing wealth for you. Often relatively higher-income auto and steel workers are producing much more wealth and are much more exploited (in the Marxist sense of producing wealth for capitalists) than low income workers who might not be producing as much wealth for capitalists. Third Worldism tries to make us forget capitalism is about social relationships by telling us it is about income, which robs us of the revolutionary analysis needed to change Canada.
Instead of income tiers, the world should be looked at as consisting of imperialist countries like Canada, socialist countries like Cuba or Democratic Korea, and what I will call neo-colonies which are countries targeted by capitalists in imperialist countries for making money off of them. Looking at the world through imperialist relations directly, rather than income brackets, shows that wealth is produced by workers in imperialist countries too and this has nothing to do with the size of your paycheck.
Third Worldism as presented by the Toronto Comrade, and I think this is a distortion in the presentation, confuses retail with service. A “mall economy” is a retail economy, and according to Marx’s analysis in Capital II retail workers do not produce wealth but instead circulate it. However, not all service workers are retail workers, and service workers such as those in outsourced call centres like myself do produce wealth for capitalists, in fact a lot of it. Marx’s analysis of capitalism is about looking at wealth production, not the production of physical stuff. The fallacy that those who do not produce physical goods are not producing wealth was smashed by people who came long before Marx, like Adam Smith. What’s important about capitalist exploitation is whether the capitalists as a class makes a profit off of the work, which they do for outsourced services, and to focus on income alone is to turn back the clock on Economics over 200 years.
Stats Can’s Labour Force Survey released August 6 2010 shows manufacturing workers increased by 26,000 in July and make up 1.7 million workers (productive and non-productive of capital e.g. in administration and maintenance). The goods-producing industries have 3.7 million workers vs 13.5 million for the service industries, but only 2.7 million of those are in trade. Most of the other service workers are not in retail and produce capital and so are “productive” of capital and exploited in the same way as workers in manufacturing industries or workers in neo-colonies. These are the facts that Third Worldism wants to confuse us about by mixing up retail and service work, and mixing up paycheck sizes with the social relationships of capitalism.
All of these workers in manufacturing and non-retail services produce wealth for capitalists, and their paychecks are not from the third world or neo-colonial countries but from their own labour. So it’s wrong to say that we make gains from the exploitation of workers in neo-colonies, we make gains from the struggle against our own capitalists, who workers in neo-colonies are also struggling against. In fact we can only beat the Canadian capitalists if we work together with workers in neo-colonies to take them on, something Third Worldism will never let us do because it wants us to close our eyes to the realities of the struggle in Canada in the name of confusing income disparity as a short-hand for imperialist social relations. To say workers in imperialist countries are collaborators is to ignore the fight back as it is, and to ignore the reality of our responsibility in Canada to increase the resistance and win the leadership of the working class here as a means of overthrowing capitalism.
Nothing to lose but your chains does not mean you literally have nothing other than chains, but rather that socially we are nothing under capitalism even if we have good food or a good apartment because we don’t control the means of production, and so “we have been naught but we shall be all” as in the song Internationale not because we have naught but because despite what material things we might have we are still naught. This is the difference between physical income vs our social relationship. Capitalism is not about how much stuff you have but about the social relationship of making the stuff.
The Right is successful because it uses demagoguery backed up by its wealth, and we have limited success because we need to improve in our leadership of the struggle and our work and not because Canadian workers are living large. Third Worldism buys into the ignorant stereotypes of capitalist demagoguery that tries to convince us Canadian workers have it good and so should accept pay cuts and layoffs, and plays into the hands of the capitalists to make us forget the potential around us of rebellion by having us focus only on what is happening in neo-colonies.
We don’t need theories of fetishism to tell us a fight-back is happening in Canada, we just need to open our eyes (at least a couple of millimeters). The reason capitalism is strong in Canada is not because workers are weak through living off the workers in neo-colonies, but because capitalists are strong through living off the workers in neo-colonies as well as Canada. “Third worldism” has this backwards and does not offer a scientific solution forward, and tries to confuse us about the basics of Marxism by playing tricks with the idea that your income determines your social relationship in the economy.
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