>>>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.
>>JB: 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.
JB: Sure, but we were talking about current imperialism and whether the U.S. and other western working classes benefit from the empire to the extent that it is actually against their material interests to have world socialism. Without socialism somewhere in the world and the continued threat of it here, we will be back to third-world conditions, and some of us are already experiencing them. The informal economy is thriving here in west Harlem, for example.
>CB: 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.
JB: It cut both ways. The British working class also did a lot of dying in factories and far-away places. I'm fairly sure British factories of the time would remind us of Indonesian or Bangladeshi factories now.
In the U.S., anti-slavery whites had a material interest, which was widely understood, in stopping the spread of slavery west to the new states. That was selfishness, too, in the sense that they went to war to advance their material wellbeing (yes, I know, on Indian land). Their selfishness just happened to bring down the slavocracy. I suppose they could have focused on cheap cotton and rum, and said it was in their interest to have slavery expand, but I think we agree that would have been a wrong analysis of their self-interest.
Part of our job is to point out how imperialism is NOT in the self interest of workers in the U.S.--if we always focus on one side (as a result of race and sex analysis being way ahead of class analysis in this country) then it'll just be all about the allegedly wonderful privileges whites/men/U.S. citizens have and we'll never get past that to understanding that the owning class wants it all and it's up to us to stop them.
Jenny Brown