Can you explain why you think there is no proletariat in America? Is it cuz food stamps exist? Like idk, food stamps make you a shareholder in America PLC? But can't they just stop issuing food stamps at any time? Like, isn't the point of being bourgeois that you *own* the capital, but the food stamp recpient has no ownership, because they cannot dispose of or make decisions about the use of the "capital" that is the US govt. and its resources. They're recpients of charity more than they are shareholders in that sense.
Well, it’s not exactly that there is no proletariat in America, but there’s no exactly a class war in the classical Marxist sense. If there is a proletariat in America, it is one that has been largely deprived of the productive activity that makes it a revolutionary class in the first place. More accurately, the American proletariat bears more likeness to the surplus population; and American labor is, by and large, superfluous and unproductive labor. We produce little value in the US; most of it is actually produced in China and the developing nations that Kojeve identified with the global proletariat at the peripheries. Which also means that the wages of the American surplus population, or its former proletariat, represent not any value produced by themselves, but by the global proletariat. Marx somewhere comments on this paradoxical character of the surplus population: they are surplus workers, a sort of disempowered proletariat no longer tied to the means of production, but they also live off the value produced by the working proletariat, in a manner similar to the bourgeoisie - even if they are much poorer.
My perspective, which I guess comes from being a compsci grad and generally having worked in software development is that... the whole idea that only tangible (fully physical) products that are like transformed count as value makes no sense to me. Besides the fact that a software program seems as tangible to me - there's like, if someone moves a thing from place to place thats work, nothing has been transformed, but if im here and the thing was over there i've benefited from some work being done right? That's value. But then that applies to lots of processes, if someone writes a poem, its work, if someone organises a schedule, also work, all the sort of wishy washy beuracracy semibullshit stuff is still work, it still has a value, ppl dont pay for it for nothing, it might be inefficient and maybe that work could be applied better doing something else, but its still work.
As a software developer I often come up with overambitious programming projects that a few days in I realise... oh, oh damn this is a project for a *team*. I cannot do this project on my own. But it's not the programming part - I *can* do that on my own. It's the organisational fundamentals, project planning, high level design, testing, UX design, promotion and so on. All that stuff is work. I know it's valuable because all my personal projects fail for lack of it xD. Who is paying ppl to do "not work"?
And this applies to any goal, not just programming projects. Any halfway ambitious goal requires a whole ass team of people many of whom are not directly producing some tangible product (like writing code, or pulling coal out of the ground or fabricating microchips) - they're doing stuff like scheduling, planning, writing reports, taking minuites of meetings, even super fluffy stuff like making sure everyone is on the same page and keeping momentum to the goal without letting their personality foibles fuck the team's ability to work. Like it's *all* important, you can't remove any of those elements without reducing the scope of what you can achieve by a lot. You can't say just the hands on front line ppl are doing work or producing value, the whole team is necessary for the work to be done, so they all did it and it can't be reduced to specific persons contributions in any meaningful way.
And while my laptop was made in China for sure, the laptop would be useless without software, a very expensive paperweight. Both of those things were work that turned the raw materials that went into my computer into something valuable.
And to me, from this perspective class struggle seems super simple and omnipresent - its just, wanting to achieve things, change things, create things, build things in line with your own values and benefits and being forced to change things, create things, build things in line with someone elses values and benefits, even directly opposed to your values and antagonistic to what benefits you, because ppl with capital already get to decide what gets made, can force teams into being through the coercion of "well u will have no money then, hope u got savings to make rent lol"
Your perspective is valid! And by the way, when I say something is “unproductive,” that is not a put-down of anybody’s hard work, not a moral castigation, or anything like that. Productivity is a technical concept for Marx, and it refers to the production of surplus value. The same activity may be productive or unproductive depending on whether it is commodified and integrated into the capitalist system or not — and how it is. At the same time, some activities serve the capitalist system bin productive ways and others in productive ways.
For example, Marx often divides surplus value into three types: profit, rent, and interest. These are all subdivisions of surplus value, which is produced by productive labor; but the activities that divide value into rent or interest, for example, are not productive. The activities that go into the finance sector, behind the usurious extraction of interest on loans, are not productive; they merely distribute a value that has been already produced. Many would be surprised to discover just how large a portion of the bourgeoisie’s profits are derived from usurious loans, which are nothing more than an upward distribution mechanism of already-produced value. The finance industry that facilitates these mechanisms is huge; but it produces very little value.
Similarly, rentiers derive their rents not from productive labor but merely by extraction of value from the renter. That last point, by the way, is very relevant to your own industry. There is certainly a portion of your industry that is productive, but what is so often missed is just how large a portion of the profits in the tech world are derived not from the production process, but from rent. In the internet age, that’s ubiquitous.
Some further thoughts on these issues at an old blogpost of mine here, if you’re interested:
If a landlord buys a book in order to write down the rents he is owed, does that automatically make the (uh) production of that book unproductive? Like for the economy as a whole I guess?
Ofc. someone else coulda used that book so maybe not, but what if he employs someone to make a book for him? I guess in that situation its not cuz he isnt gonna sell it? What if it's way down the supply chain though?
Where does something like advertising come in, cuz like, without advertising theres no 'sale' in the first place, but no-one wants or needs advertising as a consumer, its something ppl selling stuff want tho, to them it has the 'value' of helping them sell stuff.
An issue I take with you saying its not like a moral condemnation or whatever is practically speaking you're saying the people who made idk the accounting software for some buisness that earns from rents has in producing that accounting software effectively actively stolen their ability to survive from the 'really productive people'. Which might be the case if you untangle all the threads of the economy.
But how far does that go? If the software is a commodity on the market then does it magically become productive compared to when it was produced in house? But it was in a sense a commodity on the market because the inhouse version has a cost and the outsourced version also has a cost and a decision was made to choose one or the other based on those costs? Even if accounting *itself* is an unproductive activity, software that makes it possible to *do* accounting is still a commodity.
Like to take the moral question into relief, looking at guns, from like a social benefits pov def bad, but, you wouldn't say people manufacturing guns for the market were producing no surplus value, the guns are commodities, sold on the market: that doesn't surely change if the end user of the gun is *using* the gun is using it to shake down people for money (collecting rents). But now if some warlord decides, actually, cheaper to make these guns in house and does so - they're still commodities on the market, because at any given moment the warlord can be like "hmmm now the guns other people make are the cheaper guns, I'll fire the inhouse staff and purchess guns on the open market instead".
Ultimately the 'value' of having a gun for the end user is to extract rents - but a gun is a commodity that is actually being produced and can be sold, not sold, replaced with some other gun etc
The livelyhood of someone producing a gun at some point is going to involve fucking up someone's shit or threatening to - it's social utility is negative - but it's still a commoditity.
And more to the point the value of the gun does not accrue to the people producing the gun whether in house or out of house - it accrues to the guy shaking people down. He's collecting rents: but he needs the gun, a commodity, to do it. They made the gun, not him, but they only get a portion of the spoils. Is that not surplus value?
But then take it further, and he's not only paying people to *make* these guns to shake people down, he's also paying people to do the actual shaking down - then give him the money they collect.
The people he hires as goons, are also producing a surplus because - conceivably they could shake people down and pocket the lot (less what they paid for the guns) - but instead they have to hand over the money they extorted to the dude who employed them, and he hands back some smaller portion.
From a social good pov - bad obvs, but from a employer/employee dynamic there's a surplus there that is being skimmed off. A portion of their work shaking people down is not theirs to keep but is handed over to their employer.
I think the moralism actually does come in when you make a sweeping statement that the whole gun producing industry is incapable of producing surplus value because what the guns are used for is going to ultimately come down to rent extraction. It's not socially beneficial, it ends up taking, often destroying from others - but for the owner of the gun, its a real tool that has real value that *can* be split out into the surplus.
Another example could be a dairy cattle farmer: he takes milk from his cows, the cows are being exploited, they produce the milk, the farmer takes it. This might be a social good for humans if he takes more milk from the cows than the 'stuff' they consume. For the cows its always exploitation. If someone *owns* the cows and the milk processing stuff etc - his employees produce surplus value for him getting the milk. Just like the rent guy and his guns, the milking equipment, the farmers he hires - they're all producing surplus value for him - even if, taking the cows into account (like taking the 'victims of rent extraction' into account) the ultimate site of production was all the cows udders and everything everyone else in the process did was just exploiting them. You can trace that back far enough and everyone in all the productive processes is just exploiting the natural bounty of the earth and all production is just increasing the efficiency with which it's possible to do that.
By making the question really 'who is the ultimate site of exploitation' it does get transformed into a moral question (who is the ultimate victim, everyone else being perpetrators - and it's always going to be gaia at that point lol) and not a question of the relations between the employer and those they employ (someone is doing the work that lets them do this ultimate exploitation of gaia, but they are in control of the spoils and direction of that exploitation) it loses the key facet of power relations in society which is what I think is more central than designating the 'victim'. The thing that is notable in capitalism is not that it makes victims, but that the power to do stuff is seperated out from the people actually doing it and given to the 'owner'.
And don't get me wrong, I am not saying 'exploitation' itself is a moralistic question - exploiting cows or a mine *could* be made into a moralistic question, just as can exploiting people - but it needn't be. It just seems like the desire to trace it back has a moralistic motivation, to turn the 'problem' of capitalism into one of figuring out who really does deserve stuff, and not one of power: who really has potential agency underneath the illusions of ownership that redirect that agency to the owner.
And most of that narrative is borne out of the frustration people felt with the working class in the imperial core during the 2nd International for siding with their imperial powers on the question of WW1 and in some (but hardly all) cases even colonialism instead of taking an internationalist perspective.
But I think that is a much more complicated question than people made it out to be (simple "oh it's cuz they're a labour aristocracy living off the backs of superexploitation who don't really produce surplus value"). I think it has been moralised significantly and that's actually be detrimental to developing actual proletarian internationalism. It's actually exploitation all the way down, beyond the human race even, and exploitation isn't a moral question. The (heh) exploitable facet in capitalism aren't related to it being exploititive - all economy and nature itself is exploititive, in another sense its just energy flows and entropic - it's related to the power dynamics in the direction and consumption of the exploited, and the fact that the ownership class (however that ownership is used to generate money) is so completely alienated from labour itself that it has in itself become completely useless and easy to lop off the process entirely if people just recognised that fact and worked together to achieve it. But because productive activity *is* distributed globally that can only be done with global level co-operation - or by isolationism and trying to cram all productive activity into 'one country' (thus limiting what can be achieved by limiting the resources, both natural and human, available to achieve it with).
And what makes that co-operation possible is the fact that the antagonist in both cases is the same, the owners who exploit the 'global south' and the 'global north' despite the fact that as a whole the north works at exploiting the south (a fact, genuine fact, that itself obscures a lot of underlying activity in various directions), are the same - even when labour does not have freedom of movement between countries (which varies), that's a transient situation, when they are needed they do, when they're not needed they don't, en masse workers *are* a unified class even though for sure stratified along many lines, as are owners, the antagonism is the same wherever it's sited and however many layers in the chain of exploitation there are. A worker who one day does a job that facilitates human exploitation might the next day get a job that exploits nature directly, he is not tied to a particular lord like a serf, in a sense the nation state *does* work like that, but in another sense it doesn't because these chains are transnational and transcend national boundaries. But for all the many stratifications in the working class, the owner class is a co-antagonist for all. That's why there's opportunity there for everyone else, why it makes sense, in pure self-interest terms, to work together against them. The complexity of the economy as a whole and the common experience of all the workers in the sense of doing stuff they don’t accrue the benefits of and don’t get to control allows that commonality of antagonism to be realised.
Can you explain why you think there is no proletariat in America? Is it cuz food stamps exist? Like idk, food stamps make you a shareholder in America PLC? But can't they just stop issuing food stamps at any time? Like, isn't the point of being bourgeois that you *own* the capital, but the food stamp recpient has no ownership, because they cannot dispose of or make decisions about the use of the "capital" that is the US govt. and its resources. They're recpients of charity more than they are shareholders in that sense.
Well, it’s not exactly that there is no proletariat in America, but there’s no exactly a class war in the classical Marxist sense. If there is a proletariat in America, it is one that has been largely deprived of the productive activity that makes it a revolutionary class in the first place. More accurately, the American proletariat bears more likeness to the surplus population; and American labor is, by and large, superfluous and unproductive labor. We produce little value in the US; most of it is actually produced in China and the developing nations that Kojeve identified with the global proletariat at the peripheries. Which also means that the wages of the American surplus population, or its former proletariat, represent not any value produced by themselves, but by the global proletariat. Marx somewhere comments on this paradoxical character of the surplus population: they are surplus workers, a sort of disempowered proletariat no longer tied to the means of production, but they also live off the value produced by the working proletariat, in a manner similar to the bourgeoisie - even if they are much poorer.
What do you count as "productive"?
My perspective, which I guess comes from being a compsci grad and generally having worked in software development is that... the whole idea that only tangible (fully physical) products that are like transformed count as value makes no sense to me. Besides the fact that a software program seems as tangible to me - there's like, if someone moves a thing from place to place thats work, nothing has been transformed, but if im here and the thing was over there i've benefited from some work being done right? That's value. But then that applies to lots of processes, if someone writes a poem, its work, if someone organises a schedule, also work, all the sort of wishy washy beuracracy semibullshit stuff is still work, it still has a value, ppl dont pay for it for nothing, it might be inefficient and maybe that work could be applied better doing something else, but its still work.
As a software developer I often come up with overambitious programming projects that a few days in I realise... oh, oh damn this is a project for a *team*. I cannot do this project on my own. But it's not the programming part - I *can* do that on my own. It's the organisational fundamentals, project planning, high level design, testing, UX design, promotion and so on. All that stuff is work. I know it's valuable because all my personal projects fail for lack of it xD. Who is paying ppl to do "not work"?
And this applies to any goal, not just programming projects. Any halfway ambitious goal requires a whole ass team of people many of whom are not directly producing some tangible product (like writing code, or pulling coal out of the ground or fabricating microchips) - they're doing stuff like scheduling, planning, writing reports, taking minuites of meetings, even super fluffy stuff like making sure everyone is on the same page and keeping momentum to the goal without letting their personality foibles fuck the team's ability to work. Like it's *all* important, you can't remove any of those elements without reducing the scope of what you can achieve by a lot. You can't say just the hands on front line ppl are doing work or producing value, the whole team is necessary for the work to be done, so they all did it and it can't be reduced to specific persons contributions in any meaningful way.
And while my laptop was made in China for sure, the laptop would be useless without software, a very expensive paperweight. Both of those things were work that turned the raw materials that went into my computer into something valuable.
And to me, from this perspective class struggle seems super simple and omnipresent - its just, wanting to achieve things, change things, create things, build things in line with your own values and benefits and being forced to change things, create things, build things in line with someone elses values and benefits, even directly opposed to your values and antagonistic to what benefits you, because ppl with capital already get to decide what gets made, can force teams into being through the coercion of "well u will have no money then, hope u got savings to make rent lol"
Your perspective is valid! And by the way, when I say something is “unproductive,” that is not a put-down of anybody’s hard work, not a moral castigation, or anything like that. Productivity is a technical concept for Marx, and it refers to the production of surplus value. The same activity may be productive or unproductive depending on whether it is commodified and integrated into the capitalist system or not — and how it is. At the same time, some activities serve the capitalist system bin productive ways and others in productive ways.
For example, Marx often divides surplus value into three types: profit, rent, and interest. These are all subdivisions of surplus value, which is produced by productive labor; but the activities that divide value into rent or interest, for example, are not productive. The activities that go into the finance sector, behind the usurious extraction of interest on loans, are not productive; they merely distribute a value that has been already produced. Many would be surprised to discover just how large a portion of the bourgeoisie’s profits are derived from usurious loans, which are nothing more than an upward distribution mechanism of already-produced value. The finance industry that facilitates these mechanisms is huge; but it produces very little value.
Similarly, rentiers derive their rents not from productive labor but merely by extraction of value from the renter. That last point, by the way, is very relevant to your own industry. There is certainly a portion of your industry that is productive, but what is so often missed is just how large a portion of the profits in the tech world are derived not from the production process, but from rent. In the internet age, that’s ubiquitous.
Some further thoughts on these issues at an old blogpost of mine here, if you’re interested:
https://postmodernperennialist.substack.com/p/on-productive-vs-unproductive-labor
If a landlord buys a book in order to write down the rents he is owed, does that automatically make the (uh) production of that book unproductive? Like for the economy as a whole I guess?
Ofc. someone else coulda used that book so maybe not, but what if he employs someone to make a book for him? I guess in that situation its not cuz he isnt gonna sell it? What if it's way down the supply chain though?
Where does something like advertising come in, cuz like, without advertising theres no 'sale' in the first place, but no-one wants or needs advertising as a consumer, its something ppl selling stuff want tho, to them it has the 'value' of helping them sell stuff.
An issue I take with you saying its not like a moral condemnation or whatever is practically speaking you're saying the people who made idk the accounting software for some buisness that earns from rents has in producing that accounting software effectively actively stolen their ability to survive from the 'really productive people'. Which might be the case if you untangle all the threads of the economy.
But how far does that go? If the software is a commodity on the market then does it magically become productive compared to when it was produced in house? But it was in a sense a commodity on the market because the inhouse version has a cost and the outsourced version also has a cost and a decision was made to choose one or the other based on those costs? Even if accounting *itself* is an unproductive activity, software that makes it possible to *do* accounting is still a commodity.
Like to take the moral question into relief, looking at guns, from like a social benefits pov def bad, but, you wouldn't say people manufacturing guns for the market were producing no surplus value, the guns are commodities, sold on the market: that doesn't surely change if the end user of the gun is *using* the gun is using it to shake down people for money (collecting rents). But now if some warlord decides, actually, cheaper to make these guns in house and does so - they're still commodities on the market, because at any given moment the warlord can be like "hmmm now the guns other people make are the cheaper guns, I'll fire the inhouse staff and purchess guns on the open market instead".
Ultimately the 'value' of having a gun for the end user is to extract rents - but a gun is a commodity that is actually being produced and can be sold, not sold, replaced with some other gun etc
The livelyhood of someone producing a gun at some point is going to involve fucking up someone's shit or threatening to - it's social utility is negative - but it's still a commoditity.
And more to the point the value of the gun does not accrue to the people producing the gun whether in house or out of house - it accrues to the guy shaking people down. He's collecting rents: but he needs the gun, a commodity, to do it. They made the gun, not him, but they only get a portion of the spoils. Is that not surplus value?
But then take it further, and he's not only paying people to *make* these guns to shake people down, he's also paying people to do the actual shaking down - then give him the money they collect.
The people he hires as goons, are also producing a surplus because - conceivably they could shake people down and pocket the lot (less what they paid for the guns) - but instead they have to hand over the money they extorted to the dude who employed them, and he hands back some smaller portion.
From a social good pov - bad obvs, but from a employer/employee dynamic there's a surplus there that is being skimmed off. A portion of their work shaking people down is not theirs to keep but is handed over to their employer.
I think the moralism actually does come in when you make a sweeping statement that the whole gun producing industry is incapable of producing surplus value because what the guns are used for is going to ultimately come down to rent extraction. It's not socially beneficial, it ends up taking, often destroying from others - but for the owner of the gun, its a real tool that has real value that *can* be split out into the surplus.
Another example could be a dairy cattle farmer: he takes milk from his cows, the cows are being exploited, they produce the milk, the farmer takes it. This might be a social good for humans if he takes more milk from the cows than the 'stuff' they consume. For the cows its always exploitation. If someone *owns* the cows and the milk processing stuff etc - his employees produce surplus value for him getting the milk. Just like the rent guy and his guns, the milking equipment, the farmers he hires - they're all producing surplus value for him - even if, taking the cows into account (like taking the 'victims of rent extraction' into account) the ultimate site of production was all the cows udders and everything everyone else in the process did was just exploiting them. You can trace that back far enough and everyone in all the productive processes is just exploiting the natural bounty of the earth and all production is just increasing the efficiency with which it's possible to do that.
By making the question really 'who is the ultimate site of exploitation' it does get transformed into a moral question (who is the ultimate victim, everyone else being perpetrators - and it's always going to be gaia at that point lol) and not a question of the relations between the employer and those they employ (someone is doing the work that lets them do this ultimate exploitation of gaia, but they are in control of the spoils and direction of that exploitation) it loses the key facet of power relations in society which is what I think is more central than designating the 'victim'. The thing that is notable in capitalism is not that it makes victims, but that the power to do stuff is seperated out from the people actually doing it and given to the 'owner'.
And don't get me wrong, I am not saying 'exploitation' itself is a moralistic question - exploiting cows or a mine *could* be made into a moralistic question, just as can exploiting people - but it needn't be. It just seems like the desire to trace it back has a moralistic motivation, to turn the 'problem' of capitalism into one of figuring out who really does deserve stuff, and not one of power: who really has potential agency underneath the illusions of ownership that redirect that agency to the owner.
And most of that narrative is borne out of the frustration people felt with the working class in the imperial core during the 2nd International for siding with their imperial powers on the question of WW1 and in some (but hardly all) cases even colonialism instead of taking an internationalist perspective.
But I think that is a much more complicated question than people made it out to be (simple "oh it's cuz they're a labour aristocracy living off the backs of superexploitation who don't really produce surplus value"). I think it has been moralised significantly and that's actually be detrimental to developing actual proletarian internationalism. It's actually exploitation all the way down, beyond the human race even, and exploitation isn't a moral question. The (heh) exploitable facet in capitalism aren't related to it being exploititive - all economy and nature itself is exploititive, in another sense its just energy flows and entropic - it's related to the power dynamics in the direction and consumption of the exploited, and the fact that the ownership class (however that ownership is used to generate money) is so completely alienated from labour itself that it has in itself become completely useless and easy to lop off the process entirely if people just recognised that fact and worked together to achieve it. But because productive activity *is* distributed globally that can only be done with global level co-operation - or by isolationism and trying to cram all productive activity into 'one country' (thus limiting what can be achieved by limiting the resources, both natural and human, available to achieve it with).
And what makes that co-operation possible is the fact that the antagonist in both cases is the same, the owners who exploit the 'global south' and the 'global north' despite the fact that as a whole the north works at exploiting the south (a fact, genuine fact, that itself obscures a lot of underlying activity in various directions), are the same - even when labour does not have freedom of movement between countries (which varies), that's a transient situation, when they are needed they do, when they're not needed they don't, en masse workers *are* a unified class even though for sure stratified along many lines, as are owners, the antagonism is the same wherever it's sited and however many layers in the chain of exploitation there are. A worker who one day does a job that facilitates human exploitation might the next day get a job that exploits nature directly, he is not tied to a particular lord like a serf, in a sense the nation state *does* work like that, but in another sense it doesn't because these chains are transnational and transcend national boundaries. But for all the many stratifications in the working class, the owner class is a co-antagonist for all. That's why there's opportunity there for everyone else, why it makes sense, in pure self-interest terms, to work together against them. The complexity of the economy as a whole and the common experience of all the workers in the sense of doing stuff they don’t accrue the benefits of and don’t get to control allows that commonality of antagonism to be realised.