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Thoughts on Third Worldism? (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have often heard ultra-lefts describe Marxists who oppose settler-colonialism and uphold AES as being "Third Worldists".

Looking at what people like Jason Unruhe have to say about the topic, Third Worldism does not seem entirely baseless (e.g. the proletariat in the imperial core more often being labor aristocrats).

So, what are our thoughts on Third Worldism?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Hinterland is a good book on this, though biased against China.

There hasn't really been a labor aristocracy since the 1970s; everything changed then.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There hasn’t really been a labor aristocracy since the 1970s

I think the primacy of the labor aristocracy (in the U.S., at least) has only really started to degrade much more recently. There was a fairly strong (though changing) economy in the 90s, the first dotcom boom, then the early tech boom, then the consolidation of the tech companies into 4-5 giants in the 2010s (after the Great Recession).

Now that even those jobs are drying up, and now that multiple generations are seeing the twin crunch of that + the cost of living explosion (in education especially), you're finally seeing widespread, lasting pessimism about the economic future.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Yeah, definitely don't underestimate the cost-of-living crisis; it's developing rapidly at a rate that's historic, at the very least.

I'm not saying the effects of the stagflation crisis and the economic reconstructing of the 1970s had an immediate effect, but certainly in the long-run, it did, and only accelerated during the 1990s with Bill Clinton.