I wanted to piggyback on @dushanbabe’s post regarding the the comprador bourgeoisie and its collaboration with the imperial core.
I recently posted about Fanon’s critique of the National Bourgeoisie - the bourgeois that allied with the colonial power, or gained their status once the colonial power receded. This works hand in hand with the core-periphery model popularised by Wallerstein and Dependency theory that came out of Latin America.
The core-periphery model operates like this:
The core refers to the imperial core - Western Europe and the US. The periphery refers to the rest of the world - the imperialised, colonised, or underdeveloped. This is Latin America, Africa, Asia, and arguably Eastern Europe.
The core and periphery interact through extraction, as capitalism requires constant expansion. The periphery is underdeveloped (or over exploited, as said by Parenti) through their economies never evolving past limited export of raw materials. The core thus gains its wealth through having access to these cheap raw materials, labour, and a monopoly on finished goods.
There are countries that lie somewhere in between these two - Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Spain, South Africa etc. They act as buffer zones. They are examples to point to and say ‘ look! It is possible for the periphery to become the core, for their economies to develop beyond neocolonial extraction.’
This is not the case. These buffer zones exist at the goodwill of the imperial core.
A nuance to have with this, however, is that the Core has a core and a periphery, and the Periphery has a core and a periphery.
The core of the Core is the bourgeois. They are the state, the business owners, and the titans of industry. Some would say that labour aristocracy falls into this too. The Core also has a periphery - historically marginalised groups like African Americans in the US, the Romani people in Europe, or any other group that has their access systemically limited. This is your proletariat. These are the people that must ally themselves with the Periphery.
The Periphery also has a core. They are the comprador bourgeois, the members of state, the nouveau-riche. They too are bourgeois, but they are subordinate to their Imperial core peers (see my previous post about Fanon and the national bourgeois). The Periphery then has a wider periphery - the hyper-exploited proletariat, or even peasant population. Independence from colonisation did not free them from exploitation, and this is why you see militant Marxists emerge from the periphery. They do the labour that allows the core to have gentle capitalism in the form of social democracy.
Where I disagree with the model below is that there is a harmony of interests between the two peripheries. Both must unite to form a global, working class movement. There is no sympathy for the capitalists of the periphery.
My apologies for the long post, but I think that this provides a more nuanced understanding of class. The bourgeois-proletariat model is global, but their natures differ slightly.
