The liberal wing of our ruling class has a plan to save the empire: bribe the strata of urban workers who aspire to become professional-managerial class. This plan is being advanced in the context of an escalating inter-capitalist conflict, where the Trump wing of capital instead seeks to fully destroy what remains of the well-paid workers. In cultural terms, the right-wing has won out; since October 7 caused our ruling class to escalate its war on the pro-Palestine movement, Silicon Valley has gone in a conservative direction, and this shift has reoriented all areas of bourgeois society. The far right still needs the “progressive” politicians to advance its repressive goals, though, as is always the case when fascists go on the advance.
So as our ruling class grows ever-more aggressive, we’re not going to see a purge of fascism’s left wing, like happened in Nazi Germany; we’re going to see the social democrats play a critical role in the effort to ramp up Washington’s wars, and to crush the American people’s resistance against these wars. We may even see a “progressive” be appointed as the next president, though this depends on what will come from the power struggle inside the Democratic Party. What we’re seeing the “democratic socialists” do so far is enact reforms that help the urban workers, while making sure that none of these policies take away from the police state or the national security state.
This is the principle that Mamdani has demonstrated by implementing paid family leave, yet not doing anything to disrupt the NYPD. And it’s what we can expect from the other socdems who will come into office off of the momentum that Mamdani has generated: efforts at improving the lives of certain workers, namely the ones in the metropole who won’t get targeted by our intensifying state violence.
When I say that these urban workers are who the liberal wing seeks to bribe, I am not advocating for working-class organizers to give up on winning urban workers to the revolutionary cause. If our class enemies aim to win these workers over through bribes, this means it’s still an open question as to how many of them will take the right side in the class war. Studying the scheme to bribe these urban workers is useful because it lets us understand how we can thwart this attempt at taking away potential allies of ours.
Like I said, this particular current of workers share a desire to gain the same status as the PMC. This impulse to join with the bribed strata is apparent in the crude craft unionism of the Starbucks workplace benefit movement, whose end goal is effectively to create a new mass current of workers which receive comfortable shares of imperial super-profits. It’s significant how during the 2020s, the industry where such a movement has been allowed to gain traction is an industry whose employees are not part of the proper “working class,” i.e. the workers whose labor produces new material gains for society. Construction and factory workers were allowed to have such a movement amid the post-New Deal era, but it’s dubious whether they’ll ever again become treated as well as this by the ruling class. It’s mainly or even exclusively the PMC-adjacent metropolitan workers who the liberal wing wants to elevate.
This is what it looks like for the bourgeoisie to cultivate a pro-imperialist, pro-fascist social base when capital at the same time seeks to keep degrowing the economy. When financial monopolist imperialism was still a young force, and the capitalists were waging their first world war, Lenin pointed to the labor aristocracy as a critical tool in creating support for this project. He observed how in the last generation, this strata had reached a status that caused Engels to recognize its central role in fortifying capital:
On December 7, 1889, Engels wrote to Sorge: "The most repulsive thing here [in England] is the bourgeois 'respectability', which has grown deep into the bones of the workers.... Even Tom Mann, whom I regard as the best of the lot, is fond of mentioning that he will be lunching with the Lord Mayor. If one compares this with the French, one realises, what a revolution is good for, after all." In a letter, dated April 19, 1890: "But under the surface the movement [of the working class in England] is going on, is embracing ever wider sections and mostly just among the hitherto stagnant lowest [Engels's italics] strata. The day is no longer far off when this mass will suddenly find itself, when it will dawn upon it that it itself is this colossal mass in motion." On March 4, 1891: "The failure of the collapsed Dockers' Union; the 'old' conservative trade unions, rich and therefore cowardly, remain lone on the field...." September 14, 1891: at the Newcastle Trade Union Congress the old unionists, opponents of the eight-hour day, were defeated "and the bourgeois papers recognise the defeat of the bourgeois labour party" (Engels's italics throughout)....
That these ideas, which were repeated by Engels over the course of decades, were so expressed by him publicly, in the press, is proved by his preface to the second edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1892. Here he speaks of an "aristocracy among the working class", of a "privileged minority of the workers", in contradistinction to the "great mass of working people". "A small, privileged, protected minority" of the working class alone was "permanently benefited" by the privileged position of England in 1848–68, whereas "the great bulk of them experienced at best but a temporary improvement"
Both Engels and Lenin were speaking prior to the rise of the service economy, when the capitalists deindustrialized the imperial extractive countries and made service work the replacement for the lost jobs. This shift changed the labor aristocracy’s character in many ways. The number of labor aristocrats has shrunk since mid-century, in accordance with the effects from neoliberal austerity; yet the bourgeoisiefied culture that this class represents has remained prevalent. And one of the ways that our ruling class aims to reinforce this culture is by appealing to the bourgeois sentiments among the urban service workers.
In its effort to expand the pro-imperial base, the liberal wing is looking to lift up the metropolitans who overlap with the PMC in their attitudes towards imperialist exploitation, despite not being PMC themselves. An example is the baristas who don’t view their present work as just being a transient gig, like the bulk of U.S. workers today view their jobs; but who view their jobs as essential “proletarian” labor, and want to make barista work well-paid in the same way that PMC roles are. Which translates into a layer of aspiring labor aristocrats who will back Washington’s Hitlerite wars more vociferously than anyone else.
This is how crude “Marxism” can be used to ideologically assist a fascist regime. Mussolini used Marxian theories to craft the first narrative concept of fascism, in which syndicalist violence was fused with the bourgeoisie’s fighting wing. The modern equivalents of Mussolini are the actors who prop up imperialism, while claiming to come from a “socialist” position. Among all the enemies that communists and our popular allies face, among the most dangerous are the ones who claim to be serving the proletarian cause, but really believe in cultivating an aristocratic “proletariat” that gets its wealth from genocidal extractivism. My warning here is not about the urban workers in general, but about this particular layer of “Marxists” who’ve come to a synthesis with Hitlerism, and who will increasingly assault the anti-imperialist cause as our class conflict escalates.
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