Scanning recent discussion I am literally begging you to look at how the wages of workers in the core are allocated. Pay goes to rents, debts, medical, insurance, despite undercosted pineapples etc.
Scanning recent discussion I am literally begging you to look at how the wages of workers in the core are allocated. Pay goes to rents, debts, medical, insurance, despite undercosted pineapples etc.
This is why the theory of third world development & first world class consciousness evolved way past the point which our friends on twitter are beginning to reach.
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Could you explain why this contradiction is something worth focusing on or explaining? I see it and don't fully understand it. I like pineapples every now and then but I agree I am far more fearful that we survive on the whims of capitalists. If you believe that rising food costs (which is terrifying) have a liberal economics external cause you can misdirect that anger towards whatever the NYT tells you, but when you realize it is done by capitalists it becomes a lot scarier for people who need to feed, house, and provide for their families.
Is that something you think should be confronted first and most importantly? Or am I missing a more basic point?
The pineapples thing is a reference to undercosted exports from global south countries which are a good example of a way that workers in the imperial core benefit. I'm using this example since it points to rising food costs, which show where the exploited wealth actually goes. You can also contrast the cost reductions of imperialism (which are being yanked back pretty severely) with the financialization of the lives of workers on top of increasing hardships.
Nobody in their right mind would care if pineapples were $11 if they got paid more, or had at least a thousand more dollars a month from socialized housing and medicine rather than this bloodsucking insanity, nobody wants food picked by wage slaves who get treated like shit, as evidenced by where most people spend their money at the grocery store when they have more of it (healthier and more ethical choices).
I am also deliberately using different terms for high/low income countries interchangeably.
Do you think it is worth highlighting this contradiction in particular over other avenues? That most of an imperial core workers wages go to rent, insurance, taxes - all made up bullshit that are there to protect the investments of long term assets by various leeching intermediaries?
I and everyone I know would take universal healthcare over any amount of cheap citrus. I and the people I respect/care about would take ethical consumption over saving a few bucks at the grocery store if we had any guarantee that the workers were getting that extra compensation. For all the "choice" that capitalism gives there is never an option without pigs extracting rents at the trough.
How does highlighting these contradictions help? I don't think you are advocating reminding friends that the oranges in their salad are fertilized with blood and suffering. I think highlighting the rampant increasing cost of housing and medical can be helpful, but how do you direct/incite anger at the ratio of an imperial core workers salary in to something productive that won't just alienate us further?
It's more being highlighted as part of my response to some unusual criticisms of the analysis of how financialization has destituted so many people in the US. Saying that it's somehow trying to paint industrialist exploitation of workers as being okay, but financial exploitation of workers as bad. That's not what highlighting the contradictions between finance and industrial capitalism is about. It's examining the further exploitation of workers more in depth than just looking at the low cost goods taken from poor countries like tropical fruits, and higher wages overall. (Alongside looking at how financialization is disintegrating the economy and deindustrializing the first world BECAUSE of the exploitation of the third world, it's not some Infrared shit about how baristas are the labor aristocracy and only industrial shit matters. People think everything is Patsocs. There's only like 400 patsocs. Most of the likes "patsoc" posts get are coming from African uncles who know what Hillary Clinton Emails Revealed) I'm saying only 10% of the population even belongs to the global labor aristocracy but I'm open to hearing arguments against it. Maybe my definition of labor aristocracy is too narrow.