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


1998 MIM Congress Session II
On the internal class structures of the internal semi-colonies




On the internal class structures of the internal semi-colonies
by MC5, February 1998
edited by MC45, March 1999

I. History of the BPP view 
II. Class structure and exploitation    
a. Genocide, its meaning for class structure and reparations
b. Relative deprivation
c. Current surplus-value

I. History of Black Panther Party view of class structure

In the four years preceding the formation of the Black Panthers, Huey
Newton and Bobby Seale had the chance to run into activists of the
Progressive Labor Party. The Progressive Labor Party and Robert Williams
were conduits to Mao of information about the U$A.

In his famous statement of 1963 on the oppression of Black people, Mao
countered those nationalists who would say that white workers were the
enemy. We have to recall at that moment the Nation of Islam was dominating
headlines and Malcolm X was seen as the leader of radical Blacks. He would
occasionally have something quotable to say about "white devils." Mao's
statement offset the reformism of Martin Luther King and the
non-materialism of the Nation of Islam. Huey Newton recalls that even he
was not able to summon enough hatred of the Euro-Amerikans to be totally
acceptable to the non-Marxist nationalism of the time; although he
demonstrated in practice the physical courage to go into shoot-outs with
police. 

Unfortunately, given the climate of the times, Mao veered away from a
serious analysis of the class structure of the United $tates and promoted
a stereotypical view. Some Chinese documents on the national question
within U.S. borders at the time do not even mention super-profits and thus
prepare reconciliation with social-democracy in order to fight Islam, a
most definitely incorrect strategy.

Nonetheless, throughout the 1960s, the Peking Review of the Chinese
Communist Party was admitting that comrades in the United $tates "were
beginning" to study Mao Zedong Thought. The first Chinese references to
the Black Panthers were of this nature. Revisionists of the Wang Ming
variety promote the idea that Mao settled the issue of the class
structure, when the contrary is the truth: the comrades in the United
$tates had only just started studying Marxist-Leninist science and Mao
Zedong Thought. To think that they had come up with a definitive analysis
of the class structure would be like saying the Chinese Revolution was
carried out in Moscow classrooms. Those who attack us with such general
statements by Mao and no analysis of U.$. conditions do not understand the
first thing about Maoism. We advise them to read the Selected Works of Mao
from the beginning.

The first analyses of the U.$. class structure in the post-McCarthy period
omitted Lenin's concept of labor aristocracy. There are no writings from
the CP-USA or the PLP that show any awareness of the original Lenin and
COMINTERN pronouncements on the imperialist country class structures. What
the Progressive Labor Party said was right out of a chapter of Das
Kapital--completely removed from U.$. conditions. As we explain elsewhere
in a review of their 1968 Boston Magazine, PLP performed the magic act of
disappearing the petty-bourgeoisie in order to smuggle it into the
proletarian camp as Lenin spent most of World War I warning against.

At first the Black Panthers accepted the proclamations from Mao in 1963
and 1968 on Black people and re-distributed them in the hundreds of
thousands by reprinting them in their newspaper. Newton accepted the view
in 1968 that 98 percent of Black people were have-nots, even higher than
the 94 percent the APSP says today. As time went on the Black Panther
Party started showing awareness of the concept of the labor aristocracy,
middle classes generally and the situation in Algeria. In comments on the
U.S. Constitution Huey Newton referred to settlers.

By 1970, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver were both putting forward
something a little different than what would be found in standard Maoist
circles. Influenced by Fanon, they took up Lenin and wrote off the
economic demands of the middle-classes as imperialist parasitism. Then
they said what was left was the lumpenproletariat. This represented the
correct recognition that salary and wage-receiving people within U$
borders are labor-aristocracy or higher, unless they are undocumented.

So at first the Black Panthers were well served by reprinting what Mao
said with the feedback of Robert Williams and the Progressive Labor Party.
As time went on, the Black Panthers took Mao seriously and devised an
analysis specific to their conditions. That analysis shows that there is a
bridge from Lenin to Fanon and Mao, if conditions are such that there is
no industrial proletariat.

As we have explained in MIM Theory 10  and elsewhere, Lenin
provided the concept that entire nations might be bought off with
surplus-value sucked out of the colonies. Newton and Cleaver accepted this
idea and argued that the proletariat ascended to the middle-classes. Only
the lumpenproletariat that does not get paid might be considered
otherwise.

Huey Newton said, "In this country, 1970, the Black Panther Party issued a
document. Our Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver, who now is in
Algeria, wrote a pamphlet called 'On the Ideology of the Black Panther
Party.' In that work Eldridge Cleaver stated that neither the proletarians
nor the industrial workers carry the potentialities for revolution in this
country at this time. He claimed that the left wing of the proletarians,
the lumpenproletarians, have that revolutionary potential, and in fact,
acting as the vanguard, they would carry the people of the world to the
final climax of the transformation of society. It has been stated by some
people, by some parties, by some organizations, by the Progressive Labor
Party, that revolution is impossible. How can the lumpenproletarians carry
out a successful socialist transformation when they are only a
minority?"(1)

Answering his own question, Huey Newton did not say that the oppressed
nations (a concept he was moving out of) were majority lumpen but he said
that the lumpenproletariat was going to become the majority of society.
"Technology is developing at such a rapid rate that automation will
progress. . . If the ruling circle remains in power it seems to me that
capitalists will continue to develop their technological machinery because
they are not interested in the people. Therefore, I expect from them the
logic that they have always followed: to make as much money as possible,
and pay the people as little as possible."(2)

Furthermore, "If revolution does not occur almost immediately, and I say
almost immediately because technology is making leaps (it made a leap all
the way to the moon), and if the ruling circle remains in power the
proletarian working class will definitely be on the decline because they
will be unemployables and therefore swell the ranks of the lumpens, who
are the present unemployables. Every worker is in jeopardy because of the
ruling circle, which is why we say that the lumpenproletarians have the
potential for revolution, will probably carry out the revolution, and in
the near future will be the popular majority. Of course, I would not like
to see more of my people unemployed or become unemployables, but being
objective, because we're dialectical materialists, we must acknowledge the
facts."(3) 

According to Newton, "How can we say that we have accomplished revolution
if we redistribute the wealth just to the people here in North America
when the ruling circle itself is guilty . . . they have taken away the
goods of the people of the world, transported them to America and used
them as their very own."(4) This was an excellent point, one that the APSP
missed as MIM showed in our review of that organization in ITAL MT8 END.
Newton understood what was wrong with narrow nationalism, to such an
extent that he preferred to chuck the whole concept of nation.

In a related point very similar to MIM line in  MT7 , Newton points
out that a country that exploits the whole world will have to be corrected
by what MIM calls a joint dictatorship of the proletariat of the oppressed
nations. Here is how Newton put it: "The bourgeoisie that is based here in
America has an international character because it exploits the world, it
controls the wealth of the world; it has stolen, usurped, the wealth of
the people of the world, including the people who are in the Black colony
here in America and who were stolen from Africa. We feel that the only way
that we can combat an international enemy is through an international
strategy of unity of all exploited people who will overthrow the
international bourgeoisie and replace it with a dictatorship of the
proletariat, the workers of the world."(5)

Newton did not call the present U$ majority revolutionary. The Black
Panthers said it would take the descent into the lumpen from the
petty-bourgeoisie to create a revolutionary majority. MIM has not put
forward the line of an emerging lumpen majority. However, we must admit
certain facts pointing in this direction. One is that since the time
Newton wrote, a prison craze did start, and middle-aged and younger people
alive today are on pace to live to see the majority of the oppressed
nations people thrown in prison if present trends continue in the U$A.
There is also some evidence of this craze spreading to Europe; although
Europe starts considerably "behind," which is one situation in which
"behind" means ahead. Secondly, others have pointed to the development of
technology that makes it possible for the ruling class to single-handedly
oppress the vast majority of people with persynalized weapons of
militarism and with technology that makes labor obsolete. Some argue that
the labor theory of value is now obsolete, because we are headed for a
future where there is no labor or only very small quantities.

We believe that the materialism displayed by Newton is leagues ahead of
that seen in the labor aristocracy and Kautskyite circles criticizing MIM.
We would like to keep his theory of the lumpenproletariat in mind. He also
adds to it in the book ITAL In Search of Common Ground, END where he
explains why the concept of inter-communalism is necessary. It turns out
that just as the PLP break with Mao that resulted in so much splintering
since that time was inspired by Vietnam, Huey Newton's eclectic break with
Mao was also inspired by Vietnam. Neither PLP nor the BPP liked what Mao
was doing about Vietnam -- criticizing revisionism in private and
upholding united front in public. Huey Newton relates that he was writing
a letter to the Vietnamese Communist Party to criticize it for
nationalism, but he wrote the letter and tossed and turned in his sleep.
When he awoke he decided he felt too guilty to be able to criticize the
Vietnamese while they were being bombed. Like PL, he now accepted that all
nationalism is bad, but he also was still unwilling to criticize the
Vietnamese for revisionism as Mao did.

From this time onward, under the theory of "revolutionary
intercommunalism," Newton took up eclecticism. He still liked Mao, but he
now liked any resistance to "reactionary intercommunalism" equally. Kim Il
Sung, Castro, Ho, Fanon and Mao were now to be treated equally in Black
Panther literature. Ultimately the material reason Newton gave for this
was that even in China, the U.$. empire was in force, because Mao could
not reclaim Taiwan. The problem was even worse of course for occupied
Korea and Vietnam. All peoples were under the U.$. empire according to
Newton, but there were some liberated territories practicing revolutionary
intercommunalism. Thus Newton felt it necessary to lump Mao's China into
having merely a community, not a state. The proof of not having a state to
Newton was the existence of Taiwan under U.$. control. The community in
China was simply the strongest community awaiting other communities to
advance so that a state could be administered over U.$. imperialism.

In both "To Die for the People" and in "In Search of Common Ground,"
Newton stresses materialism, science and the fact that oppressed
nationality people of the internal semi-colonies are not much different
than oppressor nation people. "The people and the economy are so
integrated into the imperialist empire that it's impossible to
'decolonize,' to return to the former conditions of existence."(6) Newton
went on to say that settlers returned from their colonies in many
countries, but those colonies continued acting as before, as part of the
empire. Thus "nations no longer exist."(7) Speaking of the successes in
China, Vietnam and Korea, Newton referred to these as "revolutionary
intercommunalism" and opposed it to the fate of most people which is
"reactionary intercommunalism."

Our summation of the BPP view on the internal class structure of the U$A
and its internal semi-colonies is that in no nation of North America or
imperialism generally is the lumpen yet the majority. On the other hand,
we agree with Newton that outside the lumpen and undocumented workers,
there is no revolutionary class inside imperialist country borders. We
continue to uphold international proletarian-led revolution, with
exploited and superexploited workers of the Third World at the head. All
the combined John Browns and Huey Newtons within U$ borders will not be
enough to administer the dictatorship of the proletariat, because we have
to be absolutely sure that U.$. imperialism does not raise its head again
once it is defeated.

MIM organizes for the interests of the u.$. lumpenproletariat as we
organize for the interests of the international proletariat. Yet we take
to heart Mao's admonition that the lumpen class without proper and
decisive leadership is not a reliable revolutionary vehicle. Mao wrote
that the lumpen "lead the most precarious existence of all  One of China's
difficult problems is how to handle these people. Brave fighters but apt
to be destructive, they can become a revolutionary force if given proper
guidance."(8) MIM takes this analysis by Mao to mean that while the lumpen
truly have nothing to lose in revolutionary struggle and everything to
gain, they may lack elements of class consciousness that define more
organized proletariat. So as we look at the situation within u.$. borders
today and see that the revolutionary classes have no kind of majority
here, we take responsibility for leading with the line of the economic
interests of the lumpen and undocumented workers.

Unlike Newton, we say that any time a community has organized force it has
a state, the dictatorship of one class over another. It is necessary to
say as much to avoid the unaccountability of anarchists and bourgeois
democrats. For example, the U.S. Civil War involved the organized use of
force and the next major advance in class and nation relations will also
involve oppositions of organized force. Calling MIM seditious for pointing
this out would be like blaming a historian of Abraham Lincoln for the
Civil War. We just point out the facts and which theories go along with
the facts.

Even the Maoists in Peru and the Philippines have incipient states. The
Mohawk Nation also has a state and Huey Newton had one in Oakland. The
advantage of Newton's position is that it accounts for the situation of
small nations and does not expect that they will seize territory and set
up completely independent nation-states. Newton says that is impossible
for everyone including China, thus setting up a standard of what is
ultraleft. By his definitions, MIM reasons that Newton would have called
us ultraleft for insisting that a party with organized force must have a
state. He went a step farther in opposing imperialism while also attacking
narrow nationalism.

MIM agrees with Newton that even small communities must get on the
revolutionary road and start the struggle even if they are dispersed as
Newton believed the Black communities to be. If Blacks in Los Angeles
organize force to be their own police, they are a state just as much as a
state set up parallel in New York. There may be very small states. What
Newton missed was that within those communities he was calling
revolutionary intercommunalist, it is possible to return to reactionary
intercommunalism. Such a return is not a foregone conclusion because of
the degree of imperialist assimilation of oppressed peoples. It is a
question of the class enemy from within. Vietnam has proved willing to
return to assimilation and capitalism. In this, MIM calls Newton
ultraleft, because looking at the many revolutionary movements around the
world some of which held state power like the Chinese Communists, Newton
insisted that none should be weighted with the accountability of
statehood. We say this is ultraleftism because the theory moves ahead of
concrete conditions rather than accounting for what is really going on.

MIM believes part of Newton's problem lies in his failure to fully explain
the need for a new theory of revolutionary intercommunalism. Unable to
distinguish among revolutionary movements with different ideological
leadership and unwilling to account for the defense of territory seized
through revolution, Newton's theory of intercommunalism disagrees with
Lenin's line on ending World War I. Lenin argued against Trotsky that the
first responsibility of a revolutionary party upon seizing state power was
to defend its gains in the largest territory possible by not overreaching
the boundaries it could defend. Mao's private criticism of the Vietnamese
for revisionism was another approach to taking responsibility for
revolutionary gains. Honoring the united front, Mao took responsibility
for trying to help the Vietnamese learn from China's more advanced stage
of revolution. While Newton elaborated on some important aspects of the
struggles of revolutionary governments, his theory of revolutionary
intercommunalism has the air of theory for its own sake. The theory makes
proletarian parties less accountable for protecting their own political
gains than either Lenin or Mao did. Newton's theory is newer, but it is a
step back from the practice of building socialism in one country or one
base area.

Mao proved to be correct about Vietnam being on the capitalist-road. What
the communists of the time failed to do was follow Mao on both fighting
revisionism and upholding some united front. PL wanted to fight
revisionism and ditch the united front. Others like many in RYM I wanted
to ditch fighting revisionism and uphold the united front as the be-all
and end-all. MIM does not believe it is possible to fight revisionism
without upholding united front and we also don't believe it is possible to
have a proletarian-led united front without fighting revisionism. In fact,
where there is no proletarian pole there is no united front, so in this
sense it is meaningless to talk about united front without fighting
revisionism first.

It is fitting that it would be Huey Newton to be so concerned about
imperialist assimilation that he would devise a whole theory of
intercommunalism to address it. We agree with him that it is not a
straight-forward matter for an oppressed nation to put itself first while
it is within an imperialist economic framework. In such a case where the
relationship is such that super-profits flow into an oppressed nation
(internal semi-colony) we cannot even say nationalism of an oppressed
nation is applied internationalism. Specifically Newton did not want to
see Black organizing for a share of global imperialist loot. For this
reason he did not believe that even Black workers were a revolutionary
proletariat and he took greater interest in the lumpenproletariat and how
the lumpenproletariat was assuring its consumption rights without a job
providing income.

II. Class structure and exploitation 

a. Genocide

One of the main reasons that MIM has had difficulty with pinning down the
class structure of the internal semi-colonies is understanding the role of
genocide and past appropriations of labor in class formation. Today, when
it comes to answering what class various oppressed nationality people are
in, we finally answer that historical genocide and exploitation should be
thought of as affecting the property passed down from generation to
generation.

When it comes to understanding whether oppressed internal semi-colonies
are net exploiters through imperialism or whether they are exploited, it
seems that genocide should be accounted for as an historical and
continuing debt. Recently, a former member of CP-USA circles apparently
decided that MIM is slightly more correct than both the CP-USA and the
Workers World Party and started working with MIM. He wrote to MIM various
anti-Semitic comments that also showed a confused understanding of
fascism. Not surprisingly the same persyn contended that First Nation
people cannot be said to be exploited. He says they were killed, so no
labor was extracted. This brings us in a crude way to the question of the
impact of genocide on class structure.

In the main, oppressors carry out genocide in the capitalist context to
ease the appropriation of labor both past and present. Past labor known as
"dead labor" is capital, unless we mean property of the sort that is land.

Of course, land also has congealed labor that goes into it as a means of
production. The work of First Nations to remove rocks from agricultural
fields and to build various improvements is something stolen when land is
stolen.

It is the accumulation of the means of production through genocide that
establishes the basis of class society from the earliest existence of
class society. Thus genocide can be thought of as a pre-condition for
capitalist exploitation. It is much easier to extract super-profits once
an oppressor nation has established its ability and willingness to use
genocidal force.

Genocide is thought of as something requiring reparations as a matter of
justice. Does such a concept relate to our understanding of class
structure? According to an informative APSP pamphlet we reviewed in ITAL
MT8 END, the debt owed for slavery is in the trillions of dollars. During
the Vietnam War, the Black Panthers suggested that the U$A pay $10 billion
for 1 million killed in Vietnam in reparations. How do we relate such
calculations to our understanding of class structure? And what do we do
with the fact that any repayment of First Nations must surely make each
remaining First Nation member a millionaire, a new capitalist?

Aside from the theft of the products of labor that usually goes along with
genocide, we should look at the economic meaning of genocide. People are
after all congealed labor themselves. It took so much food, shelter,
clothing and education to make the persyn before s/he was killed by the
imperialists or their allies.

When a persyn with one day left to live is killed by imperialists, his or
her people are deprived of his or her labor or creations for that one day.
When a persyn is struck down at age 13, a whole adult lifetime of labor is
lost to the oppressed nation. Genocide involves both the appropriation of
labor and labor-power.

As scientists, we must admit that killing is not part of what Marx called
the "productive sector." Rather it is a kind of appropriation more in the
waste sector. The military, police and oppressor nation lynch-mobs are
part of the unproductive sector. (See a forthcoming ITAL MT END on the
controversial subject of the ideological ramifications of the
"unproductive" sector.)

Oppressor nations appropriate the labor and labor-power of other peoples
either to waste them in order to seize control of resources and sometimes
to take them home and use them. The commodities they steal after killing
involve the theft of labor. Much other destruction is appropriation
through waste.

When we look at an oppressed nation and wonder why its national
bourgeoisie is so weak and why there is either semi-feudalism or dependent
capitalism in place, the reason can often be traced to genocide. To be a
strong and vibrant bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie has to have had labor to
appropriate. If the people in one's area of economic intercourse have been
killed off, it is difficult to appropriate labor and become thriving
bourgeoisie. Genocide stunts the upper ranks of the petty-bourgeoisie and
bourgeoisie.

Not surprisingly the same writer in MIM circles formerly of CP-USA circles
also failed to understand that home and real estate ownership are class
and national in nature. The fact that an oppressor nation persyn rarely
owns the exact farm his/her great grandparents took from the First Nations
does not mean those great grandparents did not trade within their nation.
Classes and nations are groups of people not individuals or families. That
property ended up in the hands of oppressor nation people one way or
another, usually through sale in exchange for other capital. To this day,
people of the same occupation but different nations--e.g. Black versus
white--have different average amounts of property. Genocide increases the
development of the petty-bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie proper in the
oppressor nation. 

The debt owed by the oppressor nations to oppressed nations of the
internal semi-colonies is in the trillions. The problem for our analysis
of the class structure is that the oppressor nation is now paying it back
through economically integrating the semi-colonies with imperialism: Now
the internal semi-colonies appropriate the labor of the Third World with
the help of Uncle Sam. Thus the payback is not with Euro-Amerikan labor
but with Third World labor.

The APSP is correct to say that the main issue of reparations is not cash.
It is control of institutions. The trillions owed to the oppressed nations
mean control of the land and institutions on top of it. The First Nations
must control their land here and the Africans must receive control of
Africa. In Europe, Blacks can receive their reparations by control of
institutions of the economy and in the U$A, Blacks can work out something
with the First Nations to seize land. We do not mean to favor transferring
the wealth of Third World people to internal semi-colonies. Quite the
opposite, we seek to inspire the internal semi-colonies to be a bridge
back to the Third World for the flow of reparations from ex-imperialism
under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

 b. Relative deprivation

Various bourgeois social-scientists claim that Marx's labor theory of
value is incorrect. Most simply are unaware of it in any meaningful way.
Nonetheless, there is a sociology discourse claiming that Marx's ideas of
"absolute deprivation" are incorrect, because supposedly absolute
immiseration of the proletariat has not happened under capitalism since
Marx's time.

MIM does not agree with this thesis. The Third World proletariat has been
increasingly exploited. Life expectancies have improved over feudalism. We
cannot deny that, but Marx never did deny that capitalism represented
progress over feudalism. The question is what happens within capitalist
society. We agree that the conditions of those workers bought off by
imperialism and turned into a labor aristocracy have improved, but for the
world's majority, imperialism has brought absolute immiseration.

We hold that Marx's absolute immiseration theory holds true to this day
with regard to life under capitalism. We point to three facts alone that
justify it, the first two of which are rooted in the anarchy of production
under capitalism created by intra-bourgeois competition. One is the
continued and incremental destruction of the environment that only becomes
more thorough the more technology advances under capitalism. Such
destruction is mitigated only by the class struggle to put the workers'
health interests into account in the design of production processes. Two,
we point to modern militarism which threatens more people and kills more
people than ever before. Thirdly, the greater wealth of imperialist
societies and their modernization of social control means higher
percentages of people in prison and psychiatric wards, higher than at any
time in previous history. It all boils down to killing and wasting of
humyn life.

To avoid talking about militarism, the environment and prison, the
bourgeois social scientists talk about "relative deprivation," in which
having one VCR is a disadvantage if your neighbor has two. Obviously this
is a backward concept in many regards as far as we Marxists are concerned.
It is not fundamental to our political economy analysis.

Genocide is a matter of absolute immiseration. There can be nothing worse.
In contrast, the fact that the internal semi-colonies have stunted upper
ranks of the petty-bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie is a matter of relative
deprivation.

Knowledge of relative oppression helps us form an understanding of what we
Marxists call "the particularities" of our material conditions. When
comparing Euro-Amerikans with oppressed nations, we can often show that
oppressed nations are in a relatively poor position. Such is important for
reasons ranging from the united front to why national consciousness arises
to why separate nation vanguard parties may be necessary until we reach
higher stages of humyn development.

c. Appropriation of labor

Ultimately the class structure is about the appropriation of labor. In
"Imperialism and Its Class Structure in 1997," I go at length into the
calculations for who is appropriating labor. Blacks, First Nations, Aztlan
people, Puerto Ricans and Asian-descended people within imperialist
country borders have histories of exploitation and oppression, but today,
with the exceptions of the undocumented and lumpen-proletariat, they
differ from Euro-Amerikan workers only in degree, not in quality when it
comes to their relationship to the Third World proletariat. As we have
already shown in ITAL MIM Theory 1 END, for this reason, Blacks taken as a
nation are ahead of some advanced European capitalist countries in terms
of income. This shows us that there is variation within capitalism and the
buying off of workers. A similar thing is seen in Ireland and the Six
Counties of "Northern Ireland," where although Ireland faces national
oppression, its workers are integrated economically into imperialism to
such an extent that they compare favorably with the conditions of workers
in some imperialist countries. Thus there is only a proletariat in the
war-torn Six Counties of Ireland . The proletariat there suffers
discrimination relative to Protestant workers on a national basis with
religion as the cover.

We must recall that "having nothing to lose but chains" is the definition
of proletariat. Genocide and historical exploitation determine whether one
is born into the proletariat, but they do not prevent the imperialists
from lifting today's oppressed nationalities out of their propertyless
condition into the labor aristocracy. A persyn born with no property may
nonetheless start to absorb more labor in consumption than the persyn
gives back to class society in production. True, such a labor-aristocracy
will be newer and less stable than the labor aristocracy of the oppressor
nations, but it is labor aristocracy nonetheless. In fact, those with a
sense of scrambling for crumbs off the plate are often the most
reactionary of all towards the proletariat they just left and seek to stay
above. 

In this regard, as we have seen already, Latino workers continue to have a
high proportion in the productive sector. We can still speak of an Aztlan
proletariat. We see a genuine "split in the working-class" as Lenin said
within that oppressed internal semi-colony. As we will detail elsewhere
though, even in the case of Puerto Rico, the economic integration with
imperialism has already occurred to such an extent that the economic tide
is on the Puerto Rican labor aristocracy's side.

The "Brown" peoples are the most proletarian within the internal
semi-colonies. There are also immigrant Haitians and African nationalities
and "boat people" from Asia--all terribly exploited or super-exploited and
oppressed. To the extent that these people are workers and they are
subjected to oppression outside the law applying to U.$. citizen laborers,
we can say there is a small Black and Asian proletariat. What we must be
clear about though is that only class sectors dominated by undocumented
work in the productive sectors form a proletariat. Not even all
undocumented people are proletariat or lumpenproletariat. A good portion
enters the petty-bourgeoisie immediately upon migration through family
connections and various legal fronts.

The vast majority of the employed Black, First Nation and Asian-descended
peoples is labor aristocracy or higher. An examination of the figures in
"Imperialism and Its Class Structure in 1997" makes clear that the
repatriation of profits from the Third World, the transfer of
surplus-value from the productive sector in the Third World to the
unproductive sector in the First World and the administrative fixing of
prices by multinational corporations to artificially lower prices of Third
World goods and thus disguise transfer of surplus-labor -- all these add
up to such an extent that it is impossible to see any proletariat where there
is an imperialist country minimum wage in effect. That minimum wage is
almost ten times the average wage in the Third World. 

The conclusive calculation in an upcoming ITAL MT END is to look at the
new wealth and profits of the imperialists every year and figure out where
they got that piece of pie. If the imperialists gave back their
discrimination profits to the internal semi-colonies, would the
imperialists still have the same new wealth added each year? The answer is
yes. 

The imperialist countries are absorbing so much pie from the Third World
that even if discrimination ended, the imperialists would still be covered
completely by the pie from the Third World, without losing any pie. The
reason for this is that the Third World hands all of the people within
U.$. borders with minimum wage status using U.S. currency an enormous
piece of pie. Out of that enormous pie that also ends up in internal
semi-colony hands, the internal semi-colonies surrender a relatively
small piece as discrimination profits. The class that would lose from an
end to discrimination is the white petty-bourgeoisie, mostly the labor
aristocracy. The labor aristocracy would still be eating super-profit pie,
but its piece would be smaller if the discrimination profits were gone.
The pie the labor aristocracy makes would still be smaller than it eats.

The imperialist piece of surplus-value pie is covered by merely one slice
of the pie that the Third World has to hand over to the imperialist
countries. If we look at the piece of pie called "transfer of
surplus-value from the productive sector in the Third World to the
unproductive sector in the imperialist countries," we see the following.
The Third World delivers bananas and sneakers to the door of imperialism.
Upon arrival in the imperialist countries, the banana and sneaker workers
do not sell them; salespeople sell them. These salespeople help the boss
make his profit and they get paid out of the surplus-value extracted in
the Third World. Surplus-value is never extracted from salespeople or
other unproductive sector workers that Poulantzas correctly refers to as
"new petty-bourgeoisie" in keeping with Lenin's teachings on the labor
aristocracy. The persyn on the street can figure it out this way. If all a
country had was salespeople and security guards, it would die quickly with
nothing to sell or guard. If however, a country had no unproductive
sector, it could still barter and create wealth, just not the usual way
under capitalism. The mark-up on Third World goods delivered to
imperialism is sufficient to explain all the new wealth of the
imperialists every year. The other pieces of the surplus-value pie can be
used to account for the obesity of the oppressor-nation labor aristocracy
and the internal semi-colony labor aristocracy.

Only the lumpenproletariat (e.g. making license plates in prison or the
minority of lumpen getting sub-minimum wage as a hooker or drug-dealer)
and undocumented workers face life without an imperialist country minimum
wage and similar laws. Workers making license-plates in prison may be more
objectively revolutionary than regular industrial proletarians. On the
whole, MIM looks to the lumpen and the undocumented productive sector
workers to form the core of that group whose economic demands we can cater
to somewhat successfully. Even in these groups we will have difficulty
though, because the pull of parasitic life in the labor aristocracy exists
for the majority and is clear to any persyn who looks
around--Euro-Amerikan, Black, Latino, Asian or First Nation. The tendency
will be for people to see that parasitism all around and seek to join it
rather than wage a class struggle to end parasitism.

It was a disappointment to see voting Blacks and Asian-descended people go
for Proposition 187 in California. That is the kind of extreme thing we
would expect to see from the labor aristocracy and other exploiter
classes. There were also key Black labor spokespeople attacking foreign
workers in bashing NAFTA. In 1998, there are die-hard state-hood
supporters in Puerto Rico who only wish to complete the seal of parasitism
on Puerto Rico. The state-hooders argue that all Puerto Ricans will be
entitled to more welfare benefits if they hook up officially with the
world's greatest gravy-train. All such people attacking workers outside
imperialist country borders represent the parasitic classes. Their
attitude of seeking to integrate with imperialism to re-divide the
surplus-value extracted from the world must be combated. On the other
hand, where the labor aristocracy is in dominant position relative to the
proletariat, there is a question of whether military struggle and various
other resources would be better committed in some other nation where the
imperialist link in the chain is weaker. The extent of the parasitic
classes in the minority of the world's population inside imperialist
borders is no cause for paralysis. We simply adjust our strategy to focus
in more fruitful areas than advocating the economic demands of parasitic
classes. 

Notes: 
1. Huey Newton, To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey Newton (NY:
Random House, 1972), p. 26. 
2. Ibid., p. 27-8. 
3. Ibid., p. 28. 
4. Ibid., p. 34. 
5. Ibid., pp. 197-8. 
6. Kai T. Erikson intro., In Search of Common Ground: Conversations with
Erik H. Erikson and Huey P. Newton (NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973), p.
30. 
7. Ibid., pp. 29-30.
8. Mao Zedong, "Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society," Selected
Works of Mao Tse-Tung Vol. I. (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), p.
19.

Return to MIM Homepage