Ask Lemmygrad

Inflation is mostly due to higher wages, and savings. Savings are reinvested by banks and turned into new constant and variable capital (hiring more workers). It can be turned into new consumption (like video games, social media, more advertising). It can be turned into student loans, and mortgages (if there is a surplus of money-capital all of these things will get more expensive relative the the unit of money), and “gentrification” re-developments or new suburban developments. Your savings become a smaller share of the MOP because they got invested elsewhere and more things were made or labor paid because of it!

"Savings savings savings" you say, and yet the rate of savings has been declining since the 60s and right now is on par with the period just before the 2008 financial crash. Savings are not an explanation for the inflation we are seeing and this is another contradiction to your claims: if savings are a source of inflation, and savings are down, where is the inflation coming from? Is it only coming from wage increases like is being claimed by bourgeois economists? I'm skeptical, and so I'm hypothesizing that the inflation is geopolitical.

You’re right that if not enough surplus-capital finds a home, that the value of dollars goes down, this is effected by dollar demand but also capital exports can take the form of bombs, ultimately the destruction of capital, which allows for demand to be re-established. New sources of consumption counter-balance inflation, essentially, which is why the US is the least susceptible state to inflation.

And yet, the state is grappling with inflation despite being the least susceptible state to inflation. Does this not indicate a change?

Do you think the bourgeois want a high interest rate environment? Do you think they want the global South to turn to other countries for loans?

In an Imperial economy where wages are already built from stolen labor of the global proletariat, cutting hours in Imperialist states comes at the expense of the global proletariat, it’s ultimately reactionary organizing unless it doubles with demands of a shorter working day globally for all workers, i.e. proletarian internationalism.

One thing that stood out to me was the demands for an end to understaffing, which necessarily means hiring more people. It's not quite internationalism, no, but it does benefit the internally colonized people who could gain employment instead of being forced to fill the ranks of the gig economy and reserve army of unemployed workers.

I will acknowledge the labor upsurge lacks enough international character. I'll be watching for who starts to organize migrant temp workers first.

Where? Outside of the walk-outs of academics who some happened to be in the UAW, there hasn’t been any anti-Imperialist actions by US unions.

UAW International is calling for a ceasefire, a full list of unions who have signed on can be found here. I'm not overly impressed by their calls, they only call for Israelis to be released when they should be calling for a hostage exchange and acknowledge that the Zionists have been taking Palestinians hostage by the thousands into detention centers, but they aren't just silently supporting Israel either.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union recently shut down the Port of Oakland to prevent ships carrying weapons bound for Israel from leaving the docks. In fact, the ILWU has a long history of being interested in and supportive of Palestinian liberation going back decades because of their internationalist character that was cultivated during the anti-apartheid struggle against South Africa.

It's not just academics. The labor upsurge is gaining a political character. Something is happening.

When union workers start destroying weapons manufacturing equipment I’ll have to change my mind, but that seems to be far from where we are, and the “toughest actions” have been climbing (office, not factory) buildings and tagging them with paint.

I'll cheer when that happens, and you're right to point out the lacking radicalism in US unions. Yet, you're underestimating the importance of public demonstration and should recognize that even non-destructive acts still act as propaganda for further radical action. Tagging a building with paint can be a precursor to tagging it with... something else.

I don't share your pessimism for the white US working class. I think we're on the brink of a change and these are all signs.

We'll see.

From MIM Theory 1:

[2.10] Combating Common Wishful Thinking on the White Working Class

It is tempting to look for the slightest tinge of proletarian class interest among that section of the Amerikan nation (the white working class) that participates in production and in the circulation of commodities, as well as in the realization of the social surplus value through the purchasing of commodities for their own consumption.

It is tempting to look for the possibilities of an irreversible, precipitous decline in the economic status of certain strata in the vast Amerikan settler formation. The beleaguered, exploited proletariat residing in the internal colonies of Amerika could benefit from a little help, or at least neutrality, from the middle classes—the petty bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy—during the insurrection/civil war and the preparatory years.

Settler radicals (meaning radicals descended from Europeans settling North Amerika)—from the Trots to some Maoists—have long refused to face the fact that the labor aristocracy is not only not a neutral force, but, if class interests rest on economic interests, not even mildly exploited. To paraphrase Lenin: the petty-bourgeois revolutionaries take the conditions for their own liberation to be the universal demands of mankind.

In terms of party-building this kind of thinking sometimes boils down to promoting left-economist notions of immediate gratification, such as, “Nuke war tomorrow? Oh shit, where do I sign up?” Such an understanding avoids the international class analysis necessary to best promote revolution.

To truly take the stand of the international proletariat means to put our analysis in the spot where the oppressed exist: with no choices available but further oppression—or rebellion. We can strive to do this even during the periods when the masses actually standing in that spot have not yet realized their strength. For a revolutionary hanging by his/her thumbs in a cold Peruvian prison waiting for the flames to hit, Amerika must look like one huge, undifferentiated mass of class enemies.

That’s from the outside of this toilet. Inside it, we must make the differentiation and coldly separate friend from foe. The friends will throw themselves into the flames to annihilate the flame-throwers. The foes will stand a little distance apart at the last moment. As groups, this will be decided, in the final analysis, by the historical group interest.

In the beginning, we decide what groups are worth our efforts building for those decisive moments. If there is even a faint hope that the Amerikan “working class” is waiting in the wings for revolution, then it would make sense to organize for the demands of this group. (MIM seeks to organize amongst all groups at all times, but it only organizes for the demands of the oppressed, not the oppressors.)

MIM holds that, at the present, the majority of white workers in this country—skilled workers, trade unionists, paper-pushers, etc.—do not represent a revolutionary class. They do not create surplus value as much as reapportion the surplus which results from superexploitation of the Third World and oppressed internal nations. They are not prepared to abandon bourgeois aspirations and mainly high-paying jobs to drop everything for the good of the international proletariat.(1)

“Ah ha!” exclaims the desperately vacillating nature of the petty-bourgeois revolutionary. “Just wait until they lose those high-paying jobs and become prepared to abandon their bourgeois aspirations! Then they shall be friends!”

The cold-hearted Maoist replies, “Dream on, by that point what’s left of them shall still be white-collar fascists defending a starving fortress Amerika and firing bullets at Third World Maoist armies, while eating old Spam and lining up to perish for the ‘right’ of their toxic-mutated children to ‘live free or die!’”

These settlers are perfectly willing to fight and die for the continued ability of their group to experience the taste of that rich and famous, completely corrupted, seemingly immortal lifestyle.

An article by Lenin, who died before neocolonialism really pumped up the imperialist alliances of the labor aristocracy and expanded the “shift in class relations,” still says it well:

The greater part of Western Europe might then assume the appearance and character already exhibited by tracts of country in the South of England, in the Riviera, and in the tourist-ridden or residential parts of Italy and Switzerland, little clusters of wealthy aristocrats drawing dividends and pensions from the Far East, with a somewhat larger group of professional retainers and tradesmen and a larger body of personal servants and workers in the transport trade and in the final stages of production of the more perishable goods: all the main arterial industries would have disappeared, the staple foods and semimanufactures flowing in as tribute from Asia and Africa... We have foreshadowed the possibility of even a larger alliance of Western states, a European federation of Great Powers which, so far from forwarding the cause of world civilization, might introduce the gigantic peril of a Western parasitism, a group of advanced industrial nations, whose upper classes drew vast tribute from Asia and Africa, with which they supported great tame masses of retainers, no longer engaged in the staple industries of agriculture and manufacture but kept in the performance of personal or minor industrial services under the control of a new financial aristocracy.(2)

The above quote was from Hobson, a “social-liberal" whom Lenin found useful to quote, lest he be disbelieved. To would-be communist organizers of the labor aristocracy, Lenin exclaimed: “At the present time, you are fawning on the opportunists, who are alien to the proletariat as a class, who are the servants, the agents of the bourgeoisie and the vehicles of its influence, and unless the labor movement rids itself of them, it will remain a bourgeois labor movement."(3)

Most white workers in this country are not prepared to ditch bourgeois aspirations and high-paying jobs to drop everything for the good of the international proletariat.

Notes:

1. What is MIM pamphlet p. 8.
2. I.V. Lenin, Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, Moscow Progress Publishers, 1979, p. 9.
3. Ibid, p. 11.