[lbo-talk] [Pen-l] PBS documentary: "Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream"

Marv Gandall marvgand at gmail.com
Mon Nov 19 07:03:37 PST 2012


On 2012-11-18, at 10:39 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:


> I want to underline my point.
>
> Imperialism is not the cause but the _result_ of capitalist wealth and
> power. Colonialism & neo-colonialism blocked the development of independent
> national capitalisms. That also limited the industrial reserve army
> available to capital in the core. "Globalism," by making nearly the entire
> global population available to Capital, broke the power of workers in the
> core to defend themselves.

We agree.


> I believe Doug, both on this list and elsewhere, has argued that imperialism
> (i.e., neocolonialism) has NOT been the source of super-profits, and Charles
> Post in an article in HM a few years ago pretty much destroyed the idea of
> an Aristocracy of Labor leading to opportunism; on the contrary, that
> "aristocracy" was the cutting edge of resistance to capitalism.

Can it not be both - the "aristocracy" as the cutting edge of resistance to capitalism AND subsequently the base of support of "opportunist" social democratic politicians and trade union leaders? I see no contradiction here; the unions themselves were contradictory formations embodying each of these characteristics.

The newest layers of the working class were those whose labour was most in demand and therefore most in a position to strike and to improve their pay and working conditions. Before they were legalized and employer-employee relations institutionalized, they necessarily had to engage in illegal strikes and demonstrations which often turned violent. They were, in fact, in the forefront of resistance to capitalism in the workplace and society.

But as Capital came to recognize the necessity of integrating the unions and improving working class conditions, the influence of the minority which had sought its overthrow receded. The majority sought the further reform of capitalism by peaceful means. In other words, the success of the militant industrial unions in winning various political and social reforms exerted an increasingly conservatizing influence which made them the backbone of the bureaucratized and cautious trade unions and social democratic parties which later emerged.

This trend was expressed most clearly in the working class organizations of Britain and Germany, the two most advanced capitalist countries. The German Social Democratic Party and British Labour Party, and the trade unions which gave birth to them, were who Luxemburg, Lenin, and other revolutionary Marxists had most in mind when they denounced "labour aristocrats" and "opportunists" living off of the profits of imperialism. In effect, the theory served as an explanation for revolutionary Marxists who could not otherwise understand the failure of the workers in the most developed West European capitalist economies to progressively move away from, rather than towards, the imminent overthrow of capitalism as foreseen by Marx and Engels. They used the theory to demonstrate that Bernstein and other "revisionist" Marxists who claimed that capitalism was not in its death throes and had the capacity for reform were wrong; that imperialism had only bought capitalism a temporary reprieve in its "final stage".



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