[lbo-talk] Class Analysis of the Empire?

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>In my opinion, all three ideas above should be criticized and
>>rejected, but criticisms of the empire (as well as criticisms of
>>Israel) are often couched in moral terms that partake of one or more
>>of them.  For the last several years, we have seen outpourings of
>>books and articles critical of US imperialism (and Israel), but
>>class analyses of the empire, especially ones that clarify American
>>workers' positions in it (or ones that clarify Jewish workers'
>>positions in Israel), are hard to come by, perhaps because of the
>>waning of Marxism.  That's a big problem we need to rectify.
>
>I couldn't agree more. So how do we start? I'd really love a 
>rigorous analysis of just how much imperialism contributes to the 
>U.S. standard of living today, but I don't know of any. Any ideas?
>
>Doug

A couple of years ago, when the topic of imperialism came up on 
PEN-l, I looked into some research databases searching for empirical 
studies of "costs" and "benefits" of "empire."  There are a good deal 
of books and articles by economic historians on the topic with regard 
to the British Empire -- fewer on US imperialism, it seems.  All of 
them that I have been able to track down (e.g., 
<http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-820565-1>) do cost-benefit accounting 
in national terms, not in class terms.  Very interesting (one of 
these days I'll compile a selective annotated bibliography of them), 
but not exactly what I was looking for.  Maybe, I didn't look into 
the right databases, but I suspect that nationalism is built into 
research methods, as it were.
-- 
Yoshie

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