World Systems Theory and related concepts often come up whenever people try to explain why Westerners are psychotic counterrevolutionary scum, etc. It's often suggested that white Americans in particular love third-world exploitation because it directly benefits those same white Americans. We might say "White Minnesotan Joe Cracker wants child slavery in southern Africa so he can get his cheap electronics." And yeah, that makes sense up to a point...
But Joe Cracker might not understand the relevant supply chain or even the basic composition of his smartphone. He probably doesn't even know about the existence of said exploitation, much less its nature or purpose. Maybe Joe Cracker WILL revolt without his cheap goods, but he probably doesn't actually know what goes into producing them or keeping the prices down. So what decisions is he making that render him "complicit" in the profiteering of some massive international corporation like Apple? Falling for their ads?
It's also worth pointing out that his iPhone doesn't actually make him richer any more than a Hulu membership does. It's a cute little toy, but it doesn't obtain food, housing, medicine or fuel. It's a cell phone with a billion bells and whistles and a monthly subscription fee. One could starve to death with it in hand. Is this really the "wealth transfer" we keep talking about? This is the socialized bribery Americans perfected?
It seems to me that Joe Cracker is complicit in fuck-all. He doesn't materially benefit from low wages in southeast Asian textile plants even if he wears one of those shirts they make every single day. It seems that he's just a different kind of poor from the Bangladeshi serfs who make his sneakers, the kind of poor with tap water, McDonalds, and WiFi. Poor overseas workers make the stupid shit, poor Americans buy the stupid shit, and they both struggle, but at least Joe Cracker has some killer kicks to go along with the Taco Bell and the wireless internet in his shitty apartment. The Nike execs, meanwhile, can smoke cigars and watch the line go up from the VIP lounge.
"Bread and Circuses" seems like a much better explanation for the behavior of these Westerners. Who says Joe Cracker has a good reason for throwing his verbal weight behind an ongoing genocide in Gaza, screaming about nuking Moscow over a slice of Ukraine, and pearl-clutching about the 100 billion victims of Communism in Xinjiang?
Yes, first world workers are complicit. That's just a fact. They benefit from exploitation of the global south in various ways (i.e. cheaper prices on imported goods). Many make their living through assisting imperialism. That doesn't mean that the first world working class isn't also exploited or coerced into complicity. It also doesn't mean that imperialism is in their interest. Obviously, socialism is in their interest. Multiple things can be true at once.
Can you really be coerced into complicity, though? Complicity implies that a person could have made a different choice.
How much choice does a chronically ill desk admin have when their healthcare is tied to their job at a financial firm? How much choice does an individual dock worker have when it comes to loading weapons onto cargo ship?
They don't have much choice, do they? If we're just saying that the actions of first-world workers are necessary in perpetuating capitalism and imperialism, then yes, that's clearly true. But does that equal complicity? When I hear someoen is "complicit," I think of them as an "accomplice." Should I not?
I think you’re getting hung up on platonic definitions and clean boundaries between categories. Complicity is a spectrum, not a category. Dialectical analysis isn’t a court of law where it’s “guilty” or “not guilty.”
i think that's the crux of the issue when it comes to making core-dwellers understand that they do benefit from imperialism: they think it's a moral judgement on their character rather than a factual observation
Relatedly, I think it’s helpful to shed moral thinking, to see things through an amoral (not to be confused with immoral) lens. Philosophy prof. Hans-Georg Moeller:
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
Fair enough, that makes sense.
This doesn't seem true at all, if anything the people selling the shit seem to tho.
For Marxists value comes from labour. If the pay you get for one hour of your labour allows you to purchase goods that take 50 hours of labour to produce in the Global South (which is approximately the case if you live in the imperial core), you benefit from exploitation of the cheap labour in the Global South.
Nike produces 800 million shoes a year.
Nike employs 530,000 people in it's Vietnam factories. Edit: looks like Nike makes half its shoes in Vietnam.
The average work week in Vietnam is 42 hours.
That comes to ~~1.45~~ 2.9 hours of labor for a pair of Nike shoes.
The median hourly wage of a US worker is $18.12
The last article estimates the avg person that buys a Nike shoe works about 9 hours to get them paid for.
https://runrepeat.com/nike-shoes-statistics
https://www.statista.com/statistics/185335/median-hourly-earnings-of-wage-and-salary-workers/
https://www.vietnam-briefing.com/news/where-are-nikes-factories-located-in-vietnam.html/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1190342/vietnam-average-working-hours-by-gender/
https://runrepeat.com/average-price-nike-shoes
Two vital stats even if the maths are this simple are: (1) the unit labour costs in Vietnam and (2) unit labour costs of Nike staff in the US (including all those involved in the process, logistics, admin, etc). The former will begin to show the disparity between the average US worker and the Vietnamese shoemaker. The second figure will begin to show the extent to which Nike staff in the US (et al) are better off than Nike staff in Vietnam, and the exploitative realities of that relationship.
Then it is necessary to consider all the previous nodes in the value chain before the trainers are finished in Vietnam to discover deeper levels of exploitation.
It's dated, but see this: https://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm1997/031997/ballinger.html
Examples are good, although a broader perspective is better. Still, let's stick with the example and unpack the relation following Jeff Ballinger's analysis for 1997.
Median hourly wage in the US in 1997 was $8.75
Nike was paying Vietnamese workers less than minimum wage ($42/month). Assuming (wrongly, I suspect) that they were working 42 hours:
The US sports fan in 1997 can buy their Nike sneakers after $149.50 / $8.75/hr = 17.1 hours, or roughly 2 days of work (excluding taxes). The Vietnamese worker would have to work at least (we know they were being underpaid and can assumed were overworked) $149.50 / $0.25/hr = 598 hours, or roughly 14.24 months (excluding taxes) for the same shoes.
Of course, poor Americans might find that they don't have 17/hours worth of expendable cash after the end of each working week. But neither would Vietnamese worker after 14 months and a week. Shoe prices might have been cheaper in Vietnam if they could be bought in legitimate stores but why should that favour the US worker in the equation? They could travel to Vietnam to benefit from the lower prices while the Vietnamese worker could never afford to use their 10 days annual leave on a trip to the US. I realise that 10-days leave would be a luxury for modern-day US workers, even if lower than Nike's official '30-day' leave policy but this may only account for weekends, etc, considering reports of mandatory overtime.
These are still rough sums, which only relate to one (luxury) example, and the data will have changed since 1997. The difference is staggering, still. The other factor to consider is that the average US worker only gets paid its $8.75 (1997) or $18.12 (today) because their employer shifts value around with clever accounting and significantly underpays in the global south part of its production chains.
(As for the 50/hours labour-per-item, I'm not the OP but that must be an average and it's unfair to reject that figure by finding a commodity that seems to take 2.5 hours of production; a figure itself that (incorrectly) assumes the only labour is in the assembly factory.)
Labor hours and cost of goods are only directly translatable in their respective countries since we're discussing labor disparities. Its error to equate what a Vietnamese person could buy in the us. As you don't disagree it it takes 3 hours to make a shoe. This would be regardless of who is making it. What it costs to purchase a nike is whatever the person selling the shoe says it is. In the us that is 9 hours, what it costs in Vietnam idk but people there seem to wear and buy shoes. Shoes are essentially a fungible good and the cost in the us is about 3 labor hours for the cheapest [1]. I used Nike BC they are the company that comes to mind when one thinks of exploitation and it was mentioned at the above.
The flights I found cost about 90 ($1600) hours of labor for the median worker pre tax so this isn't as a reachable thing as you may think. Especially considering most Americans must go into great debt for education, healthcare, and spend about 30% of their income on rent [2]
This was presented without evidence and can be dismissed without evidence.
I look around and I see Americans living sick, in debt, working gig work, in shit conditions, and with no legal protections from their employers. Then I'm told they have no revolutionary potential because they're benefiting from exploitation. I don't see that with my eyes or by research. I understand that some Americans most definitely do benefit but it seems me that they are a small minority and thus solidarity and revolutionary potential can be found in the US. This whole Joe cracker shit seems Taylor made for ultras and mtw to wreck for whatever reason.
[1]https://runrepeat.com/average-shoe-cost
[2] https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-do-households-spend-on-rent/country/united-states/
The cost to buy is high because of parasitic bourgies
If imperialism without bourgies existed, imperial loot would be extremely cheap in the imperial core
This is what I was responding to. It seems that with some quick research and some looking around at poor af Americans this feels like this statement is not quite right. As a Marxist I believe that assertations must be examined. I'm am more than happy to criticize Joe cracker but if in doing so I'm told that capitalists are somehow generous then my eyebrow will become raised.
I think the capitalist thievery is already calculated into those numbers and that'd mean the imperialist exploitation is even worse