Telling the Left From the Right By Frank Smyth

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Mon Mar 3 17:09:48 PST 2003


Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>
> And if you're going to think about it, you have to think about how
> compatible social democracy is with open borders, and how much SD
> depends on having imperial wealth to distribute to the workers of the
> imperialist countries.
>

Were I to say this ("imperial wealth to distribute to the workers of the imperialist countries") it would be labelled doctrinaire Leninism. :-)

Probably, _in some sense_, it points to the truth. But it can't be a literal distribution, because that would imply that workers in imperialist nations produced no surplus value -- that they kept the whole of their own product, that is, and in addition received surplus value from the imperialized nations. Nevertheless, as I said on a post a couple weeks ago, I think Lenin had it right on the main point, the necessity of imperialism, but he didn't, and to my knowledge no one since has, come up with a satisfactory explanation of why and how this is so.

Were imperialism _merely_ a deliberate policy pursued by one sector of the capitalist class of each imperialist power, there would be more evidence of successful opposition to it. Its resiliency suggests its inseparabilty from capitalist relations of production.

Carrol


> Doug



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