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: "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".
Yes, that is the question. Similar to the question of whether white workers benefit materially from (domestic) racism. Victor Perlo wrote to volumes of the economics of racism arguing racism is against white workers' material interests.
On your "other" point, I tend to think of current imperialism as built upon the whole history of colonialism and slavery. And I was responding in part to your saying ," 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 ."
I guess I don't give up on the possible rhetoric gambit which sees patriotism as a double-edged sword. If American patriots want to love their flag which represents their history ( Boston Tea Party and all that) then they gotta take responsibility for all the conquest, genocide and imperialism of that history as well as it role in creating the "greatest country in the world and history".
However, certainly I'm for lamenting the loss of the Soviet Union and socialist countries, and loss of their impact on the class struggle in the "West".
^^^^^^^
>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.
^^^^^ CB: Agree. Dickens and all that but I wouldn't characterize the British working class as not benefiting in the slightest. Part of why capitalism works is that the wage-laborers are actually paid the value of their labor power and have wages to buy stuff. The surplus labor is gotten in a "fair" deal as opposed to through the use of brute force as in feudalism and slavery. Engels noted that the booty from British colonialism had a bourgeosifying effect on many British workers, feeding opportunism. Lenin generalized this to workers in all imperialist countries *
^^^^
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.
^^^^^ CB: Agree. And certainly Marxism's plan is rooted in appeal to material 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
^^^^^^^^ CB: At this point, I'd say that we have to appeal to some kind of "ultimate" self-interest, because a huge fraction of the US working class has concluded that this is the Greatest, Richest country in the world based on the material conditions they find themselves in and see most of the rest of the world in. I don't see how we are going to persuade them that they aren't privileged relative to the rest of the world.
During the existence of socialism, US propaganda had to propagate the Big Lie that "the Russians were coming" that Communism was expansive and imperialist. I mean the really Big Lie. This was in order to rationalize US military expansion all around the world to protect economic imperialism.
Now, the argument has to be that it is US worldwide military presence that _begets_ so-called terrorism. So , military expansion begets the opposite of security.
Does the owning class want it all ? At some level they have to understand that without a mass of consumers with money, a big middle class, they can't realize profits. Wealth in the form of the mass of personal consumer goods and services must be consumed by masses.
* http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1110
Theory of the “Labor Aristocracy”
Frederick Engels first introduced the notion of the “labor aristocracy” in a number of letters to Marx stretching from the late 1850s through the late 1880s. [2] Engels was grappling with the growing conservatism of the organized sectors of the British working class. He argued that those British workers who had been able to establish unions and secure stable employment - skilled workers in the iron, steel and machine making industries and most workers in the cotton textile mills - constituted a privileged and “bourgeoisified” layer of the working class, a “labor aristocracy.”
British capital’s dominance of the world economy - its industrial and financial “monopoly” - allowed key employers to provide a minority of workers with relatively higher wages and employment security. Engels saw the resulting relative privilege, especially when compared with the mass of poorly paid workers in unstable jobs, as the material basis of the growing conservatism of the British labor movement.
The contemporary theory of the labor aristocracy is rooted in the work of V.I. Lenin on imperialism and the rise of “monopoly capitalism.” Lenin was shocked when the leaders of the European socialist parties supported “their” capitalist governments in the First World War. The victory of what he called “opportunism” (his term for reformism) confounded Lenin, who had dismissed the development of “revisionism” (Edward Bernstein’s challenge to classical Marxism in 1899) as the ideology of socially isolated, middle-class intellectuals. Lenin believed the “orthodox Marxist” leadership of the socialist parties and unions had long ago vanquished the revisionist challenge.
Jonathan Strauss, in “Engels and the theory of the Labor Aristocracy”, Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, 25 (January-June 2004) www.desp.org.au/links/bank/issue25/Strauss.htm, presents a useful summary of Engel’s writings.