This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
Maoist Internationalist Movement


The subjective factor:

MIM's Wang Ming phase of seven years

Putting concrete analysis into motion

To celebrate the 23rd anniversary of MIM's formal birth, and to continue the fight against Wang Ming dogmatism, we ask our youth today to go out and look at wages data for 2006. We will ask the question that MIM asked itself in the early 1980s but we will do it with 2006 numbers. Investigators may directly confirm the wages of U.$. workers and also surmise what Third World wages must be from some of the commodity prices they see at WalMart for example.

In September 2006, Nestle was dealing with a class struggle in Fiji. All workers there make less than $2.02 an hour, no matter what machinery or training they have.(1) Meanwhile, in Santa Cruz, California, the starting wage of a sweeper is $7.25 plus some minor city benefits.(2)

In fact, 140 local laws for cities scattered around the united $tates forbid wages below $10 an hour plus benefits or $11.10 an hour without benefits.(3) So the most skilled food-worker in Nestle's Fiji plants is sure to make less than $2.02 an hour, but the most unskilled worker in 140 places in the united $tates is bound to make at least $11.10 an hour--a factor of more than five difference. In fact, most workers in Fiji Nestle's plant make less than $1.59 an hour.

Rent in Fiji is lower than the united $tates, but food costs are much higher, with $4 or $5 for a head of lettuce common.(4) According to the U.$. State Department, Suva, Fiji ends up exactly the same cost of living as Washington, DC.(5)

So with a little looking around at statistics we get the picture: the most skilled machine worker at Nestle's in Fiji will receive one-quarter or one-fifth what a U.$. floor or street sweeper makes. The lowest possible pay goes to U.$. minimum wage workers who will earn $5.15 an hour, which is still 2.5 times more than that of any skilled worker at Nestle's in Fiji.

This sort of information can be found in an hour of digging. We should do much more than an hour, but the point is that we should organize ourselves to do the digging. MIM chose this example to prove two things--that the gap in wages is not caused by skill levels or cost of living differences. In fact, Washington DC is one place with a "living wage" law itself and it has the same cost of living as Suva, Fiji. So a sweeper in Washington DC will be over five times better off than the most skilled worker at Nestle's in Fiji.

Arghiri Emmanuel knew this was true before MIM was born. He put the numbers in the face of the international communist movement and started drawing the dialectical connections based on an understanding of Marx's theories of surplus- value as the background. He asked the question, how many Third World workers being super-exploited would have to exist before we could say that there is too much surplus-value to account for? When would we realize that there is so much surplus-value to account for that we have to count Amerikan so-called workers as petty-bourgeoisie?

If there were just a few workers in the condition of Fiji's workers, then the surplus-value that comes from them can be accounted for. The trouble is that Fiji's workers are actually above-average for the Third World for pay. There are so many of these super-exploited Third World workers, that it becomes impossible to account for all the surplus-value generated except by counting the top 10% of the world as parasites--including the rich country so-called workers.

By law, the DC sweeper with some connection to government contracts, which of course this being the seat of government and DC's budget coming from the federal government such contracts are common, the DC sweeper must make more in a single day than Prakash Chauhan, 32 who is a sweeper in India will make in a month.(6) Chauhan says he is one of the better-paid sweepers too, at $88 a month. He is a dalit who lost his job in an accounting firm despite having a commerce degree.

In fact, many internationalists will accept MIM's argument on a relative basis alone. While most social-democrats in the imperialist countries spend their time talking to people on the difference in assets between someone in the world's top 10th percentile economically and the top 6th, MIM is pitting the whole top 10 or 15 percent against the rest of the world, in the interests of the international proletariat. Sadly, only a few organizations that constitute the proletarian camp are doing this in the imperialist countries. In this sense, we are still in a stage where the class struggle is just getting started in imperialist countries, unless we count intra-bourgeois struggle as class struggle.

MIM's Wang Ming problem at the beginning

MIM founding comrades spent about seven years in a Wang Ming phase of not knowing the concrete realities of the united $tates adequately to be decisive revolutionaries. Wang Ming was the embodiment for Mao of someone who could not do concrete analysis of China. As a result of MIM's experience, we have collected up much concrete information and analysis concerning the united $tates so that subsequent comrades should not undergo the same problem. Globally we see signs of many imperialist country comrades re-evaluating their class structures, but failing to commit, so we need to address the Wang Ming problem.

Subjectively, MIM knew it was in a Wang Ming or petty-bourgeois vacillation phase relatively early on. MIM comrades studied the people, carried out demonstrations and teach-ins, waded through economic statistics and read Marx and Monthly Review for theory.

Likewise, on gender questions, MIM knew that what it found in real life did not really correspond to what Marx and Engels had in mind for wimmin's liberation activism. At the same time, MIM knew it had no concrete analysis for that and had to settle for the most radical sections of liberal-radicalism on gender questions until several years after becoming Maoists.

A combination of reading economic statistics, checking in real life, thoroughly studying the theory of surplus-value in Capital and other writings of Marx left MIM comrades in a vacillating position made most acute by reading Arghiri Emmanuel on international statistics regarding wages. We tended to believe that elder comrades would show us concretely how Amerikan workers were exploited, so we bit our tongues, an example of too much deference to our elders and not enough concrete investigation. The MIM comrades came off as for seeing the principal contradiction between oppressed nations and imperialism instead of between U.S. imperialism and Soviet social-imperialism. MIM also sounded to some as saying youth is a class. These sorts of accusations had merit, basically because MIM vacillated on the u.$. class structure; even though our critics never pinned it down that way. MIM vacillated, because its critics did not have a thoroughly internationalist view of the class structure, and MIM wrongly refused to believe that.

Subjectively, to us at MIM, it seemed that we just did not have in hand what we needed. It was not until we obtained the work of J. Sakai Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat and H.W. Edwards's book that we finally tipped into one direction and stopped vacillating. What we knew from the math, surplus-value theory and statistics angle took concrete political form in the history that Sakai and Edwards told. At the same time, Catharine MacKinnon was steadily improving her theoretical output. Finally it was possible for MIM to pour forth concrete analysis itself. We should mark the MIM Theory on Sakai and Edwards as the turning point where we can say that afterwards, MIM was going to be decisively on the side of the exploited instead of the exploiter.

One difference between MIM and others in the proletarian camp is that MIM never held nationality as fundamental more than class. From the beginning, MIM's doubts about the Euro-Amerikan proletariat stemmed from Marx's theory of surplus-value and the kinds of calculations that Arghiri Emmanuel demanded of us in the concrete world. If one persyn can live on wages one-tenth of that of another, is it not inevitable that the richer of the two will effectively be able to hire the labor of the other? Actually no, but it depends on how many of the lower-paid workers there are.

What we have to say to comrades around the world today looking at this concrete data is not to stay in dogmatist land forever. Do not vacillate forever. MIM took seven years, but we imagine that you have less excuse, because we gathered up what you need to know to decide this question decisively. We know you are out there considering siding with the exploited and you can be found in the strangest places, even in the leadership of neo-Trotskyist parties.

There will be those who continue to defend a myth created for the benefit of exploiters, but it does not mean they can refute what MIM said. Most people do not live in a world of scientific endeavor. They will never consider for example that they have to prove the existence of the surplus-value they say exists when they say even white so-called workers are exploited. The critics of MIM say so for feel-good reasons, not because they connect together the implications of their own statements the way Marx connected together wages, prices and profits. You will search endlessly and in vain among 90% of MIM's critics for any concrete estimate of surplus-value in the united $tates or any other imperialist country. The reason is that MIM's critics do not function at that level. All that they know about wages is that they want higher ones--oink, oink.

In MIM's case, we always thought someone older would come along and bail us out of the difficulties we saw in theory and fact for the white proletariat myth. That is idealism. If it seems to you that MIM is utterly destroying the arguments of the white proletariat, do not wait for an equivalent idealist bail out. It's not coming.

We cannot give the enemy breathing room while we wait for some idealist bail out. The Comintern did not bail out the comrades in Peru when the state captured Gonzalo. Nor is anyone going to bail us out if we wait while analyzing to death the obvious sell-out of Maoism in Iran today.

Theory and defeating Wang Ming dogmatism

There were many similarities between mostly agrarian Russia in 1917 and mostly agrarian China at the same time, so Wang Ming's copying of the Soviet Union especially while leaders of the Soviet Union were available to discuss science with him was not the worst possible thing we can imagine. Even so, Mao said Wang Ming caused the Chinese Communist Party the most damage, because he did not have a firm grip on concrete conditions.

Far worse is to take what we learned from an agrarian country and apply it to an industrial and post-industrial society. Then even worse is to take such an agrarian society with live communist leaders and compare it to an imperialist country today when those leaders like Mao are not around anymore to argue with. This range of dogmatism is even several qualitative levels worse than Wang Ming's.

MIM is able to look at concrete data on wages and know from reading Marx's theories of surplus-value what the potential problems in analysis are. With a background in theory, MIM was set to vacillate from the beginning in the 1980s once confronted with the facts of that day.

Now MIM is going to teach a little theory and method in connection to one of the most important sets of statistics available today, China's export trade. First, we should return to Fiji. There because the cost of living in Suva is the same as Washington DC, it is easy to imagine that skilled workers make less than one- fifth of what sweepers make in DC. What that Fiji work is really worth or would be worth in the united $tates is the question that comes to mind, especially since the u.$. market is still the choice market for the whole world.

When we realize that the very minimum for sweepers in DC businesses doing business with the government is $11.10 an hour, we call that factor of five or more difference something that MIM handles with a "monetization parameter." That number in your head when you think, "Geez, a minimum of five times more pay for less skilled work," that is a parameter. In actual fact, when we consider that most Fiji workers are under $1.59 an hour at Nestle's and we consider that sweepers get promotions and won't all be at the absolute minimum in DC businesses doing business with the government, the parameter is really more like eight when we compare unskilled workers with unskilled workers. If unskilled Fiji workers average $1.20 an hour and unskilled DC workers made $12.00 an hour then we would call the parameter 10 and MIM has called it a "monetization parameter." When we start to consider Prakesh Chauhan's class, a monetization parameter of 20 or 30 suggests itself.

The whole point to Marx about why bourgeois economics is inaccurate is that surplus-value is hidden. It is labor that occurs without being accounted for by the bourgeoisie or its hired statisticians and economists.

MIM says that the reason the united $tates can run a trade deficit seemingly forever is that surplus-value makes u.$. currency more valuable than it would be without surplus-value that no one is counting. The dollar has not gone into a terrible tailspin of inflation, and devaluation, because Third World countries still deliver increasing surplus-value to u.$. imperialism. Thus it is possible to buy ever better things with U.$. dollars despite the increasing quantity of U.$. dollars floating around the world outside u.$. borders. As comrade Oz says, right now, some Asian countries are keeping the U.$. dollars in the bolthole, because those capitalists cannot think of anything creative to do with them, but they would dump them out of the bolthole into another currency quick if they knew for sure that the U.$. dollar was going to face major inflation and if they knew it was politically and legally OK for China and like countries to dump the dollar.

In response to this, MIM's critics often go to look at trade statistics and say, "those trade figures are just too low to make a difference. It can't be that flow of goods causing the well-being of the u.$. economy and keeping U.$. white collar workers afloat like you say MIM." In response, MIM says it looks that way because our critics did not use a monetization parameter. They are guilty of what Marx called commodity fetishism. We must always remember not to leave our analysis in terms of something just on paper.

Parameters and margins

When it comes to baseball, hockey and basketball, Amerikans can be some amazing number-crunchers. The persyn who second-guesses a professional sports team manager is the most likely to be a real number-cruncher. When should the pitcher leave the game, who should be up at bat--it turns out that managers consider several factors in these questions and keep data on all of them--grassy field or fake, night time or day time, home game or away, left-handed or right-handed and so on. It is really no less complicated than anything MIM asks its members to do. The difference of course is class. MIM asks for calculations about exploitation while Monday-morning quarterbacks are just reviewing a game in their minds.

The vanguard party is composed of the equivalent of sports team managers. MIM generally does not ask for people to do anything more complicated than what sports team managers do but we do ask that it be done for the vanguard party. People who have no determination to study the quantitative aspect, people who would decide whether Roger Clemens should continue pitching in the 8th inning after 120 pitches without reference to previous statistics--we can't use those people in imperialist country vanguard parties.

From decades of talking with imperialist country people, MIM knows that they actually do keep parameters in their mind on the question of class. When they hear that Third World wages average 50 cents an hour, and compare those wages with their own, there are two likely parameters that come to mind-- relative prices and productivity.

If you believe your wages are 16 times higher than similar workers in another country, it won't matter in the least if you also imagine that prices are 16 times lower in the other country. Ordinary people have experience with inflation and might just imagine that inflation carried on and on in his country but not another.

In the most extreme situation we have data for, if one believes that prices in the u$a are double those of the Philippines, that would be pretty accurate. So fantasizing things are half price in the Philippines is an example of something we are going to call a parameter. The parameter is half.

Whatever is leftover in the problem after considering prices, the Amerikan is likely to think is a question of "productivity," usually just a question of laziness. So after fantasizing that Filipinos have prices half our own, we then fantasize that Filipinos go to work and just stand around, say six out of eight hours, while we Amerikans work the whole eight hours. So here the parameter is 25%.

People adjust these in their minds but generally they do not work hard on getting the data, unlike in professional sports where the adjusted-daily stats are on the pages of the newspaper every day. The funny thing is that cross- national inflation and productivity statistics are not in the newspaper each day, but still people form hardened chauvinist judgments about other countries.

Marxists before MIM addressed this political problem by talking about parameters in given situations. In another article, MIM showed how to use the concept of "margin" in China-U.$. trade. MIM wanted to demonstrate something, so we said, 1)OK, we won't contest that the Chinese government fixed the exchange rate between U.$. and Chinese currencies, so it's fixed; 2) OK, we will not even bother discussing a change in export volumes in dollars from China to the United $tates. Yet still, even with currencies fixed and budgets remaining the same there is nothing preventing the Chinese from selling 100 innertubes for $100 one year and only 50 innertubes for $100 another year. Exchange rates and export volumes would be the same, but the number of inner-tubes would have declined by 50%. The physical difference in exports delivered represents a change in what Marx called surplus labor behind surplus-value.

This example is important in demonstrating margins and dialectical connections. When we consider that the united $tates is going to have inflation if physical surplus-labor delivered to the united $tates declines, then we can also predict a decline of the U.$. exchange rate against all non-Chinese exchange rates as a result of the resulting inflation. U.$-China exchange rates may not change; dollar volumes of trade may not change and still something in China may affect the exchange rate between the U.$. dollar and the Japanese yen. Conversely, if China kept delivering more and more surplus-labor to the United $tates, in exchange for the same dollar sum, the United $tates would tend to find the U.$. dollar actually rise against other currencies from doing this importation. This is counter-intuitive but true. By holding the exchange rate fixed and the import budget in dollars fixed, we can look at something else that changed, and we say it is at the margin of these other two factors we fixed.

Even if Chinese go to the united $tates to actually spend the dollars they have accumulated, there may not be much inflation. People who come to the united $tates will be paying retail prices, unless of course they start an import-export business in great volume--something figures show does not happen much in trade with China from the united $tates. The money that others spend in the united $tates supports a legion of service workers in retail for example. The ratio of physical commodities taken away relative to advertising, guarding, lawyering and sales work put into a commodity might be small.

Monetization parameter

"Hey, MIM, I don't like that idea where the currency exchange rate stays the same and the import budget stays the same but the physical commodities double or quintuple arbitrarily. Let's account for that physical difference." Anyone who thought that knows why we take that physical difference or change and monetize it correctly in order to speak intelligently about it.

In general, people already have what commoners call "inflation" parameters in their mind in addition to "effort" parameters. People have these in their heads when they think about Third World wages. They're not very accurate because these parameters are built to be self-comforting for the petty-bourgeoisie.

From MIM's example of a fixed exchange rate and even fixed import dollar volume, our reader should start to have a disturbing question. Where does it stop? How do we know how much of the stuff in the u.$. economy is Chinese?

It could be 50 innertubes for $100, then 100 innertubes, then 200 etc. Yet in many regards it looks like the trade statistics did not change, and they did not. What changed was how much Chinese workers were being exploited to benefit a U.$-China trade. Readers of Marx's book Capital will recognize that either profits went down for Chinese capitalists or s/v increased. In the long run, profits cannot decrease without a business going out of business, so an increase in s/v--an increase in the rate of exploitation is the more likely explanation for a big increase in innertubes delivered for the same money.

At the same time, when our own imperialist country factories make inner tubes, it might always be 50 for $100. It does not matter whether it is steel or inner tubes or something else, and the most difficult situation occurs for commodities that have further use before being sold at the retail level to individual customers.

Now if we know that ordinary imperialist country innertubes go 50 for $100 and now the Chinese are sending 500 for $100, a monetization parameter suggests itself--10. We start to think, "gee, we need to pin this down somehow. Otherwise, every year it could be something different for the same exact exchange rate and dollar volume in trade."

We start to say to ourselves, "OK that Chinese regime does not allow wages to increase or exchange rates to change. So for scientific purposes I'm going to use a monetization parameter of 10 to deal with their exports. I'm not going to accept these figures that use units that are in paper, such as currency."

It's actually just the reverse of the inflation parameter that most imperialist country people have in their minds. What they should be thinking is that those wild inflation numbers they are dreaming of actually apply to wholesale industrial and raw materials questions. Prices are 10 times lower, just not for the individual worker's commodities. They are 10 times lower for people who buy things in the Third World for business export purposes. The full price shows up in the united $tates, the final market of favor for everyone.

What the bourgeois theorists say is that at the retail level, we have increasingly one globalized world market. Prices are becoming more similar across countries.

Now just imagine if that were not true and a combination of common exploiter fantasies were true. Suppose that prices in another country were really 10 times lower both at the wholesale and retail levels relevant to workers' consumption. So then it would appear that wages could be 10 times higher in the imperialist country and there would be no real difference in workers' wages. Yet this is forgetting something. Now imperialists are going to come and buy wholesale from the country where goods are 10 times cheaper. Those goods will be sold in countries where workers are paid 10 times as much. The reverse will not occur very often. The people in the Third World are not going to go the imperialist country, buy stuff that is 10 times more expensive and bring it home for sale. Even when the First World has something the Third World does not, it will not happen very often relatively speaking that the Third World will be able to make a profit from such trade. What do we suppose will happen then?

Before there was trade, things looked kind of equal. Wages and prices were just 10 times higher in one country than another. After trade, capitalists can increase profits and/or decrease prices while wages remain 10 times higher. What it means is that surplus-value flows in a vicious cycle. It accumulates where there is capital and capital comes from surplus-value. High wage countries forever have the advantage in being able to conceal the most surplus-value stolen from the low-wage countries. High wages stem from high overall capital to labor ratios, the accumulation of surplus-value that allows higher wages to be paid.

The role of the reserve army of unemployed

The bourgeois economists say this won't happen all this way explained above, because prices at the wholesale level in the Third World will not stay 10 times cheaper. Imperialists will outbid each other and prices will go up even at the raw materials level in the Third World.

MIM says the bourgeois outlook is not true, both for reasons of politics and because the imperialists are bidding in a situation of unemployment. Why would the imperialists bid each other up in the Third World, when they can just go set up another factory and hire some unemployed people for an average of 50 cents an hour? Obviously they are not going to bid too high. So we need to know the overall labor conditions of the Third World.

This is also where we need to understand two separate questions, the price of labor-power and production of surplus-value. The peasant farmer and even garbage-dump picker are often not counted in questions of global exploitation by our critics, because they do not see the dialectical connection.

What matters to Marxists is the overall class situation. The price of labor- power in the Third World is low thanks to peasant farmers, garbage-dump pickers and others eking out a living. They produce very cheap means of staying alive.

In some factories in the Third World, the capital to labor ratio is the same as in the imperialist countries. This leaves out that the overall capital to labor ratio is not the same for the class as a whole, and that will affect the price of labor-power.

Again, it is wrong to say that the unemployed of the world have no role in the production of surplus-value. Quite the contrary, without lifting a finger, the unemployed are in fact determining how much surplus-value the capitalists extract elsewhere. Wages cannot rise in the Third World to imperialist country levels, because there is not enough capital chasing down unemployed workers yet. We can argue about the reasons for that, but it is observable that there is a vast supply of unemployed workers. The terrible paradox is that capital piles up in the imperialist countries while Third World workers remain unemployed.

At IRTR the question has arisen, why Marx speaks of exploited unproductive sector workers. It has to do with two great but separate trains of thought in Marx. One is that what matters is how much it costs on the market to replace a worker. That will determine the wage. Two is that productive sector workers have to work for capital and produce commodities. These two questions generally pull in the same direction as it exists factually, but not always.

So the thing that people are looking at is very low-paid unproductive sector workers. They can be paid less than the price of their labor-power and still produce no surplus-value.

Here the problem is one of method at the margin. One factor pulls in one direction while another pulls in another. Marx called these workers "exploited." Why? Because despite having two distinct factors described, Marx did not want to create four classes from that. No matter how many possible combinations there might be in Marx's economic analysis, in the end people had to go in one of two places--exploited or exploiter. So even though they do not work, the unemployed are counted as "exploited" by Marx before today's imperialist welfare system was in place.

This has to do with Marx's dialectical method, a method in total opposition to Liberalism. Marx's method looked at the overall situation and social connections. He did not say, "well there is a totally distinct class which produces no surplus-value and yet receives wages below the price of reproducing their labor-power." If we start thinking this way, we will end up in individualism. There is always one more factor one could look at and create more than two groups--the exploiter and exploited. In deciding whether to count a worker in one of two places--exploiter or exploited--Marx said people of low enough wages should be counted as exploited. Whether unemployed, other lumpen or low-paid unproductive sector workers, the question is the impact on the price of labor- power. When it comes time to deciding where surplus-value can be dumped off, we can see why MIM's analysis of unproductive sector people in the rich countries is important. We cannot account for much surplus-value redistribution by going to the relatively small and poorly paid unproductive sector in the Third World. However, we can find tons of surplus-value that needs to be accounted for in the Western unproductive sector so-called working-class.

The labor aristocracy has traditionally had great hostility to the unemployed, First Nation people and lowest paid of unproductive sector workers in the Third World. MIM handles these groups in a similar way. True, poorly paid unproductive sector workers in the Third World absorb some surplus-value, but their existence like that of the unemployed depresses wages and allows greater extraction of surplus-value elsewhere. The same cannot be said of the petty-bourgeoisie in the unproductive sector of imperialism. The imperialist country unproductive sector absorbs surplus-value, and helps realize surplus-value but it is in fact a limit on the expansion of capital. Its existence tends to eliminate the possibilities of surplus-value extraction. Meanwhile, a poorly paid unproductive sector worker can easily switch to a poorly paid productive sector worker and contribute net surplus-value to the capitalist system.

So when it comes to the unemployed, the lumpen, the garbage-dump pickers and the poorly paid sections of agrarian workers, in many cases we are talking about one united phenomenon. These groups of people assist in the reproduction of labor- power and depressing its price to the satisfaction of the exploiters. Marx, Lenin and Mao counted the unemployed, lumpen etc. in the exploited camp despite the fact that they generally are not productive sector workers. In contrast, those with education beyond a certain point, such as doctors and lawyers, they absorb surplus-value and require capital just to obtain their educations. They are surplus-value absorbers of the petty-bourgeoisie, people with their own means of production, in this case education obtained at the expense of the productive sector housing, clothing and feeding the petty-bourgeoisie.

Notes:
1. http://asianfoodworker.net/fiji/060905nestle.htm
2. http://www.beachboardwalk.com/02_seasonal.html
3. http://www.livingwagecampaign.org/index.php?id=1958
4. http://www.escapeartist.com/efam6/living_in_Fiji.html
5. http://www.state.gov/m/a/als/qtrpt/2003/26018.htm
6. http://www.agrnews.org/issues/299/labor.html#2