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S E C T I O N
C
The Western Left
and Social Democracy
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XV
I M P E R I A L I S T P A R A S I T I S M A N D
T H E W E S T E R N W O R K I N G C L A S S E S
Perhaps the most significant and deep-going – and also little investigated – of the aspects of imperialist parasitism described by Lenin has been that one whereby, out of super-profits, capitalism bribes "the labour leaders and upper stratum" of Western workers "in a thousand different ways, direct and indirect, overt and covert".
This activity, manifesting itself in a variety of forms, has an extremely serious effect of the working class because
"those strata of the working class who are being BRIBED out of imperialist super-profits and converted into WATCH-DOGS of capitalism, into CORRUPTORS of the labour movement ... area ALIEN to the proletariat as a class ... are the servants, the agents, the conduits of the influence of the bourgeoisie ... of whom the labour movement must RID itself if it does not want to remain a BOURGEOIS LABOUR MOVEMENT."1
At the time when Lenin wrote these words, he was able to describe those "servants...of the bourgeoisie" as "a tiny minority" of the working class in industrialized nations. The year was 1916. Since then, the parasitism which gave rise to such "servants" did not die out of shrink. On the contrary, we have seen how it expanded as the imperialist system decayed.
Moreover, this "working-class aspect" of parasitism has specific material bases which can be investigated in detail to ascertain whether "the labour movement" did, in fact, "RID itself" of those "WATCHDOGS of capitalism", as Lenin urged; or if it has, instead, remained a "BOURGEOIS LABOUR MOVEMENT".
It is not, as we shall see, without significance that the Western Left has never made this investigation, but has contented itself with mouthing Lenin's 1916 phrases.
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What material bases, then, did Lenin offer as means of examining the bribed sections of the metropolitan working class?
One of them is suggested by following of his words:
"the percentage of productively employed population to total population is declining."2
Lenin proved this assertion for his time. Is it still true? A sampling of nine basic industries in the U.S., comparing 1950 and 1960, can be tabulated:
Table 53
RELATIONSHIP OF
PRODUCTIVELY EMPLOYED U. S. POPULATION TO TOTAL
(In Thousands)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I N D U S T R Y N u m b e r E m p l o y e d
1950 1960
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mining 532* 519
Industrial Chemicals, Organic & Inorganic 226 278
Petroleum Products 66* 67
Primary Metals 1,036 957
Metal Products 323 337
Non-Electrical Machinery 1,043 1,137
Electrical Machinery 670 865
Transport Equipment 1,036 1,160
Industrial Instruments 35 36
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
T O T A L S 4,967 5,356
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total Population 150,697 178,464
===============================================================================
P E R C E N T A G E 3.3 3.0
===============================================================================
*1959 figures
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
These figures clearly confirm Lenin's point. Yet they furnish only one small glimpse of this aspect of the effects of imperialist parasitism on the working class. There are others.
For example, one study of the U.S. economy, scrutinizing "The Sales Effort", and its non-productive role in the capitalist system as a whole, shows that
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"From being a relatively unimportant feature of the system, (the sales effort) has advanced to the status of one of its decisive nerve centers. In its impact on the economy, it is outranked only by militarism."4
Furthermore, the system's successful campaign to create new demands as stimulus to a flagging economy not only increases the economy's number of "drones", but invades production itself. For instance, in the automotive industry, "costs of production" are inflated by non-essential expenses arising from the need to change models, create premature of planned obsolescence, etc., with the significant result that
"by far the greater part of the sales effort is carried out not by obviously unproductive workers such as salesmen and advertising copy writers but by seemingly productive workers: tool and die makers, draftmen, mechanics, assembly line workers."5
Another cause of the increase in percentage of non-productive workers to total is found in the inroads of automation on large basic industry:
"At General Electric, less than half of the total employees are now on regular hourly wage scales (i.e., in direct production - H.W.E.). Thus, the blue-collar worker is falling more and more out of style. The white-collar worker ... is the man of the moment."6
Similar considerations apply to the American working class as a whole.
But what IS "the American working class"? How large a sector of population is it?
In Marxists terms, there is a double answer: (a) the "industrial proletariat," or value-producers, off whose labour the entire U.S. society lives in part; and (b) the broader "working class" comprising both the industrial proletariat and all others who, while not producing values, have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Category (b) encompasses sales personnel, clerical workers, private household workers, and so on, who constitute that "non-productive sector" which increases as a percentage¬
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of total population. The working class must also include unemployed, who have labour power to sell but cannot sell it.
In our count, we have also included the armed forces because, class-wise, they are overwhelmingly working people, with Afro-Americans composing a segment disproportionately larger then their ratio to total population. While, objectively, the armed forces are the very backbone of the bourgeois – i.e., oppressive – state, nonetheless, the working-class background of the individuals who compose them does come into play at crucial times, as evidenced in the current war by the desertion of the "South Vietnamese" soldiers to the "Vietcong." Moreover, soldiers are far from the only category to whom the ruling class pays wages to do jobs that harm the working class by sustaining the hostile state. Sheriffs, police, prison wardens are among others.
In defining a class, the sole criterion is relationship to the means of production. Ideology and/or size of income seriously affect a class; but they can NOT define it.
Some people say, "A man making £50,000 a year can't be a member of the working class." In the first place, such people are – in their type – numerically insignificant. But the point of their existence is the fact that there are a few such individuals to illumine the meaning and irony of imperialist parasitism.
Social Democrats, especially, try to use "size of income" defining classes: after a worker's income passes a certain arbitrary (but elastic) level, he is said to have entered "the middle class."
The scholar C. Wright Mills provides an excellent example of such an approach:
"'Class situation' in its simplest objective sense has to do with amount and source of income ...
"In terms of property, the white collar people are NOT 'in between Capital and Labor'; they are exactly in the same property-class positions as the wage workers. They have no direct financial tie to the means of production, no prime claim upon the proceeds from property. Like factory workers – and day laborers, for¬
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that matter – they work for those who do own such means of livelihood.
"Yet if bookkeepers and coal miners, insurance agents and farm laborers, doctors in a clinic and crane operators in an open pit have this condition in common, certainly their class situations are not the same. To understand their class positions, we must go beyond the common source of income and consider as well the amount of income."7
Such ideas can arise only the prevalent loose, indeed often emotional, mis-usage of Marx's scientific category "class". This leads precisely to the type of distortions in the U.S. class structure in the following table:
Table 68
% %
THE MIDDLE CLASSES 1870 1940
Old Middle Class 85 44
Farmers 62 23
Businessmen 21 19
Free Professionals 2 2
New Middle Class 15 56
Managers 2 6
Salaried Professionals 4 14
Sales People 7 14
Office Workers 2 22
Elsewhere, Mills himself throws more light on the subject of his own "middle class" categories: "Free practitioners", he tells us – that is, people working for themselves – were in 1940 about 1% of total labour force and a fairly constant 2% of (what Mills dubs) the "middle class". Over the last 60 years, salaried professionals expanded from 1% to 6% of total labour force; from 4% to 14% of the "middle class". Even in 1870, only about 35% of all professionals were "free". By 1940, this had decreased to 16%, within a context where 31% of all professional people were school teachers. Among independent practitioners, the greatest proportion¬
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– 80% – 90% – is among physicians, surgeons, osteopaths and dentist. Among pharmacists, only 46% are in the "independent" category; among nurses, only 8%.8a
So, for Social Democracy, liberals and the bourgeoisie, the middle class does not, as Marx claimed and as life bears out, constantly shrink; it expands. For them, instead of more and more people being drive out of the middle, and even upper, classes into the working class, the reverse is happening. How convenient!
For, by such an approach, the significance of imperialist parasitism vanishes: that incomes of sizes actually found in imperialist citadels can exist among people classifiable as "working class" constitutes precisely Lenin's point. Nothing better expresses the development of a major inner contradiction in the international working class – one that must be dealt with (it cannot be solved under imperialism) before revolutionaries in the industrialized areas can clear a path forward.*
Thoughts along similar lines were expressed by Guyana's People's Progressive Party writer, Ranji Chandisingh:
"Widely current in bourgeois sociology is the theory that the main classes in capitalist society – the capitalist class (bourgeoisie) and the working class (proletariat) – are...being swallowed up by the so-called middle class...
"According to the fashionable bourgeois theoreticians, the working class are those who are unskilled, manual workers, with low standards of education and culture...So...highly skilled workers, technologically trained workers, are no longer members of the working class!...
"We are indeed witnessing a scientific and technological revolution, and this calls forth qualitative changes in the working class ... as the scientific and technological revolution proceeds, the unskilled, manual worker is being superseded by the highly skilled, technologically advanced¬
* We shall show that their class situation for productive and non-productive workers IS the same, but what income level alters is their "mode of life" and – especially – their "entire outlook". See Pages 167 ff., below.
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worker ... proportional changes are taking place between different categories of workers – e.g., as between productive industry and the service sectors, and between different branches of industry itself."9
Ignoring terminology, the same information is conveyed in the following table drawn up, again, by American sociologist C. Wright Mills:
Table 710
% %
THE U.S. LABOR FORCE 1870 1940
Old Middle Class 33 20
New Middle Class 6 25
Wage-Workers 61 55
100 100
The "old middle class" is the only middle class by Marxist definition; it, in truth, is shrinking. But the "new middle class" has to be added to wage-workers in order to retain scientific categories. And when this is done, what it reveals is that the working class as a whole continues to expand, but its composition alters.
What all this boils down to, Mills himself ironically but succinctly summed up: that
"fewer men turn out more things in less time. In the middle of the nineteenth century...some 17.6 billion horse-power hours were expended in American industry, only 6% by mechanical energy; by the middle of the twentieth century, 410.4 billion horsepower hours will be expended, 94$ by mechanical energy ... Technology has thus narrowed the stratum of workers needed in the production process ... Workers composing the new lower class are predominantly semi-skilled; their proportion in the urban wage-worker stratum has risen from 31% in 1910 to 41% in 1940."11
It is within such boundaries that our own Table 8 – which follows – has been compiled. Sources for the figures, together with exact categories of workers included in each major classification,¬
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will be found in Appendix V at the back of the book. We have included as working class all who hire out either their brain or their brawn for wages or salaries. Although no method of identifying or separating such categories was found, if it had been possible we would have removed from our table any person¬
Table 8*
THE WORKING CLASSES IN THE UNITED STATES
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1950 1960
O C C U P A T I O N (In Thousands)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Craftsmen, foremen and kindred workers 8,205 9,241
Operatives and kindred workers 11,150 12,143
Service workers (cooks) 272 326
Farm laborers and foremen 2,533 1,560
Laborers, except farm and mine 3,644 3,408
------ ------
A. U.S. PROLETARIAT (Value-Producers) 25,804 26,678
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Professional, technical and kindred workers 4,412 6,680
Official & inspectors, state & local admin. 113 136
Clerical and kindred workers 7,132 9,617
Sales workers 3,606 4,236
Private household workers, living in or not 1,492 1,825
Service workers (except private household) 4,986 6,265
------ ------
B. LABOR-POWER SELLERS NOT PRODUCING VALUES 23,111 32,212
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C. = A + B: CIVILIAN WORKING CLASS WITH JOBS 48,915 58,890
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
D. OFFICIAL NUMBER OF UNEMPLOYED 3,351 3,931
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
E. NUMBER IN ARMED FORCES 1,650 2,514
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
F. = C + D: CIVILIAN WORKING CLASS 52,266 62,821
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
G. = E + F: TOTAL U.S. WORKING CLASS 53,916 65,335
================================================================================
H. Total "U.S. Civilian Labor Force" 63,099 70,612
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I. Total "U.S. Labor Force" 64,749 73,126
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
J. U.S. Non-Institutional Popul'n over 14 yrs. old 110,929 125,368
================================================================================
* See Appendix V, back of book.
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earning more than 25%* of his income from any form of ownership of the social means of production. This, however, would have been because his relationship to the means of production had changed, not because of the size of income paid to him.
It will be noted that category H., U.S.-designated "Total Civilian Labour Force", differs from our category, "Civilian Working Class", F., by 10,833,000 in 1950 and by 7,791,000 in 1960. Without accounting for this difference numerically, we can still point to a number of its sources.
First, there is the difference between the Marxist definition of a "worker" and that of the U.S. for an "employed person":
"Employed persons include those who did any work for pay or profit during the week, worked without pay for 15 hours or more in a family enterprise (farm or business), or did not work or look for work but had a job or business from which they were temporarily absent during the week."12
It was to eliminate those working for profit or owning a business that such "employed persons" appearing in H. were removed from category F.
Second, the U.S. definition of "an unemployed person" accounts for more of the noted difference:
"Unemployed persons comprise those who did not work at all during the week but were looking for work or were on lay-off from a job."13
This definition enables statistician apologists for the status quo to keep official unemployment figures low:
* As noted in Chapter XII, Page 90, above, the United states Department of Commerce considers a "U.S. enterprise" one in which U.S. funds constitute 25% or more of the investment. That is why we have used 25% as the break-even point for participation in the ruling class.
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"Between 1960 and 1963, there took place a one percent decline in the labour force participation rate, which means that some 1.3 million workers dropped out of the labour force in addition to the normal losses through death and retirement."14
Between the 1950 and 1960, this decline was slower: only .65%15. Nevertheless, it accounted for some 815,000 drop-outs of the type cited. These were people not "looking for work"; therefore, in official U.S. statistics, they were not "unemployed".
A third source of discrepancies lies in the fact that the U.S. adopted new definitions of employment and unemployment in January 1957, thereby affecting earlier figures. Some statistics in the source material had been revised by the compilers, but not all.
The rest can be traced to normal population change.
In order to examine more fully the meaning of Table 8, another was compiled showing trends; the abbreviation "W.C." stands, of course, for "Working Class". The figures in G. was[were] used as the total, measuring percentages of the other categories A., B., C., and F. (which are the same as those in Table 8). Item J. is the "total non-institutional U.S. population 14 years of age or over" in the years studied.16
Table 9
TRENDS IN THE U. S. WORKING CLASS
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1950 1960 CHANGE
----------------------- ----------------------- ----------------------
Table 8 % to Total % to Total % to Total
Category Thousands Popul. W.C. Thousands Popul. W.C. Thousands Popul. W.C.
-------- --------- ------ ------ --------- ------ ------ --------- ------ -----
A. 25,804 23.3 47.9 26,678 21.3 40.9 + 874 - 2.0 - 7.0
B. 23,111 20.8 42.9 32,212 25.7 49.3 + 9,101 + 4.9 + 6.4
C. 48,915 44.1 90.7 58,890 47.0 90.1 + 9,975 + 2.0 - 0.6
F. 52,266 47.1 97.0 62,821 50.1 96.1 + 10,555 + 3.0 - 0.9
G. 53,916 48.6 100.0 65,335 52.1 100.0 + 11,419 + 3.5
------------------------------------------------------------------------
J. 110,929 125,368 + 14,439 +13.0
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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While absolute numbers of value-producers and other segments of the American working class all rose between 1950 and 1960 (due mainly to the large rise in total population), the percentage of value-producers shrank (which generalizes the findings of Table 5 on Page 114, above). By 1966, incidentally, this percentage had been still further reduced:
"only 15% of the U.S. population ... produce all the food and goods that the whole nation could reasonably need."17*
The above table also shows a shrinking percentage relationship to total population of "Civilian Working Class with Jobs" (C) and of "Total Civilian Working Class" (F). This is due to first, a rise in number of unemployed; and second, drop-outs from the labor market.
According to Marxists, two effects of the decay of the capitalist system are: the more rapid pace at which the non-productive sector of the working class increases compared to the increase in the productive sector; and the overall increase in the size of the working class itself. Tables 8 and 9 bear these out conclusively.
The American working class comprises at least two-thirds of total population;18 and (b) poor families tend to be larger than average.18 Therefore, it seems fairly safe to conclude that the American working class as a whole** now includes three of every four Americans.
This, then, is the proportion in the world's richest country of population of which one speaks in saying "the working class". We have not as yet even considered the size of their earnings of their ideology, although this will be done shortly. At that time, the significance of the real material conditions among this overwhelming majority of the American people will become clear.
* This ignores any difference between the source of the quotation and ourselves as to who constitutes "producers".
** See Page 127, below.
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XVI
T H E A N A T O M Y
O F I M P E R I A L I S T B R I B E R Y
The increase in working class size, with its accompanying change of composition in a non-productive direction, is part of the process which creates a labor aristocracy.
If the latter is, as Lenin said, that portion of the working class which is bribed by a share in super-profits, then it includes not only labor leaders, but all workers who are given an extra material stake in the status quo. Labor leaders are the articulate and usually conscious spokesmen for alleged labor interests in the world's metropolitan areas. The spread of these interests is very wide, indea[e]d.
Now, if the labor aristocracy is that sector of a revolutionary class which is being bribed, should not revolutionaries be obligated to follow its development? And wouldn't a valuable first step be to study the nature of bribery itself as applied to the modern industrial proletariat?
1. What is bribery?
Webster defines "Bribery" as "the practice of giving or taking a bribe". The word "Bribe" derives from an Old French word meaning "a lump of bread, scraps, leavings". This noun, in turn, springs from a root verb meaning "to beg". The extended dictionary meaning of the word is:
"A gift or favor given or promised in order to influence the judgement or conduct of a person in a position of trust."
Noah Webster, of course, was no political oracle. But these meanings do throw a pertinent side-light on imperialist bribery: it need not involve anything tangible, either in purpose or result; a favor or promise that warps only the judgment of the recipient adequately fulfills the function.
Chapters to come will disclose that a significant section of the U. S. working class enjoys a number of luxuries. As luxuries, they qualify as¬
— 125 —
tangible bribery. Nor is their extent bounded by the money available for working class spending: Consumer credit bears visible fruit; and, beyond that, there is entertainment, education, medical care (with all its faults), etc., all enjoyed by growing number of Americans, at least two-thirds of whom are workers by hand or brain.* To this must by[e] added the abnormally cheap staples, such as tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco and others, made possible by paying raw-materials-producing countries far below value of their commodities.
In such ways, a majority of U.S. workers and their families enjoy material values to which other workers in the world only aspire. And those aspirations, motivating people largely ignorant of the source of such values, still obscure the path leading to revolution.
2. Relationship of imperialist bribery to wages and profits
Lenin had already more than hinted at the source of imperialist bribery in saying that
"out of such enormous SUPER-PROFITS ... the capitalists of the 'advanced' countries are bribing (the labor leaders and the upper strata of the proletariat) ..."**
Consider, however, the following:
"Unions most certainly do play an important role in the determination of money wages, and the workers in more strongly organized industries generally do better for themselves than workers in less strongly organized branches of the economy. This does not mean, however, that the working class as a whole is in a position to encroach on surplus ... (Here a footnote informs that unions 'do not in fact have any decisive influence over the class distribution of income (which) is determined by a combination of forces in which ... the corporations play a far more important role than ... the unions.') The reason is that under¬
* See Table 8, Page 120, above.
** See Chapter III, Pages 27-29, above.
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monopoly capitalism employers can and do pass on higher labor costs in the form of higher prices ...*
"And whether of[r] not it is common practice to use wage increases as a pretext to increase profit margins, monopolistic corporations unquestionably have the power to prevent wage increases from lowering them."**1
The authors seem to be saying that, under monopoly capitalism in its advanced U.S. form, the ruling class is able, by maintaining artificially high prices in commodities, to recoup profit losses due to wage increases.
This idea bears looking into.
Consider, for example, the original position of Karl Marx in discussing competitive capitalism, on the relationship between profits and wages:
" ... I shall use the word PROFIT for the whole amount of the surplus value extracted by the capitalist without any regard to the division of that surplus value between different parties, and in using the words RATE OF PROFIT, I shall always measure profits by the value of the capital advanced in wages ...
"Since the capitalist and workers have only, to divide, this limited value, that is, the value measured by the total labor of the working man, the more the one gets the less will the other get, and vice versa ... If the wages change, profits will change in an opposite direction. If wages fall, profits will rise; and if wages rise, profits will fall... A general rise of wages would ... result in a fall of profits, but not affect the values."2
Elsewhere, Marx put this thought as follows:
"What, then, is the general law which determines the rise and fall of wages and profit in their reciprocal relation?
* See Table 24, Page 167, and quotation from NEWSWEEK: inflation was eating away, up to 1965 at any rate, only half of U.S. wage gains.
** Reference here to unions is, at the moment, incidental as such to the topic under discussion.
— 127 —
"They stand in inverse ratio to each other. Capital's share, profit, rises in the same proportion as labor's share, wages, falls, and vice versa. Profits rise to the extent that wages fall; it falls to the extent that wages rise."3
In a word, under competitive capitalism, "the working class as a whole" most definitely IS in a position to encroach on profits, according to Marx. The quotation under consideration (about unions) at least implies that monopoly capitalism as far advanced as the U.S. variety has surmounted Max's law of the inseparability of wages and profits is concerned.
Is Marx's fundamental law, his Law of Value, then, obsolete? Or are there loopholes in the quotation we are stud[y]ing?
A second glance at that quotation shows up one glaring anomaly at once: although the words "working class as a whole" are used, what was clearly being referred to was the "whole" working class of the U.S. only. Is this, in the era of world-wide monopoly, meaningful? Lenin gave more than a hint that it was not. And the authors of these words themselves have stressed that capitalism has always been an international system (and any system includes all its component parts):
"From its earliest beginnings in the Middle Ages, capitalism has always been an international system ... a hierarchical system with one or more leading metropolises at the top, completely dependent on colonies at the bottom ... These features are of crucial importance to the functioning of both the system as a whole and its individual components, though this is a fact the importance of which bourgeois economists have consistently ignored or denied and even Marxists have often underestimated."4
In this light, the real "working class as whole" is not the "whole" working class vis-a-vis the U.S. alone, not even when only the American economy is being discussed.*
Therefore, the meaning of monopoly price fixing and its relation to the conditions of "the working class as a whole" must be sought elsewhere.
* See Footnote Page 123, above.
— 128 —
Again, Karl Marx provided an answer:
"If the price of a commodity rises considerably because of inadequate supply or disproportionate increase of the demand, the price of some other commodity must necessarily have fallen proportionately, for the price of a commodity only expresses in money the ratio in which other commodities are given in exchange for it ...
"THE REAL PRICE OF A COMMODITY, IT IS TRUE, IS ALWAYS ABOVE OR BELOW ITS COST OF PRODUCTION; BUT RISE AND FALL RECIPROCALLY BALANCE EACH OTHER, so that within a certain period of time, taking the ebb and flow of the industry together, commodities are exchanged for one another in accordance with their cost of production, their prices, therefore, being determined by their cost of production."5
If monopolies really, via fixed prices, take back from the recipients whatever "their" workers force them to disgorge in wage rises, those workers' conditions would never improve. But the whole world can see, and statistics confirm, that the conditions of American workers, and of those in the West generally, have improved. Although the gains may not have been as large as publicized, they have been real. Workers' understanding of this fact is testified to by their migration into metropolitan centers.
At the same time, monopoly profits have continued to soar.* Are the monopolists, therefore, getting something for nothing? Science has long since proved that, in all the universe, there is no such phenomenon.
Not long ago, a then-candidate for a PhD at London School of Economics, David Horowitz (author of The Free World Colossus), reviewed the book from which the quotation under discussion derives. He wrote that
"The question that presents itself at this point is ... whether there are any limits to the controlled inflation under which the monopolistic corporations can maximize their profits while maintaining the alliance with organized¬
* See Section B, above.
— 129 —
labor on which so much depends. Such limits do exist ... but they arise from a factor which is neglected by Baran and Sweezy in their analysis of the rising surplus, namely, INTERNATIONAL competition. For here, PRICE Competition still plays an important role and sets a real barrier to creeping inflation as a harmonizing social mechanism, even in the case of the most powerful international competitors like the United States."6
That is, American monopolies operate in an integral international system. Corporations, then – even during capitalism's non-competitive stage – do not have the power Baran and Sweezy attributed to them to prevent wage increases at home from lowering their profits. Yet, as we have noted, their profits have not been lowered. The explanation lies in the fact that Marx's law of the interdependence of profits and wages, and of prices and values, hold for the system of which American corporations are one component. Fixed prices translate themselves into profits, which in turn represent values obtained from somewhere. Marx (above*) showed that all profits are limited by wages – somewhere. Lenin had explained that Western super-wages, wherever they exist, derive "out of super-profits".
If, then, the under-priced values supplying monopolies' steady profits are not in the metropolis, they must reside in the remainder of the integral international system:
In 1959, U.S. Negro per capita annual income was $1,162. So, the 18.9 million black Americans of that year6a would have had a total annual income of $21,281 million. Total U.S. population was 177.1 million. Each enjoyed an annual average $2,166, or total U.S. aggregate income of $383.6 billion.**
Of the 177.1 million Americans, 158.2 were white and/or non-Negro (black people were, therefore, 92.1% of non-whites6b). So, then, in 1959, each non-Negro American (i.e., all other non-whites plus the whites) had an average annual income of about $2,291. (This, of course, is low compared to "pure white" income: it includes the depressed wages of more than a million and a half people who were both non-white and non-Negro.)
* Last quotation, Page 128, above.
** See Table 13, Page 154, below.
— 130 —
The national difference between Negro and non-Negro income was $1,165 per head. For 18.9 million Afro-Americans, this amounted to $22,019 millions* that should have been in black pockets, but was not.
Today, the absolute amount of which America's black people are deprived in this way has risen still further.
"The Government figures that if all Negroes could be brought up to the average white American's level of affluence, employment and education, the U.S. economy's output would climb by $27 billion a year, equal to 4% of the gross national product."7
Did all this difference go to white workers?
If the $22,019 million which Afro-Americans lost in 1959 was distributed among whites in the same basis as other income, then 5.0% of all U.S. families that y ear would have picked up 19.9% of it.7a On this basis, the upper crust took a cut for itself of some $4.38 billion, redistributing only the remainder as white wages or other income. With the working class at least two-thirds o population, something over $11.7 billion (unweighted, therefore probably too high) may be suggested as the maximum amount given to U.S. white workers. To the $4.38 billion clear profit for the ruling class must be added an unknown amount in super-rents and super-interest charged to Afro-Americans.
But these profits were "obtained over and above those ... squeeze(d) from the workers in their 'own' country" by American rulers and so are really super-profits. The Afro-American community stands revealed as an internal quasi-colony.**
Capitalists in the ruling country, then, share their super-profits with "their own" workers. On a world scale, the major effect of this sharing is a redistribution of wages among "the working class as a whole" which creates – and¬
* On Page 137, below, in a different year by another method, J. H. O'Dell found the money which Afro-Americans lost to the system to be about the same amount.
** Because so many statistics are available, Afro-America can – with qualifications to be noted later – exemplify the general colonial phenomenon of which it is an important part. Also, later discussion of these qualifications will explain the use here and hereafter of the term "quasi-colony" in referring to Afro-America.
— 131 —
expresses – a contradiction between exploited and super-exploited. Since Lenin's time, that contradiction has grown large enough temporarily to obscure the central contradiction in the metropolis between workers and bosses (which naturally is the purpose of the enormous sums thus sacrificed – invested, really – by the ruling class).
The example of Afro-America is useful in another way: White workers are receiving a substantial portion of extra – i.e. super – wages which actually belong to – because the values they represent were created by and "meant" to produce the labor-power of – their Afro-American class brothers. Yet, those white workers do not own the means of production on which black workers produce such values. That is why such values, realized in super-wages, constitute bribes which amount to a peculiar participation in super-exploitation. Until removed, such super-exploitation acts as a "difficulty" temporarily outweighing the "principal aspect of the contradiction".8
We have now tracked down, without yet discussing collection methods, a tangible portion of imperialism's bribery of "its" own workers. From here, it is only a step to deduce that, if the U.S. working class is only an important metropolitan sector of the collective world working class (including Afro-America) then the differences in wages and conditions between metropolitan centers and the vast colonial hinterland (different parts of a single integral system) represent a further sharing of super-profits via a redistribution of international wages much more drastic than that in the U.S., but always favoring the metropolitan worker.
The resulting flood of tangible bribes buries under its tawdry glitter the (much smaller) exploitation of the labor aristocracy itself which, with automated speed, helps colossally to enrich "its own" exploiters. That is the significance of bribery for Marxists: it must orient their concentration in the making of revolution on the prior destruction of super-exploitation.
While workers are bribed out of a single component of super-profits, the take accruing to the ruling class from such sharing is far more numerous and often imponderable.
— 132 —
Although all super-profits ultimately reduce to super-exploitation of colonial labor power, they do not all appear in that direct form. They include exorbitant interest (on loans, on aid, etc.) charged by metropolitan powers to emerging governments or ex-colonies (such governments squeezing even larger amounts right back out of local labor power). There are also: loot from licensing patents, processes and trade marks; the incredible salaries of foreign experts, some of whom are so expert that they can't get jobs at home; the physical removal of incalculable quantities of natural wealth from colonial areas; the effect of the price scissors on the monopoly-controlled international market; non-equivalent exchange; and so on.
As for imponderable benefits of super-exploitation to the ruling class: imagining for a moment that, without any other change in the overall set-up, such a thing were possible, what if American wages were not differentiated by color? Figures showed, above, that "non-black" income in 1959 averaged about $2,291 per head, compared to the national average including Afro-Americans of $2,166. Even at a mere $125 a head, this amounts to some $21,138 million, suggesting a depression of all wages because of employer-created color divisions in the working class. How much higher, then, would all income go if not weighed down by this divisive component? This unfigurable sum, which the ruling class at present need pay nobody (and which under a socialist order would be available for the benefit of all) is pocketed in its entirety by the ruling class. Measurable or not, here are super-profits squeezed from the entire home working class including the labor aristocracy.
Another imponderable: for the capitalist class, the credit system annually draws immense sums of interest. How much of this would Wall Street lose if all workers could pay cash? In any case, how much is gravy due to extra or luxury spending out of super-wages?
Still other imponderables are hidden in prices, rents, educational costs saved by inferior education for black children, unused industrial capacity (which, of course, is also a loss) etc.
— 133 —
And how much does the international ruling class get as cut from the incalculable sum pouring into the metropolis from greatly depressed colonial wages? "That figure must be positively staggering!
Thus, the by-no-means-puny share of affluence which the ruling class gives out of super-profits in varying proportions to different segments of "its own" workers may be thought of as a cost to that ruling class in extracting its other, much more enormous, super-profits from colonies. The relative quiet of its own labor force thereby purchased on the whole and usually permits it to expand its economy without undue interference or interruption from class struggle at home. This is said in the face of the massive upheavals in France in May 1968: it will be interesting to see whether the system can weather the current struggles wracking it in various metropolitan spots. Its margin of safety may have been reduced. Yet, the continued existence of the colonial labor-power reservoir clearly suggests that it will. It may never be the same; it will have tottered another step toward its doom. But – it will still be there, continuing its parasitic life as long as it can super-exploit; and colonial suffering will continue increasing.
So, the primary result of bribery in the imperialist economic system is the formation, as Lenin noted,* of labor aristocracies in "a handful of very rich countries".
In Lenin's day, his thesis was simply represented by the facts. But as imperialism decays and its network of parasitism spreads, those facts necessarily become more complex – in the ever-integral system. The writers of the above quotation** take into account this increasing systemic complexity:
"The hierarchy of nations which make up the capitalist system is characterized by a complex set of exploitative relations. Those at the top exploit in varying degrees all the lower layers, and similarly those at any given level exploit those below them ... At the same time, each¬
* See Chapter III, Page 28, above.
** Footnote 1, quotation, Page 123, above.
— 134 —
unit at a given level strives to be the sole exploiter of as large a number as possible of units beneath it. Thus we have a network of antagonistic relations pitting exploiters against exploited and rival exploiters against each other."9
These ideas are in turn supported from another source dealing specifically with Latin America but having universal applicability:
"... metropolis-satellite relations are not limited to the imperial or international level but penetrate and structure the very economic, political and social life of the ... colonies .. Just as the colonial and national capital and its export sector become the satellite of the ... metropoles of the world economic system, this satellite immediately becomes a colonial and then a national metropolis with respect to the productive sectors and populations of the interior. Furthermore, the provincial capitals, which thus are themselves satellites of the national metropolis – and through the latter of the world metropolis – are in turn provincial centers around which their own local satellites orbit. Thus, a whole chain of constellations of metropoles and satellites relates all parts of the whole system from its metropolitan center in Europe or the United States to the farthest outpost in the ... countryside.
"When we examine this metropolis-satellite structure, we find that each of the satellites ... servers as an instrument to suck capital or economic surplus out of its own satellites and to channel part of this surplus to the world metropolis of which all are satellites."10
Imperialist bribery, while originating from the metropolis and benefiting mainly the metropolis, includes – in the system's darkening twilight – a graduated process that is interpenetrating and ubiquitous. Yet, its role in thus far enabling the system's rules, in most un-Canute-like style, to hold back the tide of revolution, could be undermined – thus hastening Liberation's time table – by documenting and exposing it. This, the present text attempts.
[— 135 —]
XVII
T H E S O U R C E O F
I M P E R I A L I S T B R I B E R Y
Table 3 on Page 82 compares U.S. wage levels with those of Asia, Africa and Latin America: even when colonial wages rise absolutely, they continue to fall relatively to wages in imperialist centers.
Table 27, Page 172, shows that, in South Africa (that imperialist world is miniature), the black worker is paid only 4.6% of the "white" race.
The size of this gap and the continual relative fall of colonial wages, taken together, indicate one specific result of imperialist parasitism: the richer the metropoles become, the poorer colonial peoples.
Imperialist bribery is not limited to wages. Wages gaps are merely one portion of a whole mode of life, which parasitism – as a single process – permits to metropolitan labor while enforcing in reverse on colonial labor.
Guinea's President Sekou Touré has quoted, for income, food production, world trade and purchasing power, the ranking of the U.S. at against colonial areas. His comparative figures, taken from "an international review", are as follows:
"1. Immediately after the war, the average per capita income in the U.S.A. was $1,000 per annum, while in the underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America it was $100. Fifteen years later the annual average per capita income in the United States was $2,500, and in the underdeveloped countries barely $150. Thus, while in the most developed part of the world the average income was ten times larger than that of the underdeveloped countries, which represent the vast majority of the world territory and population, this difference has now risen to seventeen times.*
* Table 3, Page 82, was simply a tabulation of this Section. It is repeated in words here for the sake continuity.
— 136 —
"2. Since the war, the world average per capita production of food has increased by 13 per cent. But in Africa, the production per capita has fallen by two per cent, in Latin America it has increased by two per cent, in Asia by 12 per cent, and in the developed Western Europe by 21 per cent.
"3. Immediately after the second world war the underdeveloped countries' participation in world trade exchange was 38 per cent. However, by 1953, its share was reduced to 36 per cent, in 1959 to 31 per cent, and in 1961 to 29 per cent.
"4. In the course of the last ten years alone, the prices of industrial goods in international trade have increased by 24 per cent, while the prices of raw materials have fallen by five per cent. In other words, the underdeveloped countries exporting raw materials were, towards the tend of the fifties, purchasing one-third less industrial goods for a determined quantity of raw materials, as compared with ten years earlier."1
The practical, human, outcome illustrated in vital statistics from the areas is one important consequence of such lop-sided conditions.
Table 10, below, concretizes this consequence. (Because of the poor availability of statisticsc covering "black" Africa by itself, it can deal solely with Average Years of Life Expectancy and with Infant Mortality Rates; and with South Africa vis-a-vis the United States.)
Table 102
COMPARATIVE INTERNATIONAL VITAL STATISTICS
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Years Life
Expectamcy INFANT MORTALITY RATES
A R E A at Birth
------------ ------------------------------------
MALE FEMALE 1948 1955 1959 1961
---------------------------- ---- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------
South African Whites 67x 72x 36.0 29.8 28.7 27.6
" " Asians n.a. n.a. 77.1 63.1 62.1 43.3
" " Coloreds n.a. n.a. 133.2 134.5 120.6 126.8
" " Blacks 37x 42x n.a. n.a. n.a. 200-300x
UNITED STATES 67.1a 73.5a 32.0 26.4 26.4 25.3
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
xSource: Accre EVENING NEWS, June 8, 1963. a1957 figures n.a.= not available
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
— 137 —
These figures illustrate a first point about imperialist bribery: that for the system as a whole, the CENTRAL, ancestral BRIBERY is the one which elevates metropolitan living standards so far above those of colonial hinterlands. What is more, the resulting difference between conditions of peoples in metropolitan as compared to colonial localities is a qualitative one, as will be shown later.
The figures for Asians and Coloreds show that, while such effects are at their maximum between metropoles and colonial hinterlands, there are also graded effects of the same type within colonial lands, and inside imperialist countries as well.*
This encompasses a second point about imperialist bribery, the missing of which has caused, among the Western Left and the Eastern European socialist world, serious judgemental errors about world revolutionary tactics.
To investigate how both these points operate and interact, a start can be made by comparing wages and mode of life inside the U.S. for Afro-Americans as against their white brethren.
If "disposable income" is the amount of money roughly needed to run an economy for a year, the 1963 figure for the U.S. was $420 billion. At that time, Afro-Americans constituted 10.8% of total U.S. population. Hence, had income between distributed on the basis of population, Afro-Americans should have accounted for $45 billion. Actually however, the figure was $23.5 billion. The remaining $21.5 billion was redistributed among white people of all classes in such a way that income for Negroes averaged only 52% of those for whites.3 A later figure – 1966 – shows a Negro income of 55.4% that of whites.4
The following table compares the vital statistics resulting from the above wage discrimination within the U.S. between white and non-white people. (In 1959, Negroes were 92.1% of all U.S. non-whites.5 Therefore, this table serves adequately in grading U.S. "Negro vs. white" statistics.)
* This point is in line with the theme of the quotations from Baran and Sweezy and from Professor Andre Gunder Frank, Note 4, 9 and 10, Chapter XVI.
— 138 —
Table 116
U.S. VITAL STATISTICS, NEGRO AND WHITE
----------------------------------------------------------------------
LIFE EXPECTANCY AT BIRTH
IN YEARS INFANT MORTALITY RATEo
-------------------------------
YEAR WHITE NON-WHITE
-------------- --------------- ----------------------
MALE FEMALE MALE FEMALE WHITE NON-WHITE
------- ------ ------ ------ ------ --------- ---------
1941-51 66.3 72.0 58.9 62.7 26.8 44.5
1955 67.3 73.6 61.2 65.9 23.6 42.8
1959 67.3 73.9 60.9 66.2 23.2 44.0
1959-61 67.6 74.1 61.5 66.6 22.4 40.7
1964 67.7 74.6 61.1 67.2 21.6 41.1
----------------------------------------------------------------------
oNumber of deaths of infants under one year per 1,000 live births
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The years studied were chosen so that this table would be as nearly as possible specifically comparable with Tables 10 and 12. The figures in Table 11, here, show a definite, measurable difference between the vital statistics of Negroes and whites in the leading imperialist country. The significance of this comparison¬
Table 12a
COMPARATIVE VITAL STATISTICS
SOUTH AFRICAN AND AMERICAN NON-WHITES
----------------------------------------------------------
SOUTH AFRICAN LIFE EXPECTANCY U.S. NEGRO LIFE
AT BIRTH IN YEARS EXPECTANCY AT
YEAR -------------------------------
WHITES BLACKS BIRTH IN YEARS
-------------- -------------- ---------------
MALE FEMALE MALE FEMALE MALE FEMALE
---- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -------
1948 58.9 62.7
1955 61.2 65.9
1959 60.9 66.2
1961 67x 72x 37x 42x 61.5 66.6
1962 61.5 66.8
---------------------------------------------------------
xSource: Accra EVENING NEWS, June 8, 1963. Valid date for
figures not given but context made 1961 or 1962 likely.
----------------------------------------------------------
— 139 —
between a metropolitan center and its own, internal quasi-colony will soon become apparent.
Where Afro-Americans fit into the world exploitative hierarchy is clarified in Tables 12a and 12b, which (combining information in Tables 10 and 11) compare vital statistics for South Africa and American non-whites, revealing a qualitative difference between the conditions of metropolitan and hinterland non-whites.
Tables 12a and 12b show quite clearly the dual position of the U.S. Negro vis-a-vis imperialist bribery. In 1948, their infants were surviving better than those of South African Asians who,
Table 12b
COMPARATIVE VITAL STATISTICS
SOUTH AFRICAN AND AMERICAN NON-WHITES
--------------------------------------------------------
INFANT MORTALITY RATE (Deaths of Infants
under 1 year per 1,000 live births)
------------------------------------------------
YEAR S O U T H A F R I C A U.S.A.
-------------------------------------- -------
ASIANS COLOREDS BLACKS WHITES NEGROES
---- -------- -------- -------- -------- -------
1948 77.1 133.2 36.0 44.5
1955 63.1 134.5 29.8 42.8
1959 62.1 120.6 28.7 44.0
1961 43.3 126.8 200-300x 27.6 40.7
1962 41.4
--------------------------------------------------------
xSource: Accra EVENING NEWS, June 8, 1963. Valid date for
figures not given but context made 1961 or 1962 likely.
--------------------------------------------------------
by 1961, had however caught up with them (indicating how the exploitative inner hierarchy of imperialist economy changes as the system decays). The South African blacks' infant mortality rate in 1961 or thereabouts was about five times that of local Asians, and also of U.S. Negroes; almost ten times that of South African whites, and about double that of South African coloreds, who themselves suffered three times as much as a South African Asian or a U.S. Negro.
— 140 —
As for life expectancy, by 1961, the U.S. Negro male had reached on the average a position commensurate with, lagging only slightly behind, that of South African whites who live, on a world scale, second in conditions only to U.S. whites. But South African blacks in 1961 had only one-half to two-thirds the life expectancy of U.S. Negroes or South African whites. All these figures have political consequences to be studied later.
Tables 10, 11 and 12 taken together lead to the conclusion that (a) the U.S. white population enjoys a specific, sizeable, life-and-death benefit from U.S. rulers' super-exploitation of an internal quasi-colony – as measured originally by a specific income differential; and (b) all the U.S. population, who thereby include Afro-Americans, together enjoy from such super-exploitation enormous monetary and condition advantages over people in colonies.
The improvement in South African Asians' vital statistics shown in Tables 10 and 12, above, taken with Afro-American statistics (Tables 11 and 12), further suggests the attainment of a fairly high level of living standards for Asians in South Africa and for Afro-Americans, each as a group. Certainly, it would appear from such figures that a significant section of the internal U.S. quasi-colony is being added bit by bit to an American elite.
Is this the whole story? Or is there in such figures a trap which – unqualified – may be warping the truth about imperialist bribery?
These questions, as well as their answers, have been suggested – and lucidly covered – by a recent examination of the economic history of American Negroes.7 which shows that the truth underlying statistical improvements for oppressed areas is, in reality, inseparably connected with imperialism's hierarchical nature.
In his Chapter on imperialist parasitism, cited earlier, Lenin had observed that
— 141 —
"The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism ... sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labor of several overseas countries and colonies."*
Since Afro-Americans reside in the world's most advanced "country that lives by exploiting the labor of several overseas countries and colonies", one would – other considerations aside – expect them to participate in that citadel's parasitism. But how could that be possible, since it has already been shown** that they are super-exploited by the U.S. ruling class?
The authors of the cited examination of Negro economic history note – and quote U.S. authorities who agree – that most of the real improvements in wages and conditions which have been gained by the majority of Afro-Americans have been due almost solely to their great urbanization since 1910. For, say these writers,
"The move from countryside to city has on the average unquestionably meant a higher standard of living."8
In addition, they offer figures showing how massive a component of Afro-American life has been affected:
"...in the half century between 1910 and 1960 ... The 3-to-1 rural-urban ratio (among Afro-Americans) of 1910 has been almost exactly reversed: today three quarters of the Negro population are city dwellers."9
Urbanization results from industrialization. And this, in turn, is mainly the fruit of continued super-profits. So, the reason benefits have reached a significant number of Afro-Americans, despite their own quasi-colonial status, is (as these authors put it) because the standard of living that accompanies industrialization has created a world-wide condition whereby
"the bottom of the urban-industrial ladder is higher than the top of the ... agricultural ladder."10
* See Chapter III, Page 27, above.
** See Page 137, above.
— 142 —
Of course, out of this fact, U.S. propaganda would like to present a blissful idyll enveloping its most oppressed. So, one such medium has reported specifically that
"nine out of ten Negro families (today) own one or more television sets, two-thirds have automatic dishwashers, and more than half own cars."4
These "blessings" – according to this source – stem from the fact that
"The proportion of poor families among Negroes fell from 52.2% in 1959 to 43.1% 1964, while that among whites declined from 20.7% to 17.1%."4
Also, this report notes, while Negro income was still only $3,971 per family compared to $7,170 for whites per annum (55.4%), it had risen 24% since 1960 while white rates went up "only" 14%.4
The implied claim is that Negroes as a whole are catching up with whites, with statistics to support the notion.
However, according to the authors we have been quoting7, the fact is that once urbanization has taken place, the masses of Negroes experience a real worsening of living conditions: unemployment grows; ghettoization strengthens – even though overall statistics imply a general rising situation.
These authors quote U.S. government authorities to support their position. What is more, even the above "U.S. propaganda medium" is, in the end, forced to confirm it:
"Practically all of the gains (made by U.S. Negroes) have been made by a growing Negro middle class, which still constitutes a minority of the Negro population. That is the heart of the problem for it leaves behind the lower-income semi-literate Negroes, notably the families that are below the Government's $3,000-a-year poverty line. This class contains 60% of all the nation's Negro youths ... While the income of the middle-class Negro rises, that of the great mass of Negroes is actually declining. During the 1960s, median family income for Negroes has dropped from $3.[,]897 to $3.[,]803 in Los Angeles' Watts, from $4,346 to $3,729 in Cleveland's Hough District...
— 143 —
"The number of Negroes on public-welfare rolls is increasing, and one-third of the nation's spending for public aid, education and housing (or an estimated $3.5 billion in all) goes to Negroes, who constitute only 11% of the U.S. population."4
What the mass improvement among Black Americans resulting from urbanization might be said to represent, then, is a benefit to Afro-Americans as a whole accruing to them as dwellers is a metropolis out of general overseas super-exploitation by the U.S. ruling class.
Throughout the imperialist system, urbanization is part of a continuous process of polarization. The fully-documented point made by our study of Negro economic history is that, for American Negroes – and, presumably, for ALL colonial areas – the main weight of statistical improvement shown in governmental surveys over the years goes to "the black (i.e., colonial) bourgeoisie".7 That is, per se, all figures from such areas actually deceive to a lesser or greater degree because, as averages, they hide the distribution of those improved living standards for significant numbers of people which are a feature of imperialist bribery. Whereas metropolitan polarization produces a labor aristocracy at first tiny, but growing to substantial proportions as systemic parasitism waxes, the same process "overseas" produces a colonial elite, or "bourgeoisie". The former buffers for the ruling class against revolt both "at home" and in "overseas countries and colonies"; but, in colonies (i.e., in the lower echelons of the international imperialist economy), it is, with very few exceptions, the local "bourgeoisie" which plays this same role.*
So, improvements in vital and other statistics really illumine qualitative differences in the forms and nature of imperialist bribery as it descends the international exploitative hierarchical ladder.
Now, according to the theses in this text, the type of polarization occuring in colonial areas due to imperialist bribery should have been predictable. For, if the metropolitan labor¬
* This will be elaborated in detail later.
— 144 —
aristocracy really has its conditions improved at the expense of super-exploited peoples, then the latter, in fulfilling their "function" inside the system, must experience ever-worsening conditions.
Yet, it is frequently said that 30, 60, 12, 20 – unnumbered – millions of metropolitan workers are "living in poverty". So they are – by metropolitan standards, as well as in the light of how "developed" their economy allegedly is. On the other hand, Lenin had declared, as has now been noted more than once in these pages, that super-exploitation – "coupon clipping", foreign investments, capital export, etc. – "sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country" that lives in such a manner. How do "metropolitan poor" fit into this description?
First of all, those out of work in the world's "cities" are kept alive: in the U.S., there is "unemployment compensation"; in U.K., National Assistance (the dole); etc. However "inadequate" these hand-outs, nothing like them exists in colonial areas. Furthermore, in amounts per week, they sometimes approach monthly wages for employed colonial workers (i.e., California's $42.57 per week) compared to a Ghanaian's [cedi currency sign —Transcriber]47.28 per month).11
Finally, for those who reach the end of their unemployment compensation; for those chronically unemployed – as well as for employed, for rich and for poor – in metropolitan areas there are inexpensive staples available to everyone in the West which go so far toward creating the beneficial overall metropolitan standard of living: because of Western control of the enormously below the values of such commodities.* But, as has been shown,** where prices and values do not accord with one another, the lag is made up on other commodities; in this case (a) by the high prices of manufactured goods sold to raw-materials-producing areas; (b) by the high prices of processed food sold back to points of origin; and (c) by the inordinately low wages paid to colonial workers.
In such ways, imperialist bribery creates a material contradiction in the "working class as a whole" between the metropolitan¬
* See Appendix I.
** See last quotation, Page 128, above.
— 145 —
and colonial sectors. Within colonial countries and within imperialist citadels themselves, ever-growing and complicated sub-contradictions result.
Thus, inside "improving" general statistics come about worsening conditions for the world's masses "overseas", i.e., in colonies. Despite (even there) some increment to a small group (slower to rise, and rising less, than that of the American Black) from urbanization; and, despite growing imperialist bribery of a new colonial "bourgeoisie", it is mass misery, their ten-fold super-exploitation, which supplies the "metropolitan factor" to the living standard of the Afro-American in that portion of his role where he acts as part of the West.
At the same time, if Afro-Americans also constitute a super-exploited internal reservoir for the U.S. ruling class* (bringing additional benefits to the white American labor aristocracy), then – below that international "sea" on which general Afro-American conditions "float", along with those of the rest of the metropolis where they live – conditions of Afro-America's masses must also be expected, as the system decays, to worsen, while their "bourgeoisie" improves both its size and its lot.
But both effects – in the metropolis and in colonies – show up in statistics as "overall improvement". As Lenin's words indicate, only one of these pictures is faithfully painted by figures covering these two areas. Here is a possible source of that fable which, in certain quarters of the world Left, persists in equating the sufferings of metropolitan and colonial masses.
If now, the tables of vital statistics** are again consulted, it will become evident that the reason for showing them, though admittedly they offer only the roughest idea of reality, is not sentimental: they will be shown to support certain political conclusions, provided their meaning is clear.
Such clarity, hopefully, can now be found at the point made¬
* This duality will be discussed in detail later.
** See Tables 10, 11 and 12, Pages 136, 138 and 139, above.
— 146 —
by Baran and Sweezy about price-fixing in metropoles.* If deductions in this Chapter are correct, then (Taking the international viewpoint) although monopoly does not have the power these authors postulate to prevent profit margins from being infringed on "at home", they do in actuality not only sustain but even increase (however imponderably) those profit margins when they grant super-wages to "their own" workers.
But this is so only because metropolitan workers are bribed into massive political acquiescence toward the status quo when their labor-power is purchased at such high prices, at least part of the "over-payment" being contained, as mentioned, in abnormally under-valued prices for food and other staples in industrialized areas.
But part of metropolitan super-wages represent values created by colonial workers both "at home" (where applicable) and abroad. This part contains a goodly portion of the true cost of producing colonial labor-power, which is thus bought at a price well below its value – and is nourished on necessaries paid for above their values.
As Marx has pointed out:
"A quick succession of unhealthy and short-lived generations will keep the labor market as well supplied as a series of vigorous and long-lived generations."12
So, in today's "Age of Escalation", Marx's law governing the price of labor-power12 still applies:
"... with labor, its MARKET PRICE will, in the long run, adapt itself to its VALUE; that, therefore, despite all the ups and downs, and do what he may, the working man will, on an average, only receive the value of his labor, which resolves into the value of his labouring power, which is determined by the value of the necessaries required for its maintenance and reproduction, which value of necessaries finally is regulated by the quantity of labor wanted to produce them."12
* See quotation, Page 126, above.
— 147 —
For the phrase, "in the long run", the expression, "over the system" could now be substituted of[r] added, as the above discussion makes plain. Marx's law is valid only for "the working class as a whole; and on this – system-wide -- basis, the profits-wages tug-of-war between ruling and exploited classes is fought out: Hence, Marx's "on an average" works itself out, among the real human beings concerned, though the two balancing factors just set forth: (a) the indefinitely prolonged "high living" in metropoles, directly at the expense, equally indefinitely prolonged,* of (b) the misery and sub-human living standards of colonial areas.
Here is how the Western labor aristocracy is enchained in imperialism's parasitism, losing sight thereby of its own condition as an exploited class in the world's "cities". Not only does that labor aristocracy not oppose robbery of its colonial class brothers; it actively supports, and grimly acts to preserve, such robbery whenever colonial revolt seems to threaten it, as we shall see.
In such actions, what is revealed is those "ties of blood" which connect metropolitan labor aristocracies inseparably, for as long as imperialism lasts, to its colonial class brothers.
These realities were only partly visible when Marx was writing. It remained for Lenin to illumine them. And, because contradictions of this type are insoluble under imperialism, which aggravates them instead, only the complete destruction of colonialism (and so, of imperialism) can eliminate THIS kind of "blood tie". But the exposure of the contradictions underlying such ties is a major ideological pre-condition for the necessary "elimination". No class analysis of imperialist society which ignores or conceals them can lead to successful revolution "in the West", and History bears this witness.
All these situations,, of course, contribute as end-product of bribery to the enormous practical, so-far-never-fully-measured material benefit of imperialist ruling circles, central beneficiaries of the whole parasitic set-up.
* The phrase, "indefinitely prolonged" should be interpreted to be co-extensive only with the existence of the imperialist system.
— 148 —
Today, international living standard differentials are usually huge, and widespread – yet, accepted as "part of life". This acceptance is abetted by certain earlier explanations of the differentials themselves, traceable to an original text by Karl Marx:
"Besides this mere physical element, the value of labor is in every country determined by a TRADITIONAL STANDARD OF LIFE ... the satisfaction of certain wants springing from the social conditions in which people are placed and reared up. The English standard of life may be reduced to the Irish standard ... the average wages in different agricultural districts of England still nowadays differ more or less according to the more or less favorable circumstances under which the districts have emerged from the state of serfdom.
"This historical or social element, entering into the value of labor, may be expanded, or contracted, or altogether extinguished, so that nothing remains but the PHYSICAL LIMIT."12
Today, hindsight suggests that this "historical" factor affecting the price of labor power, these "more or less favorable circumstances under which the districts have emerged from serfdom", may be expressed accumulation of the profits of black slavery and, later, of super-wages in a metropolis under hierarchical conditions like those described by Baran and Sweezy or Professor Andre Gunder Frank,* and the resultant development of a mode of life which eventually engenders an expanding labor aristocracy.
For, if different countries or "districts" tend to develop "a traditional factor" which influences the socially necessary price paid for labor-power there, why does this factor operate in such a way as forever to raise metropolitan, while forever causing colonial wages to fall? What sort of "tradition" is that, if not one the ruling classes have developed for their own self-preservation?
The examples of U.S. Afros and of South Africa, given above, offer refutation of such a factor: both black and white labor in both places live in the same territory and, in the U.S. at any rate, are employed in most cases by the same bosses.
These factors vividly imply that ALL "traditional" factors in¬
* See Notes 4, 9 and 10, Chapter XVI.
— 149 —
wages, resulting in significantly disproportionate living standards as between countries and/or "districts", merely embody that siphoning off of super-profits which turns so many workers in "usurer" nations into parasitic elements of a world working class. As a matter of fact, the same conclusion seems to be suggested in the second paragraph of Marx's own quotation above. And even if Marx's subject is something else rooted in the very foundations of the system, a "birth mark", as it were, it still remains true that this idea as it has been accepted is used to "justify" the unequal standards of living which have developed historically for those in different parts of the imperialist system.
It is precisely to prevent an outcome whereby "the English standard of life may be reduced to the Irish standard", that the labor aristocracy and its economic spokesmen – the trade unions – together with its political mouth-piece – the Social Democratic or "Labour" Parties – are struggling so "valiantly" on all colonial continents among those who have attained, or seem about to attain, independence, interfering in their affairs to the point even of financing and manning the counter-revolution (Guatemala and Guyana).
HERE, THEN, IS THE REAL SOURCE OF IMPERIALIST BRIBERY. TO SAY THAT IT COMES OUT OF SUPER-PROFITS IS FAR TOO ANTISEPTIC: THE BEDROCK ORIGIN OF IMPERIALIST BRIBERY IS THE CONTINUING, EVER-WORSENING MISERY OF COLONIAL PEOPLES.
— 150 —
XVIII
T H E M O D E R N L A B O R A R I S T O C R A C Y :
D E F I N I T I O N A N D S I Z E
Marxists readily and universally accepted Lenin's description of the labor aristocracy as "the labor lieutenants of the capitalist class inside the working class movement". Their activities left no alternative.
Yet, when studying that "aristocracy" in specific cases, all the European Marxists – Palmiro Togliatti of Italy, through Georgi Dimitroff of Bulgaria, to Palme Dutt of India and England remembered only part of the full story Lenin told:
That started, so to speak, with the following point:
"Engels publicly, in ... his preface to the second (1892) edition of his CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS IN ENGLAND ... speaks of the 'aristocracy of the working class,' of a 'privileged minority of the workers' as distinct from the 'broad masses of the workers'. 'A small, privileged sheltered minority' of the working class, he says, alone enjoyed 'lasting benefits' from the privileged position of England in 1848-1868, whereas 'the broad masses at best enjoyed only a shortlived improvement'."1
About two decades later, Palme Dutt was declaring that
"capitalist world monopoly gives the bourgeoisie superior resources and the possibility to ceate a privileged sector of a minority of workers."2
Thirty years later yet, the very same author was still saying:
"Lenin, in his analysis of the corrupting influence of imperialism in the Western labor movement, always distinguished between the upper strata and leadership of the labor movement, who were thus corrupted, and the masses. He never included in this analysis of imperialist corruption the Western working class as a whole."3
— 151 —
Of course not. Lenin wrote before 1924, when, even in the West, the corrupt section of the Western working class WAS still a minority.
In any case, other words of Lenin's had made it apparent that his quotation from Engels, above, about the "privileged minority" among the workers in industrialized nations was not necessarily intended as a hard-and-fast sole pronunciamento on the subject. For example:
"The capitalists ARE ABLE to spare a part (and no small part, at that!) of these super-profits to bribe THEIR workers, to create something like an alliance ... between the workers of the given nation and their capitalists AGAINST the other countries ...
"Formerly, the working class of ONE country could be bribed and corrupted for decades. At the present time this is improbably, perhaps even impossible. On the other hand, however, EVERY imperialist 'Great' Power can and does bribe SMALLER (compared with England in 1848-1868) strata of the 'labor aristocracy'. Formerly, a 'BOURGEOIS LABOR PARTY', to use Engels' remarkably profound expression, could be formed only in one country, because that country alone enjoyed a monopoly, and enjoyed it for a long period. Now the 'BOURGEOIS LABOR PARTY' IS INEVITABLE and typical for ALL imperialist countries."4
Lenin also said, to be sure, that
"We cannot – nor can anybody else – calculate exactly what portion of the proletariat is following and will follow the social-chauvinists and opportunists. This will only be revealed by the struggle, it will be definitely decided only by the socialist revolution."5
Of course, this remains true today. What will be sought here is an order of magnitude: is the labor aristocracy in the West still a minority or not? The answer to this question carries after itself serious political consequences, so it must be fully and honestly faced.
Yet, precisely this became the point upon which alone all Marxists agreed: that the labor aristocracy, the bribed in¬
— 152 —
metropolitan areas, constitute a minority of workers in capitalist countries forever and a day. On this basis, and without ever thereafter applying Lenin's criteria of the labor aristocracy to changing or changed conditions, Marxists in the 30s made their analyses and ensuing predictions about the future of Social Democracy – and hence, inevitably, of capitalism itself. They foretold "an end to the international split in the working class".
What kind of split? Lenin placed it into context in this way:
"The Roman proletarian lived at the expense of society. Modern society lives at the expense of the modern proletarian. Marx particularly emphasized this profound observation of Sismondi. Imperialism changes the situation somewhat. A privileged upper stratum of the proletariat in the imperialistic states lives partly at the expense* of the hundreds of millions of uncivilized people."5
Elsewhere, he added:
"... the culture of the advanced countries has been, and still is, the result of their being able to live at the expense of a thousand million oppressed people ... the capitalists of these countries obtain a great deal more in this way than they could obtain as profits by plundering the workers in their own countries."6
It was this split to which an "end was foretold by Marxist prognosticators of the 30s. Yet Lenin himself had specifically and emphatically denied the possibility of mending such a split for the duration of capitalism.7 History has backed Lenin, rather than these Western Marxists – for good reason: today, the world labor aristocracy has escalated on the flood time of gigantic super-profits until, speaking formally, it has become a majority of the working class in the U. S. A.,, and a significantly growing minority elsewhere in the West.
WHO, then, makes up this "privileged stratum" of the proletariat?
* See first quotation, Page 113 above – and Footnote.
— 153 —
On this: Lenin had the following to say:
"This stratum of bourgeoisified workers, or the 'labor aristocracy', who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook, is the principal SOCIAL (not military) PROP OF THE BOURGEOISIE. For they are the real AGENTS OF THE BOURGEOISIE IN THE WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT, the labor lieutenants of the capitalist class, real channels of reformism and chauvinism."8
These remarks he had elaborated* thus:
"The upper stratum furnishes the bulk of the membership of cooperatives, of trade unions, of sporting clubs, and of numerous religious sects. To this level is adapted the electoral system which ... is ... 'sufficiently restricted to exclude the lower stratum of the proletariat proper'."9
With these words, Lenin had provided a complete guide to examining labor aristocracy, formally, anywhere in any epoch.
So, if now his criteria are applied, they should reveal the present condition of that labor aristocracy which, elsewhere, Lenin characterized as "now ... typical for ALL imperialist countries.** This text will attempt such application, but mainly to the U. S. A., counting it as the chief world imperialist power and decisive monopoly center of our day, which should manifest all phenomena in their most advanced forms.
During this investigation, furthermore, the important thing is that wages are not only criterion of a labor aristocracy. As shown above, Lenin put first its mode of life, adding to that and to wages its "entire outlook". But all these boundaries must be explored before conclusions may be drawn.
Specific clues to the size of the labor aristocracy lie in Lenin's various detailed criteria: the electorate; memberships in specific organizations, the nature of which he elucidated. These will be applied first.
* See Chapter III, Page 27.
** First quotation, Page 151, above.
— 154 —
A. The U. S. electorate, including the portion excluded:
Table 1310
THE U.S. ELECTORATE
---------------------------------------
POPULATION
YEAR OF VOTING NUMBER %
AGE VOTING
---- ---------- ---------- -------
1920 54,512,000 26,748,000 49.1
1940 80,092,000 49,891,000 62.3
1960 108,122,000 68,836,000 63.7
---------------------------------------
Although the number of people voting and the population of voting age both rose with time, the percentage of one to the other proves that the numerical rise in number voting is not only an absolute but a relative one. If the labor aristocracy is, as Lenin held, found in the electorate, then this table suggests a continual, though lately slowing increase in the size of the U.S. labor aristocracy as decay rots the imperialist system which U.S. rulers head.
What about those excluded from the U.S. electoral system?
It is a well-known and now hotly-contested point of struggle that, in the U.S. South, only a minority vote. Not only are five million Negroes disfranchised; so are six million poor whites.
The following table illustrates the context surrounding this fact:
Table 1411
U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS OF 1960
-----------------------------------------------------
POPULATION
A R E A OF VOTING NUMBER %
AGE VOTING
----------------- ---------- ---------- -----
United States 108,122,000 68,836,000 63.7
Southern States 33,995,000 15,423,000 45.4
Mississippi only 1,171,000 298,000 25.4
-----------------------------------------------------
— 155 —
While Southern states furnished 31.4% of the U.S. electorate, they contained 47.2% of the disfranchised. Put another way: while 36.3% of all U.S. population of voting age did not vote in the 1960 elections, the comparable figure for the U.S. South was 54.6% (74.6% in Mississippi).
Do these disfranchised comprise, as Lenin claimed, "the lower stratum of the proletariat proper"? The following table suggests the answer:
Table 1512
AVERAGE PER CAPITA ANNUAL INCOME BY AREA (1959)
-----------------------------------------------
A R E A INCOME POPULATION
(Dollars) AFFECTED
----------------- --------- -----------
United States 2,166 177,100,000
Southern States 1,663 54,300,000
Mississippi only 1,162 2,162,000
Negroes, all U.S. 1,126 18,900,000
Negroes, South 798 11,700,000
-----------------------------------------------
Tables 13 and 14 together show that the U.S. electorate contains a substantial majority of U.S citizens over 21 years of age (of whom, it will be recalled, between two-thirds and three-fourths are workers*); while Table 15 adds the information that, of those excluded from the U.S. electorate, the vast proportionate majority are in the poorest sections of population. Whether or not such "poor" are in "the proletariat" will be discussed further later. Here it can be said that there is at very least a large over-lapping of the two.
Quite significantly, today, the excluded "lower stratum of the proletariat proper" constitutes, by any criterion,,a minority of total U.S. population.
* See Tables 8 and 9, Pages 120 and 122.
— 156 —
B. Memberships in organizations:
Trade Unions:
Table 1613
UNION MEMBERS AS PERCENT OF U.S. POPULATION
------------------------------------------------------------------
TOTAL U.S. % TOTAL
E V E N T YEAR NO. UNION WORKING WORKING
MEMBERS POPULATION ORGANIZED
-------------------- ---- ---------- ---------- ---------
Afl merges with CIO 1955 15,000,000 65,848,000 23.7
In March 1961 12,500,000 71,011,000 17.6
September 1966* 13,500,000* 75,000,000* 17.9
------------------------------------------------------------------
*Source: NEWSWEEK, Sept. 26, 1966: "The New Militancy of Labor"
------------------------------------------------------------------
The generally lower percentage and numbers through 1966 of total working population in unions indicates loss of militancy by the labor aristocracy as imperialism decays.* The .3% increase of organized in the 5 ½ years between March 1961 and September 1966 was due in large part (40% of it) to the entrance into unions of about 600,000 government employees:14 the labor aristocracy rises particularly in the non-productive working-class sectors.
In what might have been a commentary on the above table, Lenin had said:
"In the nineteenth century ... Marx and Engels did not ... forget first, that the trade union organizations directly embraced a MINORITY OF THE PROLETARIAT. In England then and in Germany now, not more than one-fifth of the proletariat was organized. It cannot be seriously believed that it is possible to organize the majority of the proletariat under capitalism."15
Cooperatives:
The following figures for 1959 encompass credit unions, voluntary group health plans, housing cooperatives, farmer retail supply, electric power and rural telephone consumers' co-ops: 24,382,000¬
* See Chapter XXI, below.
** Today, of the "labor force", in Sweden 45%; and in Britain, 40%, are organized.17
— 157 —
members. Farm marketing and supply co-ops: 7,559,000. Total cooperative members comprising mainly working people in the U.S. in 1959: 31,941,000.16
Sporting Clubs:
Complete information on this subject was not immediately available. However, the following table shows trends in the memberships of five sports in the U.S. – by no means the most popular in the land. The table does not help much in gauging the specific size of the overall labor aristocracy. What it does indicate, however, is that during the years 1950 to 1965 in the U. S. the trend in sports club memberships, said by Lenin to reflect a labor aristocracy, was upward, both numerically and percentage-wise.
Except for golf, the sports selected have a high working-class composition among participants; and even golf is making inroads among them since 1960, aided by factory- or Company-sponsored golf clubs, and the like.
Table 1718
MEMBERSHIPS OF FIVE U.S. SPORTS CLUBS
1950-1965
-------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 9 5 0 1 9 5 5 1 9 6 0 1 9 6 5
TEAM, CLUB MEMBERS -------------- -------------- -------------- --------------
1,000's % 1,000's % 1,000's % 1,000's %
------------------ ------- ----- ------- ----- ------- ----- ------- -----
AMATEUR SOFTBALLx 3,195 2.12 3,303 2.02 3,450 1.93 5,308 2.77
TENPIN BOWLING 1,937 1.28 2,511 1.55 5,538 3.10 8,010 4.17
DUCKPIN PLAYERS* 172 .12 279 .17 372 .21 485 .25
GOLFERS 3,215 2.13 3,500 2.15 4,400 2.48 7,750 4.04
BOAT MOTORS IN USE 2,811 1.86 4,210 2.53 5,800 3.26 6,643 3.47
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TOTALS, ABOVE SPORTS 11,330 7.54 13,803 8.42 19,560 10.98 28,196 14.70
===============================================================================
U.S. POPULATION 150,790 162,967 178,153 191,874
===============================================================================
xNumber teams multiplied by 9, plus number of youth participants (this would be
low, as no allowance is made for understudies on the team).
*Number teams multiplied by 6. Also low for same reason.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Religious Sects:
a) In 1957, when total U.S. population was 165,270,000, of the 119,333,000 persons over 14 years of age, all but 5,844,000 listed themselves as belonging to one of the three¬
— 158 —
major U.S. religions (Protestants, Catholics or Jews), including sub-sects, especially among Protestants.19
b) Of 314,345 churches reporting (said to include practically all U.S. churches), only 17,407 claimed memberships of less than 55,000. That is, of 112,227,000 persons reporting themselves church members in those years, only 2,529,000 (2.76%) belonged to a church with less than 55,000 members.20
c) By 1964, a well-known U.S. magazine was noting
"a 2% increase over the previous year in church membership, compared with an overall population increase of 1.5%."21
d) Historically, church membership figures offer the following picture:
Table 1822
HISTORICAL TREND OF U. S. CHURCH MEMBERSHIP
AS PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL POPULATION
(In Thousands)
-------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------
CHURCH TOTAL U.S.
YEAR MEMBERSHIP POPULATION %
------ ---------- ---------- -------
1926 54,576 117,399 46.6
1940 64,502 131,954 48.9
1950 86,830 151,234 57.5
1959 112,227 176,511 63.6
1964 123,307* 192,120x 64.4
-------------------------------------------
*TIME Magazine, January 14, 1966.
xSurvey of Current Business, Dec. 1965:
Page S-12; July 1, 1964, figure
-------------------------------------------
[— 159 —]
XIX
T H E M O D E R N L A B O R A R I S T O C R A C Y :
M O R E O F I T S S I Z E
If wages and wages alone were the criterion of a labor aristocracy, then today – more than 50 years after Lenin wrote his quoted words, with super-profits pyramided to unheard-of pinnacles – it could still be said that "only a minority" – though no longer "tiny" – of Western workers are bribed.
Table 19, Page 160, has been compiled from information covering 156 different industrial categories in non-agricultural enterprises counted by the U.S. government. Included along with trade and finance are service and government workers.
This table shows that in 1960 $100 per week or more was earned by 21.8% of all production workers and non-supervisory employees in U.S. non-agricultural industry in 47 of the total 156 examined by the U.S. In 1950, workers in those same industries had been 23.8% of the total, though the categories with the highest pay rates shifted with time.
The underscored industries (15 in all) comprise some 5,962 thousand workers who, in 1960, made $115 per week or more, for a yearly total of $6,000, assuming each worked the full year. These workers were 49.3% of all those in the 47 industries shown in Table 19, or 10.8% of the total number of workers in the 156 industries in the U.S. information from which this table is taken.
The minimum $6,000 per annum earned by this 10.8% was roughly equal to the amount calculated by various respectable government or bourgeois agencies in the U.S. in 1959 as "modest but adequate" for a family of four. Therefore, it approximates the minimum socially necessary cost of production for average U.S. labor power. Or, put another way, in order to qualify for this minimum category, a worker lucky enough to work the year's full 50 weeks with two of paid vacation would have to earn about¬
— 160 —
$115 per week. And wage-wise, only about 10.8% of U.S. production workers appeared, as late as 1960, to do so.
This has undoubtedly been the basis on which Western Marxists have kept insisting that "only a tiny minority" of metropolitan workers are bribed. But if, now, a study is made of historical trends in consumption, income distribution and the effects of militarism on the working class, it will become clearer why wages constitute only one portion of U.S. living conditions. The fact is that after 1960, in the wake of World War II, affluence in the West grew with noticeable speed.
Table 191
TOP WAGE EARNERS AMONG U. S. WORKERS
(Production Workers and Non-Supervisory Employees)*
(In Thousands)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1950 1960
------------------ ------------------
NUMBER AVERAGE NUMBER AVERAGE
EMPLOYED WEEKLY EMPLOYED WEEKLY
IN EARNINGS IN EARNINGS
I N D U S T R Y INDUSTRY (Dollars) INDUSTRY (Dollars)
--------------------------------------- -------- ------- -------- --------
Metal Mininge 97 65.58 92 111.49
Bituminous Coal Mininge 368 70.35 159 117.72
Petroluem & Natural Gas Production 254 73.69 288 114.49
Non-Building Construction 448c 73.46 553c 120.18
Building Construction 1,885c 73.73 2,219c 119.64
Ordnance & Accessories 30 64.79 150 107.71
Pulp, Paper, Paperboard Mills 246 65.06 275 105.03
Newspapers 280 80.00 330 111.43
Periodicals 58 74.18 64 116.43
Commercial Printing 190 72.34 231 105.72
Lithography 52 73.04 69 108.63
Miscellaneous Publishing 68x 109.05x 68 117.73
Industrial Chemicals (Inorganic) 73 67.89 105 115.37
Industrial Chemicals (Organic) 229 65.69 341 110.54
Soap, Cleaning, Polishing Products 51x 85.07x 53 111.64
Paints, Pigments, Fillers 69 64.80 77 100.86
Petroleum Refining 185 77.93 182 122.51
Coke, Coal Products 47x 86.31x 53 111.64
Tires & Inner Tubes 107 72.48 103 116.42
Flat Glass 33x 114.38x 32 127.66
Cement, Hydraulic 40 60.13 41 102.87
Blast Furnaces, Rolling Mills 611 67.46 569 116.66
Non-Ferrous Metals, Primary Smelting 48 63.71 57 109.23
Same: Rolling, Drawing, Alloying 104 66.75 113 110.03
Same: Foundries 77 67.65 62 101.30
Miscellaneous Primary Metal 147x 97.10x 150 111.48
Tin Cans, Tinware 57 60.90 60 114.54
Fabricated Structural Metal Products 211 63.29 289 100.12
Metal Stamping, Coating, Engraving 192 64.22 238 105.88
Engines, Turbine 66 69.43 102 112.19
Agricultural Machinery & Tractors 180 64.60 148 102.48
Construction & Mining Machinery 100 65.97 125 100.95
— 161 —
Metal-Working Machinery 198 71.54 256 116.75 Special-Industry Machinery 168 65.74 176 101.40 General Industrial Machinery 185 66.33 228 102.16 Office & Store Machinery 92 66.95 140 104.34 Motor Vehicles & MV Equipment 825 73.25 781 114.65 Aircraft & Parts 282 68.39 653 110.16 Ship-, Boat-Building & Repairing 85 63.28 140 105.57 Railroad Equipment 60 66.33 57 108.29 Laboratory, Scientific, etc., Equipment 64x 88.99x 66 114.68 Photographic Apparatus 53 65.59 67 107.83 Class I Railroads (Transportation) 1,221 64.14 781 108.42 Telegraphb a 44 64.14 37 100.73 Gas & Electric Utilities 526 66.60 579 110.43 Motion Picture Production 248x 93.78x 187 115.05 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- T O T A L S 10,654o 64.80+do 11,540o 108.00do -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TOTAL, all such workres, U.S. 44,738o 52,898o -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- % Top Earners to Total Industry 23.8 21.8 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Only industries where weekly earnings in 1960 average $100 or more. dAverage oTotal in Industry a1960 data not strictly comparable to 1950 x1959 figures bExcludes messengers cActual construction workers only +1950 figures only eProduction workers only ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Consider, first minimum income distribution:
Table 202
U.S. MINIMUM INCOME DISTRIBUTION
-------------------------------------
MINIMUM % OF
MEAN FAMILY U.S. FAMILIES
ANNUAL INCOME -------------------
(Dollars) 1961 1964
-------------