this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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askchapo
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People saying doctors, lawyers, and software engineers are wrong.
The labor aristocracy is essentially the majority of the proletariat in the West. They add very little value to a commodity relative to their wage. Most value is added in the periphery where they extract raw resources from the earth and process it. The labor aristocracy benefits from the exploitation of the laborers in the periphery. If the miners in Congo collected the full value of their labor, the proletariat in the West would lose massively as the cost of their commodities would go up at retail AND their would be very little added value left to justify their salaries.
It's relevant because despite your ideology driving your solidarity with laborers in the periphery, your material conditions world get substantially worse if those laborers had a communist revolution and captured the full value of their labor. That is a major problem for leftists in the imperial core to wrestle with and solve.
I just want to add onto your comment this graph which is also very relevant. from https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5477115
This is a better graph from the same paper
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49687-y#MOESM1
that is a lot better