Im talking about the gulf. Social fascism would be the most apt way to describe them - social democracy, class collaborationist, delineation along ethnic lines, etc. But at the same time, it feels like westerners who might agree on this point would be doing so out of orientalist preconceptions of the gulf rather than on an actual clear understanding. They would be more loathe to call Norway or Sweden a social fascist state. Am I inventing a strawman?
All you need to do is to look at KSA or Qatar et al. and if those “guest workers” aren’t a vast army of borderline serfs living under social fascist regimes then idk what would be a better example.
Those migrant workers form the backbone of labour upon which the cushy office jobs of the citizens rest in comfort and luxury.
One time, many moons ago, when I was still an anarchist (or at least in my AnCom transit arc) I attended a lecture with some utopian who was shilling UBI. I hadn’t really grappled with a UBI seriously until this public lecture because it was very much a fringe idea at the time. At the end of the lecture, I posed a few pointed questions that cut through the core of the lecturer’s arguments that I had come up with during the talk and (amusingly, in hindsight – maybe they picked up on something that I had not) the lecturer basically dismissed me as a tankie, except in a more polite manner but without actually addressing any of my concerns.
One of the key points that I made was that right now in the country I am in (and it’s probably true for yours too) there’s this grey market labour force that does the hard labour that most citizens refuse to do (at least for the going rate of those jobs as they are currently).
What we could expect to see under a UBI would be a hard nationalist turn, with citizenship becoming prohibitively difficult to exclude any prospective citizens from coming in and contributing to the overall costs of the UBI without necessarily contributing back into the system. Australia is a very good example of this, where migrant labour is borderline sharecropping with extra steps, and it’s extremely difficult to get citizenship in large part due to whatever vestiges of the welfare state remains unstripped. The same can be said for the US particularly in the informal labour market coming from the southern border especially in agriculture, with companies like Tyson literally busing cheap labour over the Mexican border to exploit (in a liberal sense, not in a Marxist sense).
If we extrapolate this current arrangement out and acknowledge that either all of those shitty jobs at Walmart and McDonalds and so on would have to compete against a UBI to make it worthwhile for people to get out of bed and leave their loved ones and pursuits behind for 8+ hours of a high-stress grind (lol, that ain’t happening) or otherwise those gaps in the labour market would need to be plugged immediately elsewhere. And you just know where that country is going to source its labour from and how it’s going to do that because it’s already doing it right now as we speak.
And then ✨ta-da!✨ you have a Qatar-like economic arrangement, except on steroids. Big fucken yikes from me on that one.
“It seems to me that I am more dialectical materialist than you, Mr Stalin.”
— H.G. Wells Me, back when I was still an anarchist
a vast army of borderline serfs living under social fascist regimes then idk what would be a better example.
Egh, that’s the reserve army of labor
Under the Gulf-state-model, they’re majority foreign to the Gulf nation-states, as far as I’m concerned, and {Gulf} Capital directs and controls them, however they please, by their travel documents, to pay and shelters… even if they make up the majority of the state’s population (Eg. UAE)
Particularly brutal, but not very unique among many others… (migrant labor in the U.S)
Thinking of Volume 1 again, the exploitation never stopped, it was simply off-shored, and the labor of the Global North made labor aristocrats, settlers, both or, instead placed in dominated Global South conditions…
Eh, that’s the reserve army of Labor
I mean you’re not wrong about this but I also think you’re being a bit glib about it.
What goes on in KSA etc. makes visible the mostly-obscured relationship between developed countries and over-exploited countries, that’s true. But workers under these conditions are absolutely not protected by the labour laws of the countries they work within and they lack any sort of privileges or rights that are afforded to the KSA reserve army of labour proper. And I think that’s the major difference, where you really see the true face of social fascism laid bare; if these workers went on strike the government would crack down on them with impunity. The government where I am in wouldn’t go as far as the Qatari government would but they would absolutely punish any troublemaker migrant workers to the full extent of the law and then deport them.
We don’t have to imagine what the US would be like because we’ve seen plenty of historical examples of how the US government has crushed labour movements with military and police brutality, and we already know what CBP/the DHS does to undocumented migrants and refugees.
This is where it’s different imo. US citizens on strike aren’t likely to be disappeared en masse into CBP blacksites to be detained indefinitely before being booted into Mexico without any concern for their country of official residence.
That’s where it truly reveals itself as an arrangement of treats for the citizen and fascism for the rest; that’s where it is undeniably social fascism imo.
But workers under these conditions are absolutely not protected by the labour laws of the countries they work within and they lack any sort of privileges or rights that are afforded to the KSA reserve army of labour proper
We don’t have to imagine what the US would be like because we’ve seen plenty of historical examples of how the US government has crushed labour movements with military and police brutality, and we already know what CBP/the DHS does to undocumented migrants and refugees.
This is where it’s different imo. US citizens on strike aren’t likely to be disappeared en masse into CBP blacksites to be detained indefinitely before being booted into Mexico without any concern for their country of official residence.
So, it’s the undocumented status and lack of citizenship that distinguishes and makes for the revocation of not only the Gulf reserve army of labor’s ‘appearance of equality as a seller of labor’, but even their liberal U.N given rights, at the impunity of the Gulf state…
