Divided World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism is a book published by Kersplebedeb as part of the Kalikot Book Series (and available from leftwingbooks.net) back in September of last year.
Divided World Divided Class charts the history of the ‘labour
aristocracy’ in the capitalist world system, from its roots in
colonialism to its birth and eventual maturation into a full-fledged
middle class in the age of imperialism. It argues that pervasive
national, racial and cultural chauvinism in the core capitalist
countries is not primarily attributable to ‘false class consciousness’,
ideological indoctrination or ignorance as much left and liberal
thinking assumes. Rather, these and related forms of bigotry are
concentrated expressions of the major social strata of the core
capitalist nations’ shared economic interest in the exploitation and
repression of dependent nations.
This kind of analysis strikes many of us as "obvious" on a gut level, however explaining how this occurs can seem tricky. That's one of the strengths of this book, which breaks down the process historically, but also in terms of economic data. Showing how the goods consumed by the metropolitan working class contain more hours of labour than First World consumers work, the shortfall being made up by the exploitation of workers in the Third World.
Of course, this flies against the prevalent dogma of broad sections of the left. Here in canada, for instance, the New Socialist Group is hostile to the idea and implications of studying the labor aristocracy. As such, it is not surprising that they published a review by Charlie Post, Workers in the Global North: A Labour Aristocracy?, which dismisses Cope's claims out of hand. Post's dismissal was then taken to task by MLM Mayhem, in a his The Theory of Labour Aristocracy and its Discontents: a meta-review of Cope's "Divided World Divided Class". (Note also that MLM Mayhem had reviewed DWDC previously, as had MIM(Prisons). Note also that Nikolai Brown of anti-imperialism.com also conducted a good interview with Cope about his book and his analysis.)
While the above debates can be of interest, by far the most thorough engagement with Cope's argument has come from Matthijs Krul on the excellent Notes and Commentaries blog. Rather than attempt to summarize Krul's appraisal and arguments, with permission i am reposting it below. Enjoy.
Divided World Divided Class Reviewed by Matthijs Krul
There are times when one encounters a book that is frustrating in a way
particular to the intellectual life: that is to say, when one encounters
a book that is precisely the book one wanted to write. Given the
relative obscurity of my interests, this does not happen often to me,
but Zak Cope’s
Divided World, Divided Class is precisely one of these. I
have harboured plans for the longer term to write a book on the history
of the labour aristocracy and its interrelationship with the rise of
social-democracy as the political expression of the imperialist rent
required for the maintenance of that class, with all the necessary
economic and historical detail; in fact, I almost undertook this as my
PhD subject. If I had done so, I might well have been embarrassed. Cope
has done just this, even up to much of the same bibliography I had had
in mind! Be that as it may; these reflections are not to make myself
seem important, but to underline the value I think this book has, being
the only one of its kind and a real historical contribution to the
critique of political economy under capitalism.
Cope’s book is a milestone in the current of Marxist political economy
known as “Third Worldism”, that is to say, in developing an honest and
realistic understanding based in Marxist value theory of what in the
wider literature is called the divergence question: the long-standing
division of the world between a small number of rich countries where
even the working class has incomes in the top 10-20% of the world
population, and a much larger number of poor countries lagging
tremendously behind in all aspects of development. As is well known,
this gap grows larger rather than smaller, and significantly from the
Marxist point of view, it has led for the first time in world history to
the majority of the world population actually being poor urban workers –
in these countries. There is among socialists little disagreement as to
the reality and significance of this fact. Nor of the corollary, the
enormous significance of finding the right economic theory to explain
and understand the mechanics of this divergence. Even the ‘well-meaning’
type of neoclassical economist would readily agree to this. As Robert
Lucas once famously noted:
Is there some action a government of India could take that would lead
the Indian economy to grow like Indonesia’s or Egypt’s? If so, what,
exactly? If not, what is it about the’ nature of India’ that makes it
so? The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these
are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard
to think about anything else. (1)
For this reason it is remarkable with how little seriousness and honesty
most Marxist economic theorists have been willing to analyze this
subject. There is indeed some excellent Marxist literature in
development economics, as exemplified by the works of Ben Fine, Patrick
Bond, and others. There is also a wider literature more rooted in
Marxisant versions of dependency theory, such as Samir Amin and Arghiri
Emmanuel. These already go much further in trying to analyze not just
the perpetuation of differences in wealth by immediate policies of
imperialism and expropriation, but to also understand the historical
reproduction of class relations corresponding to the phenomenon of
global divergence. For this reason, perhaps, those authors are already
somewhat marginal within Marxist economic theory. Generally it has been
very acceptable to the various Marxist parties and political currents to
expound upon the evils of imperialism and war and the poverty of the
Third World, but it has been much less acceptable to try and understand
those “mechanics” underlying this divergence, never mind the political
conclusions to be drawn from these facts themselves. This threatens the
political viewpoint of most intellectual Marxists, rooted in the
politics of students and workers in the First World countries; those
conclusions may not be compatible with that viewpoint, and it is hard to
ignore the feeling that at some level this is sensed by many Marxist
economists. Do not explore too far in this direction, they seem to say:
for there be dragons.
It is therefore to the immense credit of Zak Cope (this may or may not
be pseudonym) that he has done so regardless of the political
consequences or palatability of this research for the Marxist mainstream
in the West. Indeed, once one starts thinking about the perpetuation of
divergence, the ever-declining interest in revolution and support for a
meaningful socialism among First World workers, the rise of
social-democracy as the ‘consensus’ of the First World even up to the
neoliberal era, the logic of settler states and the inherent ‘workers’
chauvinism’ associated with them and the reproduction of similar ideas
among the working classes of Old Europe in response to immigration; in
short, all the unpleasant realities of Marxism today and one then
notices how all these are contrary to the expectations of mainstream
Marxist political thinking but entirely compatible with the Third
Worldist perspective, one has a very strong case to be explained indeed.
Cope does just this with great vigour and relentless scientific
seriousness. What J. Sakai had done for American settlerism in
Settlers,
this Cope does more extensively and more scientifically for the
position of the working class of the rich countries as a whole.
Cope’s case runs, briefly summarized, as follows. The imperialism of the
Western countries (broadly taken), enabled initially by the plunder and
exploitation of the Americas and continued by the increases in wealth,
power, and technology enabled by these, have over time created the
potential for systematic transfers of surplus value from the
‘imperialized’ ‘periphery’ to the imperialist ‘center’. These transfers
then not only allow a great blossoming of labor in the countries of the
center that is not immediately productive of capital, because it is
compensated for by the external value transfers, but more importantly it
permits the ruling classes of the center to buy off the exploited
working class of the center with the proceeds of this imperialist rent.
This labor aristocracy, so formed, then no longer fulfils the one
special role the working class has in Marx and Engels’ theory of
historical materialism: namely, to be unable to emancipate itself
without overthrowing the conditions it itself reproduces with its
labour.
In and of itself, this is not a new observation: it is the classic
expression of the theory of the labor aristocracy as found in Engels and
Lenin, among others. However, the real crux is that Cope then extends
this theory by demonstrating, as only the obscure “H.W. Edwards”
had done before him, that the natural ideology of the labor aristocracy is
social-democracy, and that social-democracy is the means by which the
imperialist rent is shared with a wider and wider section of the working
class of the center.
This First World generalized labor aristocracy
thereby becomes almost entirely non-exploited in net terms, according to
Marx’s theory of value, because the value of the surplus value produced
by them is (more than) compensated for in the process of distribution
through world trade. That is to say, the imperialist and neo-imperialist
unequal exchange between the First World – defined by Cope as roughly
the OECD and the non-OECD, excl. Eastern Europe – and the Third
constitutes
such a vast transfer of surplus value in the sphere of
distribution that it permits, through social-democracy, an almost total
compensation for the domestic exploitation of the First World working
class.
Cope goes into considerable historical and economic detail to support
this position. Almost always such a suggestion is immediately dismissed
by doctrinaire mainstream Marxists as being impossible, or done away
with by a kneejerk reference to the idea that the most productive
laborers must be the most exploited. But not only does the theory of
labor aristocracy have a considerable Marxist pedigree, as mentioned
above, but it is vital to note that Marx himself emphasized that ‘world
trade’ itself functions as an exogenous factor of distribution in the
model of capitalist exploitation presented in
Capital. Already early on,
Marx criticizes the inability of Proudhon to take the
global division
of labor,
as produced by world trade, into account, much like many
Marxists today:
Mr Proudhon is so far from the truth that he neglects to do what even
profane economists do. In discussing the division of labour, he feels no
need to refer to the world market. Well! Must not the division of
labour in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when there were as yet
no colonies, when America was still non-existent for Europe, and when
Eastern Asia existed only through the mediation of Constantinople, have
been utterly different from the division of labour in the seventeenth
century, when colonies were already developed?
And that is not all. Is the whole internal organisation of nations, are
their international relations, anything but the expression of a given
division of labour? And must they not change as the division of labour
changes? (2)
In
Capital, too, the modification in the domain of distribution
(affecting market prices) is recognized, for example by the classic case
of differences in productivity:
But the law of value in its international application is yet more
modified by the fact that on the world-market the more productive
national labour reckons also as the more intense, so long as the more
productive nation is not compelled by competition to lower the selling
price of its commodities to the level of their value. (3)
Cope describes at length the formation of various labor aristocracies of
settler kind, such as those of the American migrants in the United
States (over and against the ‘racially inferior’ populations), of the
English settlers in Ireland, and so forth. He describes how communism is
subverted among these workers into a chauvinistic form, seeking the
benefits of the capitalist system but shared with and among the labor
aristocracy itself, not globally or with the lower ranks of the
segmented labor market, and how social-democracy is the natural
expression of this phenomenon, and fascism the crisis expression of it.
(Which, incidentally, ought to do away with the Trotskyist canard about
the supposedly evident ridiculousness of the theory of ‘social fascism’
proposed against social-democracy by the Comintern; in fact, this is
precisely what social-democracy often is, seen from this global vantage
point.) But, even all this accepted, Marx proposes above the usual
mainstream Marxist explanation, that is, that differences in
productivity and intensity of labour account for the very systematic and
extremely widely shared wage differentials between the First World
working class and the Third World working class. Merely pointing at
imperialism and the remarkable ‘coincidence’ of this differential with
the main imperialist countries or their primary trading partners is not
enough, nor is historically describing the First World workers’
systematic rejection of revolutionary possibilities in favor of
social-democracy, from which they benefit but nobody else. One must
demonstrate the economic basis in unequal exchange and in direct
exploitation of the Third World of this wage differential.
Cope then comes to the major economic contribution of his book, which is
to do just that. Using the widely available statistics on working
hours, male workers’ wages in OECD and non-OECD countries, the estimates
of value transfer through undervaluation of Third World currencies
compiled by Gernot Köhler, the estimates of value-added in production
between the First World and the Third, and so forth, Cope makes a clear
and convincing case suggesting strongly, although with some room for
error, that it is not at all possible to account for the differentiation
by productivity differentials only, and in fact that the overwhelming
majority of the wage differential is composed of vast transfers of value
from the developing countries to the developed ones, distributed there
to the Western working class. The means of such transfer are unequal
exchange in commodity trade (i.e. deteriorating terms of trade), unequal
exchange in currency exchange rates, the substantial and systematic
trade deficits of the First World (especially the US), FDI profit
repatriation, and so forth.
The author has undertaken extensive statistical analysis of publicly
available data from the ILO, World Bank, UN, OECD etc., and therefore
cannot be accused of coming up with mere speculative estimates or
handwaving it away, as is usually done by mainstream Marxists on this
issue. Some may object that one cannot simply measure prices of
production adjusted in the market and then conclude value transfers from
these, but this misses the point: it is precisely the case that
bourgeois measurements such as GDP, total factor productivity and so
forth are merely based on existing prices, and therefore do not – as is
the point of Marxist value theory – explain the causes and social
origins of particular prices prevailing rather than others. Measures
such as volume of trade within the First World versus between the First
and the Third (the latter being much smaller at present prices) will not
do as a common counterargument – they constitute a
petitio principii,
because it is precisely the low prices and low ‘value’ of the Third
World production relative to the First World production that is
reflected in such statistics, and that needs explaining in the first
place.
It is tragic to note how little attention to these facts has been paid
by most Marxist thinkers of the past decades, despite their enormous
political and economic consequences. Perhaps this is because it is not
very convenient to the outlook and strategy of many Marxist political
organizations to acknowledge that the Western working class currently is
not revolutionary, and in fact
cannot be revolutionary without majorly
violating the expectations of Marx and Engels’ theory of historical
materialism. This would perhaps explain the systematic failure of many
Marxist parties to analyze why they do not and cannot become ‘mass
parties’ in the West, and why the ‘mass parties’ that did exist in the
West did not make revolution at any point. (Although in being more
serious about supporting the so-called ‘really existing socialisms’
elsewhere in the world, the Moscow line parties and ‘Eurocommunists’
were arguably still more useful than the current leading groups.)
However, after the publication of this book the ball is in the court of
the mainstream in Marxist political economy to do something with this,
at the least to analyze it statistically, come up with new theories and
new scientific research in this direction, and to not flinch from the
conclusions these may offer. Socialism must be scientific or it is
nothing, and there can be no partiality towards preconceived notions in
science.
All this being said, I have some minor quibbles with the book, which
should not detract from the great appreciation I have for its urgency
and importance. At times, I fear – like many Third Worldist Marxists –
Cope bends the stick somewhat too far. While he appears not to be wholly
consistent in this, he suggests at some points in the historical
section of the narrative that the labour aristocracy would have been
relatively significant on the world stage for Britain and similar
countries as early as the 18th century, due to the benefits of
imperialism. This seems to me unlikely for two reasons: firstly, because
social-democracy is the vehicle for the actual mechanics of ‘dividing
the spoils’, and no such system was to be found anywhere but in the
racial economy of settler states (including plantation Ireland).
Secondly, because we know from refined economic history writing of the
last two to three decades that the true ‘modern’ divergence between
Europe and the rest of the world
begins roughly between 1750-1830,
depending on estimates, and reaches its complete form only with the
conquest of India and its use as a cudgel to beat China with.
It seems therefore for a process of generalized labor aristocratization,
so to speak, to occur, one would have to estimate this no earlier than
the late 19th century – after the Berlin Congress, the complete
colonization of the world by Europe, and the rise of social-democracy.
It is important here for Cope and sympathizers not to bend the stick too
far: imperialism as such is as old as the age of the first empires in
Mesopotamia, and the mere fact of its presence even on a large scale
does not thereby create the divergence nor generate a labor aristocracy.
Ancient Rome had a labor aristocracy paid out of imperialist rent,
among the plebeians of the capital city, but even this class was not
numerous or politically significant enough to systematically alter the
class relations underpinning ancient society, and it faded into
nothingness.
It is also important to distinguish
the particular political economy of settler societies from the larger set of labor aristocratic countries,
and to sharpen these distinctions analytically. Cope does not fully do
so. It is also for this reason that I disagree somewhat with his reading
of Nazi Germany as a form of labor aristocratic imperialism. While Cope
mentions the work of Adam Tooze in his footnotes, he does not seem to
understand the significance of his work as counteracting Götz Aly’s
claims of widespread German benefits from the very start of the Nazi
empire. Of course, in Nazi Germany the programme of rearmament and
re-industrialization virtually eliminated unemployment and inflation,
and this made the fascist rule possible for most of the 1930s. But its
basis, as described by Tooze as well as Sohn-Rethel, was not in a labor
aristocracy, but in the expansionist sectors of industry, in the Junker
class, and in the small and medium farmers, all classes greatly
disadvantaged by the relative underdevelopment of Germany among the
greater powers. A relative underdevelopment is not a basis for a classic
story of labor aristocracy, but the contrary.
In my own
three extensive articles outlining a preliminary Marxist
political economy of Nazi Germany, I emphasize that the fascist policy
of Nazi Germany was not primarily one of a ‘regular’,
pseudo-social-democratic labor aristocracy in Germany, but an attempt at
creating such a class; and not just that, but in the specific form of a
settler society. The programme of colonization and destruction of
Eastern Europe for ‘Lebensraum’ is, as Cope rightly notes, simply an
application in Europe of the principles of colonial imperialism Europe
undertook elsewhere; but he misses the significance of its settler form,
which means a necessarily racial policy, a programme of genocide, and
so forth. Cope seems to suggest that the Bismarck-Kautsky era had
already created a greater labor aristocracy and that otherwise the
presence of benefits from war plunder (including of Jewish assets),
holidays and so forth pacified the working class of Germany.
I am not so convinced; precisely German relative underdevelopment
prevented the full rise of such a labor aristocracy earlier on (hence
the serious size and potential of the KPD, the various revolutionary
moments, etc.), and the Nazi programme to create one was
truncated by
the war. It seems it was mainly a combination of repression,
conscription, and the benefits of being employed in positions superior
to the POWs and ‘undesirables’ that made large-scale working class
resistance to the Nazis unfeasible until late in the war, but this only
shows a settler society that failed to form, not one in real existence.
More research is certainly needed into a serious Marxist explanation of
this phenomenon, beyond opportunistic use of Götz Aly alone. The rise in
the standard of living of Germans was in this way purely contingent on
the first few war years and failed to materialize in a substantive way;
in fact the rather austere ‘ordoliberalism’ of the Erhard period did
more for post-fascist West German living standards, thanks to American
value transfers(!), than the Nazi period ever did. It does, of course,
all the more underline the great significance of destroying this attempt
at creating the ultimate, perfect settler society in the heart of the
imperialist center itself, an ultra-empire; and therefore the
correctness of the Communist policy of ‘suspending the class struggle’
in favor of the anti-fascist effort.
Finally, Cope does not wholly avoid the common notion among Third
Worldist Marxist writers (for example in
LLCO) that the economic
analysis as such necessarily generates a set of strategic political
concerns. While it is certainly the case that these conclusions have
major consequences for the evaluation of the possibility of revolution
in Western countries, it does not follow, for example, that one must put
an undifferentiated ‘anti-imperialism’ on the agenda as the only or
main concern of all Marxist activity. Not that this is wrong per se, but
one simply cannot make the leap from historical and political-economic
analysis to strategy in this way, nor so close off the debate about the
possible avenues of further political understanding. Just as the
Trotskyists have a habit of reading clichéd conclusions about ‘socialism
from below’ based on the experience of the Russian Revolution into
every historical or economic analysis, so the Third Worldists tend to
read into every event the necessity for Western Marxists to verbally or
politically prop up any figure or group in the Third World that presents
itself as ‘anti-imperialist’, however implausible; and this I do not
think needs follow from accepting the conclusions of this critique of
political economy.
These minor points being made, I cannot recommend this book strongly
enough to all open-minded Marxists and people interested in development
questions. Occasionally the prose is somewhat rote, but the points are
extremely important and made with all scientific seriousness and are the
fruit of an impressive amount of research and statistical calculation.
In the current period, the capitalist classes of the First World seem
inclined to go more and more against the historic compromise of
social-democracy, and the social-democracy is therefore declining in
historical vigour proportionally to the shift of capitalist production
from the First to the Third World in search of lower wages and higher
profits, pressured by ever-accumulating private debt. This
death agony of social-democracy seems to me
only understandable on the basis of a
Third Worldist analysis as outlined in this book, if one does not want
to fall back into unsatisfying and intellectually lazy clichés about
“false consciousness”, “hegemony”, media dominance and whatnot to
explain the current global political constellation. Nepal makes
revolution while no British communist group has more than 3000 members,
China and India ‘develop’ along capitalist lines
because the Western
working class has lived at their expense – that is the reality we must
explain today.
Divided Word, Divided Class is neither more nor less than
an application to our time of the analysis Friedrich Engels made of the
British working class in 1883, the year of Marx’s death:
Do not on any account whatever let yourself be deluded into thinking
there is a real proletarian movement going on here. I know Liebknecht
tries to delude himself and all the world about this, but it is not the
case. The elements at present active may become important since they
have accepted our theoretical programme and so acquired a basis, but
only if a spontaneous movement breaks out here among the workers and
they succeed in getting control of it. Till then they will remain
individual minds, with a hotch-potch of confused sects, remnants of the
great movement of the ‘forties, standing behind them and nothing more.
And–apart from the unexpected–a really general workers’ movement will
only come into existence here when the workers are made to feel the fact
that England’s world monopoly is broken.
Participation in the domination of the world market was and is the basis
of the political nullity of the English workers. The tail of the
bourgeoisie in the economic exploitation of this monopoly but
nevertheless sharing in its advantages, politically they are naturally
the tail of the “great Liberal Party,” which for its part pays them
small attentions, recognises trade unions and strikes as legitimate
factors, has relinquished the fight for an unlimited working day and has
given the mass of better placed workers the vote. But once America and
the united competition of the other industrial countries have made a
decent breach in this monopoly (and in iron this is coming rapidly, in
cotton unfortunately not as yet) you will see something here. (4)
This world monopoly is now that of ‘the West’ so-called; and every
day it is more broken, while every day the Western working class fights
to maintain it. What will we do?
Notes
1) Robert E Lucas Jr., “On the Mechanics of Economic Development”, in:
Journal of Monetary Economics 22 (1988), p. 3-42.
http://www.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/docs/darcillon-thibault/lucasmechanicseconomicgrowth.pdf
2) Karl Marx, Letter to P.V. Annenkov (Dec. 28, 1846).
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1846/letters/46_12_28.htm
3) Marx,
Capital, Vol. 1, Ch. 22
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch22.htm
4) Friedrich Engels, Letter to August Bebel (Aug. 30, 1883).
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/letters/83_08_30.htm
