>Has anyone ever tried to quantify the contribution of imperialism to
>the First World standard of living? The jokers in the Maoist
>Internationalist Movement - who, I'm told by people who knew them in
>Ann Arbor are mainly upper-middle and upper-class kids looking for a
>fresh reason to hate the American working class - claim to have done
>it, but they'll only share the info if you pay 'em $10. I don't doubt
>at all that imperialism contributed a lot to Europe's initial rise to
>wealth, but what's the contribution today? The MIMsters claim that
>most value production goes on in the Third World, with the First
>World (including the working class) living off that value. Seems to
>me that the poor countries are poor mainly because little value
>production goes on there (another illustration of Robinson's law,
>that under K'ism, the only thing worse than being exploited is not
>being exploited). So who's right?
I think that imperialism doesn't have to contribute to rich nations' living standards massively in terms of surplus value production for it to be not only valuable but also necessary for the systemic needs of reproduction of capitalism. It simply needs to help, together with other factors, counter-balance the tendency toward a periodic crisis. This being the case, the MIM theory of labor aristocracy in rich nations is ill conceived. Imperialism is a losing proposition for workers in the belly of the beast. Workers pay for the maintenance of the empire but get back little in return.
Yoshie