Workers of the World must be prepared to overthrow the West

I've had several family members work in the fruit picking industry here in Australia. This includes some aunties and grandpa on my mum's side, and uncle on my dad's side. Sometimes for visitors, they are working in the grey economy, which is the norm amongst them, for picking fruit in farms, cleaning dishes in local restaurants or cleaning houses and hotels – where their visas didn't allow for formal work and they got very low pay, but it was higher than the $5 USD a day that they get back in Viet Nam.

There also many Vietnamese women including my mum for one, who are working to sew clothes. My mum has sewed clothes for brands here as well as for ambulance uniforms – I remember a paramedic visiting one of my aunty's places and talking about logo and other requirements. I remember when I was young, I came across the local Leader papers (now Murdoch-owned) that mentioned how these Vietnamese women sewing clothes were often paid below minimum wage in our area.

So meanwhile this is the norm for my community, in all of the Westerners I have met, I have never met one who aspired to be a fruit picker or to sew clothes — and it actually says a lot about how this society is organised. It's a fundamentally universally ingrained inception that Westerners expect the rest of the world to do the dirty work for them (collect fruit, make the fabric and clothes, clean the hotels and the houses, sweat in the factories to produce phones and consoles en masse) while they aspire for lofty ambitions (become a gourmet chef, become a fashion designer, become a architect, become a world-famous entrepreneur or game developer). Even as a casual job for some cash here and there as a student, or a fallback job when you can't find anything else, the Westerners here see working in supermarkets and retail as their kind of "lowest tier" — so not picking the fruit or making the clothes, but organising them for sale for other people, a tier above.

It still remains that the global majority is labouring to serve the wealth and luxury of a global minority, let alone all the elites who have much more power than the rest of the world combined.

So what are the possible approaches?

For one angle, colonialism is still very much intact and alive, if more subtle, as Michael Parenti describes in Against Empire:

Neoimperialism: Skimming the Cream

Sometimes imperial domination is explained as arising from an innate desire for domination and expansion, a ”territorial imperative.” In fact, territorial imperialism is no longer the prevailing mode. Compared to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the European powers carved up the world among themselves, today there is almost no colonial dominion left. Colonel Blimp is dead and buried, replaced by men in business suits. Rather than being directly colonized by the imperial power, the weaker countries have been granted the trappings of sovereignty while Western finance capital retains control of the lion's share of their profitable resources. This relationship has gone under various names: “informal empire,” “colonialism without colonies,” “neocolonialism,” and “neoimperialism.”

U.S. political and business leaders were among the earliest practitioners of this new kind of empire, most notably in Cuba at the beginning of the twentieth century. Having forcibly wrested the island from Spain in the war of 1898, they eventually gave Cuba its formal independence. The Cubans now had their own government, constitution, flag, currency, and security force. But major foreign policy decisions remained in U.S. hands as did the island's wealth, including its sugar, tobacco, and tourist industries, and major imports and exports.

Historically U.S. capitalist interests have been less interested in acquiring more colonies than in acquiring more wealth, preferring to make off with the treasure of other nations without bothering to own and administer the nations themselves. Under neoimperialism, the flag stays home, while the dollar goes everywhere – frequently assisted by the sword.

After World War II, European powers like Britain and France adopted a strategy of neoimperialism. Financially depleted by years of warfare, and facing intensified popular resistance from within the Third World itself, they reluctantly decided that indirect economic hegemony was less costly and politically more expedient than outright colonial rule. They discovered that the removal of a conspiuously intrusive colonial rule made it more difficult for nationalist elements within the previously colonized countries to mobilize anti-imperialist sentiments.

Though the newly established government might be far from completely independent, it usually enjoyed more legitimacy in the eyes of its populace than a colonial administration controlled by the imperial power. Furthermore, under neoimperialism the native government takes up the costs of administering the country while the imperialist interests are free to concentrate on accumulating capital, which is all they really want to do.
After years of colonialism, the Third World country finds it extremely difficult to extricate itself from the unequal relationship with its former colonizer and impossible to depart from the global capitalist sphere. Those countries that try to make a break are subjected to punishing economic and military treatment by one or another major power, nowadays usually the United States.

The leaders of the new nations may voice revolutionary slogans, yet they find themselves locked into the global capitalist orbit, cooperating perforce with the First World nations for investment, trade, and aid. So we witnessed the curious phenomenon of leaders of newly independent Third World nations denouncing imperialism as the source of their countries' ills, while dissidents in these countries denounce these same leaders as collaborators of imperialism.

In many instances a comprador class emerged or was installed as a first condition for independence. A comprador class is one that cooperates in turning its own country into a client state for foreign interests. A client state is one that is open to investments on terms that are decidedly favorable to the foreign investors. In a client state, corporate investors enjoy direct subsidies and land grants, access to raw materials and cheap labor, light or nonexistent taxes, few effective labor unions, no minimum wage or child labor or occupational safety laws, and no consumer or environmental protections to speak of. The protective laws that do exist go largely unenforced.

In all, the Third World is something of a capitalist paradise, offering life as it was in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century, with a rate of profit vastly higher than what might be earned today in a country with strong economic regulations. The comprador class is well recompensed for its cooperation. Its leaders enjoy opportunities to line their pockets with the foreign aid sent by the U.S. government. Stability is assured with the establishment of security forces, armed and trained by the United States in the latest technologies of terror and repression.

Still, neoimperialism carries risks. The achievement of de jure independence eventually fosters expectations of de facto independence. The forms of self rule incite a desire for the fruits of self rule. Sometimes a national leader emerges who is a patriot and reformer rather than a comprador collaborator. Therefore, the changeover from colonialism to neocolonialism is not without problems for the imperialists and represents a net gain for popular forces in the world.

[Source: Against Empire by Michael Parenti]

For another angle, this divide is no different to the bourgeoisie and worker divide. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote precisely about this in the 19th century in the Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural […] Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

[Source: The Communist Manifesto - Bourgeois and Proletarians]

The average price of wage labour is the minimum wage, i.e., the quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence.

Especially in the Third World, Marxist and anti-colonial revolutions have swept through many individual countries. The spirit of revolution was very much in the air in the 20th century.

As they say, revolution is the only solution. These revolutions have proved to be the only effective means of combatting colonisers. Even in the Sahel in Africa today for example, anti-colonial revolutions are still happening whereby new leaders are cheered by the community and threaten the colonisers like France by refusing to export the precious materials that power their wealth and luxury (like uranium for electricity in the case of Niger) while people in their own community don't have access to those resources like electricity.

For us, there may be the need for a concerted, global, unified struggle for freedom and self-determination — a real wide-reaching socialist and anti-colonial struggle rooted in the same elements as all those preceding revolutions, motivated by the compassion and love for our people as all those revolutions were.

This is what is needed to free us from the militarism and imperialism and neo-colonialism and exploitation from the global Western bourgeois class and their elites who create the conditions for the bourgeoisie to thrive while doing what the elites want.

Today, there are much more muted analyses amongst Western dissidents politely talking about how Russia and China are "paving the way for a multipolar order" and "challenging" the primary Western imperial power, the United States. How extremely muted it seems to consider, when remembering that these two countries went through very major Marxist revolutions in the 20th century — with the 1917 Russian Revolution and the following civil war, as well as the revolution in China in 1949 — and how both the Soviet Union defeated the fascist, imperialist and genocidal Nazi Germany and how China fought a militaristic Japan in the 1940s. Perhaps they are more muted now after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the case of Russia, and chastised by the Cultural Revolution in the case of China.

I want to take us beyond that.

Westerners like to think that they are all-important. But their society would crumble if there was no one to harvest the fruit, no one to manufacture all the goods in factories, no one to make the fabric and sew the clothes, no one to dig the uranium and cobalt.

If we, the rest of the world, are willing to strike, to seize the means of production and to forge revolutions to expel exploiters, we can start working for our own liberation and quality of life instead of for the colonisers and imperialists.

As Michael Parenti also observes in Against Empire, talking about the rest of the world, they need to be given back their land and labor so that they might work for themselves and grow food for their own consumption.

This “development theory” or “modernization theory,” as it is sometimes called, bears little relation to reality. What has emerged in the Third World is an intensely exploitive form of dependent capitalism. Economic conditions have worsened drastically with the growth of transnational corporate investment. The problem is not poor lands or unproductive populations but foreign exploitation and class inequality. Investors go into a country not to uplift it but to enrich themselves. People in these countries do not need to be taught how to farm. They need the land and the implements to farm. They do not need to be taught how to fish. They need the boats and the nets and access to shore frontage, bays, and oceans. They need industrial plants to cease dumping toxic effusions into the waters. They do not need to be convinced that they should use hygienic standards. They do not need a Peace Corps volunteer to tell them to boil their water, especially when they cannot afford fuel or have no access to firewood. They need the conditions that will allow them to have clean drinking water and clean clothes and homes. They do not need advice about balanced diets from North Americans. They usually know what foods best serve their nutritional requirements. They need to be given back their land and labor so that they might work for themselves and grow food for their own consumption.

The legacy of imperial domination is not only misery and strife, but an economic structure dominated by a network of international corporations which themselves are beholden to parent companies based in North America, Europe, and Japan. If there is any harmonization or integration, it occurs among the global investor classes, not among the indigenous economies of these countries. Third World economies remain fragmented and unintegrated within themselves and among one another, both in the flow of capital and goods and in technology and organization. In sum, what we have is a world economy that has little to do with the economic needs of the world's people.

The downfall of the West, the end of its never-ending misery and war inflicted upon the rest of the world, will not come easily. We must fight for it.