1st World Countries vs 3rd World.

I've had problems with this irritating perspective back at this end of the globe. But never from a teacher. With this kind of perspective he disregards intrest, which is what pisses me off about these kind of people in general. The struggles which are most important are the ones directly experienced by you, not ones that we see happen in other countries on television.

it's generally best to try to work on where you are, rather than to go for other places as much.

as much as the situation in various other parts of the world may dismay you (and, certainly, a lot of it dismays *me* too, and makes me want to fly away to some other country to see if i can help)... there are distinct problems in the idea of someone in canada, or the like, deciding to putting their effort in changing another country. very often, unless you actually live in that country, a person's analysis of the actual situation on the ground can be quite poor, leading to supporting questionable individuals, groups, methods (etc). this isnt always the case, but it's often so. much of Africa, for instance, has been riddled with well-meaning actions done by outsiders who try to fix the continent, who have more often than not made things worse, shifted away one problem for another, or just did a nice sounding but ultimately futile action.

it might sound cliche, but the first step to helping the problems of the rest of the world is fixing the problems where you are... one great difficulty for the improvement of many poorer countries is the economic and political hegemony of the stronger, richer countries who stand in their way or manipulate their lives. to actually make a revolutionary situation within countries like canada, USA, england (etc etc etc) would actually be a much better starting point for foreigners like us to try to help people in other parts of the world - it'd simultaneously help to remove certain harmful restrictions from other countries due to matters of imperialism, while giving (hopefully honest) revolutionary societies actual *resources* to make a meaningful difference... not making a difference as an outsider looking in per se, but as a partner, an ally.

or so it seems to me, anyway...

Welcome to libcom Riley.
Generally it's best to be a part of struggles that affect your everyday life, so mostly workplace or community organising and sometimes public services.
Capitalism is about a social relationship and it is this relationship that a revolution should get rid of. The actual amounts of money earned are not the point although obviously we should always push for more, they cannot pay us what we are worth.
In terms of an uprising your teacher is right, workers in Canada have more to lose. But struggles such as strikes are generally based on the ability of the workers to mount them, for example skilled workers can strike more effectively than unskilled, workers in times of full employment are in a stronger position than when unemployment is high. As has been said before this often means that the poorest workers have trouble organising.

I must take issue with the majority of views raised in this thread: particularly that it is unwise for anarchists to travel to the 3rd world to try and do good there, and that:

I have to say that I could not disagree more with this statement. This kind of thinking will be the death of anarchism if it continues to be the norm.

The process of anarchism is the realization of the class struggle, not locally, not nationally, but from the perspective of the whole human race. If you act only to correct the injustices you personally experience, you are acting only out of self interest - not out of true class (or human) solidarity. It is true that it is attractive and appealing to deny that events that happen far away or 'on TV' are unimportant and irrelevant. But this has never been the case, and is even less so now than it was in the past. The mobility of the human race has never been greater than it is today; geographical remoteness is rapidly losing all practical meaning.

The idea that you should first correct injustice where you are, and then seek to do so elsewhere, is absurd, unworkable and blinkered. Even in the time of Marx and Engels - arguably ever since people learned to make ocean-going ships - the market and the injustice it creates has been a worldwide phenomenon.

The exportation of the working classes from the 1st world is a story we see repeated everywhere. Production was shifted because of the comparative malleability of third world workers compared to the traditional working classes. The results: a generation of mass unemployment, then the induction of the remaining workers into two classes, the middle class (bourgeois), which now effectively dominates Europe, Japan, Australia & the U.S., and a sub-class of people performing the few remaining necessary menial jobs, and living in abject poverty. This is the first world today. This is why the majority of the population of the U.K. are occupied in the 'service' industry, a sector of the economy with no obvious function, except perhaps distribution.

The class division, as it is now, forms a belt around the world, with the workers geographically removed from their masters - it is the ultimate in class division. Capitalism deserves credit for its uncharacteristic ingenuity here.

Basically, to say that you have to focus on local events is a kind of reaction, not revolution - it is born of an instinct to cling to local, manageable problems, as happened in days of yore when villages were essentially islands of self-sufficiency. But this is not the reality today. It can never again be our reality. It is not even particularly desirable - the costs in terms of development would be dire indeed.

Anarchists today must seek world revolution, for a number of reasons. Firstly, the capitalist class is not working on a local scale, and cannot be defeated unless it is met with overwhelming force on equal terms (overwhelming force in terms of numbers and will, equal in terms of the scale of the conflict). Secondly, history has shown us that small scale efforts at local anarchism are always hastily crushed by the governments, corporations and autocrats of the capitalist system. Thirdly, the nature of cooperative anarchism is that the more people are involved, the stronger it becomes.

Now, I agree that there is such a thing as bad intervention. In Africa, it is perhaps true that foreign intervention has done some harm. I do not believe that charity work there has done more harm than good, if you talk in terms of the direct consequences of such work, rather than the disgusting sham of tied aid etc., perpetrated by the governments of the bourgeois hemisphere. However, that aside, we must not think that because it is difficult to reach Africa, we should give up trying. Nor does it mean that we can leave Africa to itself and trust that revolution will come - revolutions do not happen without effort, despite Marx's assertions to the contrary. They only come about when the workers are forced to wake up to their conditions, either because those conditions are suddenly much worse, or because they become aware of the alternatives to the conditions in which they live. Of these, the first is undesirable for obvious reasons and may not lead to anything better than what exists now; the second will not happen in our lifetimes if we do not act to make it happen.

The fundamental principle of Anarchism, indeed of all Communist philosophy is that the interests of the workers are, fundamentally, the same. That is how the working class is defined. The proletariat are the enemies of the bourgeois, and no matter what nation or race or religion or culture or whatever they are, they have that in common.

((What makes you assume I'm white?))

But the simple fact is that workers organizations are more important where there is the most actual hardship. I'm not denying that it's a challenge to overcome the barriers you have outlined, but the alternative is to leave the vast majority of the human population to their fate. Even capitalists believe in doing something to help the 'developing' world, as they rather misleadingly call it.

The working class doesn't earn its credentials through its "hardship", but by its everyday conflict with bureaucratic society.

"Issues" are for losers and petit-bourgeois campaigns.

Uh, so what are we gonna do then?

[/sub-maoist crap]

Certainly in the sense it attaches a meaning to the metaphysical.

Nah.

There is no such thing as an anti-establishment philosophy.

You go. When they try to put you in a pot and eat you, don’t come running to us for sympathy.

Pretty, like a Richard Estes painting...

http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&q=%22richard+estes%22&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2

If there are no workers in the west then how come every single person I know gets up every weekday morning and goes somewhere and repeat a task or series of tasks which produce suplus value for their boss? Is this some sort of illusion, or is it only work if its down a mine, in the paddy fields or at a sweat-shop.

If workers produced nothing, communism would effectively mean the creation of a parasitic class within society. As it happens the opposite is the case, therefore communism removes the parasitic class, making society healthier. At least, that's how I see it.

(EDIT: Depends how you define communism, obviously - though I would label the historical theory marxism, and the political movement communism)

(Work, by the way, is any productive activity - as I said before. It produces wealth. The majority of people in the first world do not produce wealth. They are involved in something called the 'service' industry, which does not produce all that much. The wealth by which they live is produced in the third world, on the whole. Surplus value is the wealth they produce minus the wealth they consume - the surplus. Assuming you can put a defined value on 'wealth' of course.)