>CB: Obviously, you are correct. We are not headed to world communism,
because Americans and Europeans are selfish , and aren't about to give
up their material superiority, despite the fact that they got that
superiority through world conquest. The 100 plus US military bases
around the world are not unrelated to the superior US living
standards.
The more I've thought about it over the years, the more wrong I think this is. The main reason we in the west ever extracted any goodies on a mass scale was not imperialism but socialism, the threat of it internationally and the movements for it domestically. Britain ripped off plenty from its colonies and yet the working class didn't start benefiting in the slightest until there were international threats of revolution and serious worker unrest
^^^^^ CB: I think it's good to credit socialism . However, for example, the whole Western Hemisphere was "extracted" by European conquest before socialism even existed. Much of that wealth , especially the use-values, were had by the Euro-American working masses. The wealth derived from the African slave trade is part of the foundation for today's superior wealth. Slavery was abolished decades before socialism. Today's wealth is built on and accumulated on that and from centuries of colonialism around the world before 1917.
The Industrial Rev in England was based in significant part on super exploitation of American slaves and Indian Peasants. The British working class consumed most of the mass commodities it produced before socialism.