Oil states as an analog to the United States – and resource rather than settler status as key?

During the 1990s and 2000s, I was extremely aware that the working classes of the United States and Australia were radically different from the powerfully Communist working classes of Europe. The working classes of the United States and Australia, indeed, opposed Communism as anti-Christian.

More recent reading, especially since the 2016 presidential election, has seen a much darker side in that the conservatism of the United States lower class, at least of its white component, is largely or even wholly driven by racism. The fact that, despite massive increases in the wealth of the richest 1 percent, stagnating real wages, and major decreases in religious observance (although they remain much higher than of European workers 150 years ago), poor white Americans are voting for Republicans in larger proportions than they did for Richard Nixon in his 1972 landslide over George McGovern suggests that the role of religion is less marked than I had assumed.

In the 2010s – I think before the Trump victory – I looked online at a book titled Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat by one J. Sakai. “J. Sakai” does not sound like a real name but web searches have failed to find out what his real name actually is. “J. Sakai” argued that the poor white population of America was much more different from the working classes of Europe, East Asia and Latin America than I had presumed previously. He argues that lower-class whites are essentially a petit bourgeois or a “labor aristocracy” and that as settlers they had the same interests as the ruling class.

Whilst I was sceptical of Sakai, I was much less sceptical of Michael Goldfield, who argued and argues that race has always been the mainspring of American politics. A recent article by Mitchell Peterson on medium.com demonstrating the the US is mapped towards a one-party authoritarian regime made me wish to look deeply at this. It is abundantly clear that poor whites are the critical group to reverse increasing income inequality and voter suppression. What I found was an (admittedly outdated, written in January 2010) article by Sebastian Lamb titled ‘J. Sakai’s Settlers and Anti-Racist Working-Class Politics’ which argued that defending the privilege of belonging to the dominant racial group is attractive to lower class whites and promoted constantly by the ruling class as a means of protecting itself. Concurrently the US ruling class invests heavily in making it as difficult as possible for white workers to unite with workers of color. Lamb argues that this emphasis on white supremacy has led to many distinctive traits of US politics and culture.

What Lamb did not discuss, but might, is why the US ruling class has been so much more able to do this than ruling classes in other Enriched nations. I think a relatively simple answer exists:

1. that the US is vastly richer in natural resources than almost any other Enriched nation
2. capitalists who own natural resources are uniquely vulnerable to a united lower class because their assets are so physically immovable
3. ownership of natural resources gives capitalists more financial ability, as well as need, to divide lower classes

I believe that there exists a “hidden” and consistently ignored example elsewhere in the world of an analogous situation to the absence of a socialist party independent of the ruling class in the United States. This being the absence of any democratisation movement in the Gulf oil monarchies (except for an unsuccessful attempt in Baḥrain), as is noted by Sean L. Yom and F. Gregory Gause III in their 2012 ‘Resilient Royals: How Arab Monarchies Hang On’ which emphasises the role oil reserves play in preventing any democratisation movement in most of the oil states. That the United States’ vast and more diverse mineral resources could play an indispensable role in allowing the ruling class to so successfully and consistently divide white workers and workers of color is ignored by Lamb. So is the fact that the Gulf oil monarchies possess similar blood-based caste systems to the white/nonwhite racial classification in the United States. Once one sees this, it actually becomes logical to think that the racial caste system of the United States is more analogous to that of the Gulf Oil monarchies than of India or perhaps even South Africa. Yet writers like Michael Goldfield and Isabel Wilkerson (in Caste) never mention the Gulf oil states as a possible comparison to the United States, despite what I have said above.

If we look at the traits noted by Sebastian Lamb that distinguish the United states, and which he notes are due to racism, and then make a comparison with the Gulf States, one can in most cases see possible similarities as the table below shows 

US trait noted by Sebastian Lamb	Comparative Feature in Gulf Oil States
bad jobs	high frequency of low-paying jobs by expatriates in oil states
low pay	low-paying jobs taken by expatriates in oil states
	extreme relative scarcity of jobs full stop in states from which oil state expatriates originate
low level of unionization	unions are banned by law in all oil monarchies
the dominance of bureaucratic business unionism
no mass workers’ party organizationally independent of the ruling class	complete absence of movements amongst citizens of oil states for any democratisation
almost no public health care or welfare	exception because segregation is sectorial (public v. private) rather than geographic as in the US
the influence of patriotic nationalism and narrow individualism	extremely strong nationalism is apparent amongst citizen populations in oil states

As the table shows, there is one key difference: the Gulf States do have large public health and welfare systems for their citizen populations. The reason for this difference is that caste segregation takes upon a different form in the oil states from the United States. Whereas in the United States caste segregation takes the form of confining nonwhites to urban ghettoes or impoverished reservations, in the Gulf States segregation takes the form of privileged citizens working in the public sector with much greater security than expatriates who dominate all but the highest positions in the private sector. This is possibly because in the United States the expansion of the public sector coincided with nonwhite civil rights movements. These in turn coincided with imperialist competition with Stalinist Russia that forced a degree of racial reform on the United States to avoid being viewed as a pariah internationally and prevent mass international support for Moscow over Washington.

Despite this difference, it does seem logical to me that the US is politically similar to the Gulf oil states to an extent unrecognised. I even suspect that for the Republican Party and its academic supporters, the oil monarchies may be a political model of “privately owned government” (Hans-Hermann Hoppe) regardless of the powerful anti-Islamic bent of the Republicans.

Even the radical left, as can be seen in Gabriel Kuhn’s 2017 ‘Oppressor and Oppressed Nations: Sketching a Taxonomy of Imperialism’, has failed to consider that the US (and Australia) may be much more critically “resource states” than “settler states”. Of the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are undoubtedly true imperialist nations, as seen in their support for international Islamic terrorism and their ability to blockade greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Kuhn also does not recognise that New Zealand – although a settler state – has much more in common politically and economically with noncolonial European nations or the European periphery (especially Iceland) than with Australia or even perhaps the US.