>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.
I just don't know exactly what to think about this - the specific contribution of imperialism to First World privilege. Does it depend on a hierarchy of poorer nations in the same way that a bourgeoisie depends on a proletariat, or are poor countries poor because productivity is low and value production scarce? I'm not sure.
Doug