Labour Aristocracy

Wait are you saying India isn't rioe for revolution? What about the Naxal/CPI-M led people's wars? What about the ethnic stratification in Sri Lanka?

The labor aristocracy are the house negroes of the proletariat.

They're not "rich proletarians", they're the bureaucrats in charge of managing collective bargaining with capital, who've become so entrenched in their own meditative nature, that they've subordinated the interests of their fellow workers to the bosses.

It's not that they're unelected that's the problem. The problem is that they don't represent the union's workers. Having them be subjected to election and recall would just create better conditions of representation, but the fact that they aren't isn't the problem.

M8, it's basic Marxism that stuff tends to exchange near value. If two companies produce the same thing and company A requires only half the work time company B does because company B uses outdated technology, that doesn't mean that company A exploits the workers at company B. There are huge areas in Asia and Latin America where you don't have proper fucking roads, you have to drive through mud, all of these problems with shit infrastructure and old tech add up so it takes more work time to produce stuff.

To show the "Maoist" Third-Worldist analysis to be correct, you would have to show that the richest countries all intervene in the rest of the world in a similar way. But there is no equivalent in Europe to the military might of the USA, nor do the rich countries have a similar share of colonial history. Look at how many people today in Africa speak French, and compare that to the few speakers of German in Africa (Namibia mostly). So, just looking at Africa, wouldn't you expect France to be much richer than Germany? (France regularly gets tons of money from Africa in form of interest payments on debt, by the way. But all of that doesn't remotely play a role of the size that you think it does.) Some rich countries are much more involved than others while having a similar standard of living. How do you square that with your belief of where the wealth of the rich countries comes from, by adding a type of non-observable exploitation that fills gaps as you need them to be filled?

This

Careful with that terminology (if you want to use Marxist definitions). Marx talks about realtive immiseration, that is, the relationship of the wage to the rate of exploitation, not the actual infliction of human misery. Workers in the First World are more exploited than workers in the Third World - a worker in a car factory produces ten times more value per hour because he can press a button for a robotic arm to montage a piece, than a Bengali woman who sews in a sweatshop. The crucial part is the purchasing power: Prices in Bangladesh are so high, that she is objectively much poorer than the worker in the First World. This is why lolberts and conservatives keep regurgitating the argument that people in a sweatshop "are paid what they're worth" - the real hard pill to swallow is that they are technically right. They are being paid according to the value they produce per labor time unit. Where Marx was wrong was that he thought that with the increasing rate of exploitation, workers would experience more and more misery, but since modern imperialism was established, this isn't necessary the case.

So in the end, Third Worldist are kind of right, but for reasons different than most of them think. The real problem keeping those countries down is unequal exchange, particularly resource extraction and export of commodities manufactured by these resources to a higher price back into the developing countries. Pdf related

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You leave out how state handouts ramp up your income so you can live properly. This isn't the case in the TW