Saw this comment on the commie side of TikTok. My gut tells me this is ultraleft bs, but perhaps my fellow hexbears can educate me on this discussion which I’m sure is not new.
I don’t see how a poor American on food stamps is responsible, even though a systematic analysis reveals that international superexploitation is a thing.
The American proletariat can and should organize in any case. I don’t see how Americans can build any sort of socialist movement if any organization at all is accused of being hypocritical.
Your gut is correct. The international left needs something to offer all workers, it’s idealist nonsense to expect that a Western left would ever be able to attract enough people to have leverage and use it to advance the position of the international working class without improving the situation for Western workers. That comment is grossly overgeneralizing the notion that imperialism incentivizes class collaborationism and false consciousness, which is true, but does not imply that anyone is better off by having a leftist movement that has nothing to offer to the people it’s trying to attract.
From a utilitarian perspective if the left could rally the masses of the imperial core to all collectively go to the suicide booth, that would be a win for the global south. Of course that’s inhuman, from the moral high ground we would rally the masses of the imperial core to send everything not nailed down to floor on cargo ships to the global south forever, and the west could live in moral comfort with just the essentials, that’s also inhuman because nobody wants to live like that. From a practical perspective the imperial core could agree to pay reparations and gradually pay back the debt they owe to the global south but that’s the worst option of all, that’s not radical change at all, that’s worse than inhuman, that’s liberalism.
It’s not an ultraleft statement to say that AES states do a little capitalism and have contradictions and things, it’s ultraleft to say that we should tear down AES states and not just them but states critical of the west like Russia and Iran because they aren’t doing socialism. Also why do we even call them ultraleft? It’s far too dignified of a name, revisionist left is a far better description of their beliefs than ultraleft.
You’re part of the problem if you solely focus on improving conditions only in rich countries
focusing on autarky is fundamentally a socialist thing that all socialist movements end up doing when getting power and it fundamentally fucks over capitalists in other countries. this is already a concern that is solved.
of course social democracy stuff is cursed, its why its not socialism. it doesnt focus on autarky whatsoever.
As if getting exploited in a rich country is nice. Obviously there’s been colonialism etc but life here is pretty shitty in its own unique disgusting way
Lil_tank isn’t saying it’s nice, they’re saying there are people around the world with general conditions much worse than what even the homeless experience in the west. Just look at Yemen, Sudan, Palestine, etc.
We should be fighting to improve living conditions for all people on a global scale.
In my opinion, if that means the conditions of the global south improve first, I’m totally fine with that. The majority of westerners live in decadence compared to much of the world.
I doubt if Medicare-For-All got passed the American Bourgeois would be like “well we were holding back on the imperialism up till now, but since I gotta treat the core plebs a bit better I’m gonna ramp this shit up!”
They’re already not holding back.
If anything, the opposite is true. The left was much stronger than it is now under FDR, and the New Deal didn’t really kill any momentum for the left by itself, instead the Red Scares and McCarthyism had to perform that function. However, under neoliberalism, workers in the imperial core have turned more reactionary and often incorrectly prescribe blame on immigrants for their poor employment numbers and stagnating wages. The poor understanding of globalism leads people to believe that their enemy is the sweatshop worker in Indonesia, instead of the shareholder in Wall Street. The left can offer an alternative paradigm for the people that fall into that reactionary trap by showing that development isn’t a zero sum game, we can have manufacturing at home without protectionism, xenophobia, and imperialism holding the international working class back.
Yeah it’s not like the failure of the working class in the West to organize somehow means the exploited third world gets to keep more of its wealth. There are problems with labor aristocracy in the West, but the solution to educate around global working class interests the way the capitalist class does.
I feel like this is less ultra left bs, although there’s some of that, but more creating a rationale for not being active in labor organizing. The West can’t do shit, the noble savages of the hinterlands will save us, so we can sit back and be snarky on the internet.
