C. Olin Wright has to extend the Marxist story of the ever immiseration of the working class by invoking non-Marxist ideasfrom economics and sociology.
C. Olin Wright was a leading twenty-first century Marxist theorist. He fine tuned some concepts from the Marxist corpus. He correctly followed Marx by distinguishing occupations from the relations of social production, which is class, and also by distinguishing occupation and class from stratification, which is the non-Marxist approach to sociology, where all kinds of qualities, such as clothing and art forms as well as wealth and power, are ranked by prestige. Wright also modified the Marxist view on surplus value theory which says that capitalists get their gains by siphoning off the wealth created by the workers; Wright updates that theory by claiming that the percentage of surplus has lessened and that governments have been more equivocal about exploiting what the workers create. Wright’s point of view is influential in that the placards at the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture say that American wealth was created from the surpluses Blacks created, which is to neglect that Connecticut ingenuity and New Bedford whalers and Hudson Valley entrepreneurs from Holland created wealth on their own, even if some slavers in Charleston and Newport made their money that way.
Marx’s theory of surplus labor was stark, remorseless and cataclysmic. Workers would have to accept whatever wages were allowed by the capitalists because there was nowhere else to go to get employment because capitalists circulated lists of workers to be blacklisted and because agricultural labor was on the decline. The monopoly over the labor force meant that capitalists would make labor as low as possible so that the capitalists would get as much surplus labor as possible That meant providing wages enough that would allow slow starvation until the time that continued immiseration would lead to revolt--though I suspect only some well fed intellectuals or Moses like figures, part of the leadership, would lead the rebellion, the poor too weak to do it themselves .
Wright, in his “Alternative Perspectives in Marxist Theory of Accumulation and Crisis” (Critical Sociology 25, 2-3) thinks there are a number of impediments from capitalism having its way even while it remains in power. But the four qualifications it suggests vitiate the entire iron law of labor surplus. First, increased productivity will lead to less excess profit because profits can be squeezed from workers but not from capital goods like computers which will cost what the capitalists need to buy and so the immiseration of the workers is slowed because they are a smaller part of the capital needed in an enterprise.. But it could be argued that, in fact, the workers would be more scarce and so drive up their wages because they are needed to manage their valuable computers, which would alleviate the inevitable slide of the wages of workers. Second, Wright thinks that there is a danger to capitalist profit in the underconsumption of the workers who even in their immiseration absorb most of the products of a nation. You can’t have wages so low that people can’t buy fast food or any toys. So the excess profit will be reduced from what it otherwise would be. But if that is the case, then the economy is subject to the usual laws non-Marxist economists think hold for, all economiesL having to churn the economy so that everyone is selling to everyone else, everyone circulating money like crazy and that leads to prosperity for all. China, even under Communism, has to worry about its own citizens saving too much and worry about Americans buying Chinese production much less. This is not a Marxist model of being efficient in government by reducing competition so that there is enough to go around from the stock of goods created by labor. Third, Wright argues that both government and labor through their powers and organizations push labor rates up and so slow the decline to immiseration. But if that is the case, then organizations and cultural trends to more or less be sympathetic to the plight of the workers have an independent set of effects from the iron laws of economics, and so the political game is afoot, going along its own imperatives. And fourth, Wright argues that taxation, which Marxists think creates no wealth, can redistribute wealth, which means give to the poor from the rich or visa versa which also means that the political game is afoot, and is no different from Bidenism wanting to extend entitlements by raising taxes on the wealthy. All those exceptions are in fact the substance of a mixed capitalist society.
But aside from Wright undercutting Marxism, I am more concerned with parts of the Marxist vocabulary that are more controversial and of contemporary significance. The proposition that colonialism was a system by which invading nations exploited the resources and the people of the nations they conquered and so was economic in nature was set as key by Lenin's book "Imperialism" which was published in 1917. It seemed particularly pertinent with regard to the European nations, including Great Britain, France and Germany who took control of Africa in the nineteenth centuryIt is consistent with the general Marxist idea that everything is a zero sum game and so conquest is just another name of stealing property rather than a pre-capitalist and present process of the appropriation of territories form among other things imposing their newly dominant culture upon the defeated population.
Wright’s contribution to the discussion of colonialism is the idea of contradictory classes, whereby people can have multiple relations to the class structure. Sen. Warnock of Georgia had a father who was a junk dealer most of the week, and so a member, just barely, of the very petit bourgeoisie, but on Sunday he was a preacher and so a professional because he orated, was knowledgeable about Scripture, and gave advice as part of pastoral counselling. Wright thinks that contradictory classes intensifies colonialism.. That means that people can have entrepreneurial roles in a colony while being subservient or a dependent to the overseas controller of the colony. So a bureau director with twelve servants in British India and so part of its power elite is just a minor employee of the East India Company.
But the idea of contradictory classes is very different from a modification of the Marxist story of the long march, however delayed, towards immiseration or even the tussle between immiseration and capitalism, which believes in ever greater prosperity for everyone, either by making the rich richer, which is the Republican belief, or by reallocating wealth, as the Democrats think. Rather, the idea of contradictory classes is only a special case of the dynamics of formal structures in society that obtain in social life since chimps began to develop some self awareness. These are characteristics of role theory, not Marxist theory, whereby actors can have are at the moment contrary roles, such as the nonbeliever who goes to church or the woman who is a bricklayer. So the American idea of sociology has tainted the Marxist idea by placing the Marxist story into its always human context, just when append when I say that I want the doors of the train to remain open until I get into the train, after which I want the doors to close as soon as possible. There is nothing here about the class struggle, just wanting to get to work on time.
A theory about colonialism that is true to the Marxist story of the ever more desperate attempt to shore up the capitalist system is to assert that colonialism takes place not just to use native peoples and material wealth but also because wages are increasing in these late stages of capitalism for those living in the home country and so colonials are used because they will work at comparatively lower wages. That theory applies even in the fact that China today invests in underdeveloped countries like Angola because it has difficulty getting local consumers to buy goods and so has to find other places to make investments. An empirical study might show that the rate of return on investment was higher in Africa than mainland China but that is unnecessary because African investment would add to Chinese domestic investment even if not a more productive investment than one in the domestic market. Either way, the colonized countries are economically needed by the colonizers even if it is to offshore money. The colonized are victims because they are forced or convinced to take on debt they will find it difficult to repay, loaded down with real estate far beyond the means of their own economies. It is exploitative to give people loans they cannot repay however attractive are the baubles being offered, like glass beads given to the Indians in America as well as the guns they would use against the white men.
There is no need for any Marxist or Wright theory of colonialism to explain what happened in the colonialist era or its present incarnation of offered overseas investment.The great powers spent more money to gain control of Africa than they ever made out of it (with the exception of Belgian control of the Congo), though a Marxist might say government investment was needed so as to construct the dominance whereby exploitation might be developed for the benefit of homegrown and western world capitalists. The government pays so private enterprise, like Elon Musk, prospers. But the British government spent on colonialism was done to glorify the nation so that, for example, middle class Brits would vote for the Disraeli Conservative party. Either money or glory can't both be the dominant reason. Moreover, geopolitical issues can also outweigh monetary gain. The United States took over the rest of the Spanish Empire in the Spanish American War because the United States wanted to keep Japan, the rising Pacific power, from taking over the Philippines. The US soon gave up on Cuba and has been subsidizing Puerto Rico ever since, as is evident from the fact that residents in Puerto Rico pay no income taxes.
A clear and concurrently contentious area of international relations, the Israel-Gaza War, does not yield itself to a Marxist colonialist model, however many sympathizers of Palestinians try to make it that way. The usual Marxist view is to claim that Israel is a settler colony in that a foreign nation occupied and dominated an indigenous population so that it could settle there. The Jews who came to Palestine were Europeans and Russias and some Americans which the British had appropriated from the land and allowed the soon to be Israelis in to take over the land from the Arabs and also that European and American political and economic power allowed Israel to prosper. Never mind that Jews were in continuous occupation of the area for four thousand years and that Palestinians did not regard themselves as an ethnic people rather than as Arabs who happened to own property in Palestine until Arafat for Jordan to agree that the PLO would be the sole representative of its people after the 1967 Six Day War. Leave history aside as well as the repeated efforts to partition the area. Palestinians are an ethnicity that wants what it regards as its homeland to be from the river to the sea. No equivocation about that..
The real explanation of colonialism is what happens whenever a more advanced society, whether militarily or economically or organizationally, encounters a less developed society. It takes it over so as to take the land for settlement, as is the case with America, and find the indigenous people a nuisance, or subject to disease. So I don't want the aliens to come to Earth because they will control us even if they are benevolent as was the case with the Catholic priests who were bringing the true faith to the Indians in Hispanic America. Europeans came to dominate Muslims in the seventeenth century and Africans in the nineteenth because they could, just as Islam invaded Europe until the Battle of Tours in the tenth century. And Israel is a more advanced ethnicity, nation and civilization than the Arab peoples of this day however much the Saudis and others want to modernize and economically diversify by, among other things, acquiring Israeli software. The Israel Gaza war stands in the way of Arab development.
You might think it superficial or coincidental to look at geopolitical or cultural causes as the engine of social history, everything dominated by the greed of capitalists, but governments and cultures and technologies are autonomous, each form of structure following its own exigencies and not all beholden to their puppet masters like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, however much government and culture wrestle with those capitalist interests. Moreover, the entire world economy, with the exception of North Korea, are capitalist in that they are all organized in corporations which are slightly regulated, as in the United States, or are heavily regulated, as in China, but all subject to the value of the currency and levels of consumer spending and all the other aspects of economic life. You can blame capitalism for the smokestack economy that made Pittsburg so sooty but will you praise capitalism for shifting to electric cars and the smokeless computer industry for having lessened the burden on climate change? Technology not capitalism did that.and has been on the advance since "Gilgamesh" marvelled at the building of tall walls.