[Marxism] Imperialism and the US working class (Was YADL)

[Joaquin Bustelo]

S Artesian  questions my statement ""imperialist countries grow rich as [at]
the expense of the colonial and semi-colonial countries.  The overwhelming
majority of the population of imperialist countries share in this
imperialist privilege." 

He asks for data and so on. Apart from reading Marx on primitive
accumulation, and perhaps an article or two on who profited from the slave
trade, I would suggest he chart the price of sugar against price of
industrial products for the last 100 years. Also he price of coffee and the
price of crude oil. And in the case of coffee, he can even just chart the
bean price paid to, say, a Costa Rican grower versus the ground coffee price
paid in an imperialist supermarket. 

Then he wants to know the exact mechanism through which the wealth "trickles
down" to the workers of imperialist countries. The exact mechanism is this:
they LIVE in the imperialist countries. Is this desirable from the point of
view of workers? Does it actually make a difference?

I do not have the data to hand, but let me suggest the following
investigation to the comrade: compare the number of unauthorized immigrant
workers TO the United States FROM colonial and semicolonial countries who
come here to become part of the U.S. working class, to the number of
unauthorized immigrants FROM the United States who enter illegally countries
like Mexico to become a part of its working class.

That will tell us, strictly from the point of view of OUR class, whether its
desirable that your president be Black in North America or your Primer
Minister Brown in Europe, as opposed to Latino. 

Sorry is I sound a little contemptuous. But when people start writing stuff
like "this notion of imperialist privilege" --you can hear the harrumph in
their voice-- it drives me up the wall. 

It drives me up the fucking wall because NONE OF US who are part of the
working population in the imperialist countries would FOR ONE SECOND even
CONSIDER trading places with anyone in our chosen field/occupation, or at
any rate the one we wound up in, in Africa or Latin America or India or
China. Whereas if you were to offer that deal in the opposite direction
generally to people in the Third World, a few billion hands would shoot up.

And anyone who claims this doesn't affect the consciousness of working
people is just whistling past the graveyard -- the one where the corpse of
the movement of the U.S. workers AS A CLASS rests. SOME DAY it will rise
again in what will be for the capitalists a Transylvanian nightmare much
more terrifying than all the vampire stories and Dracula movies. And while
we do not know the timing or exact combination of circumstances that will
lead to a reawakening of the workers movement, we do know the circumstances
under which it fell into its death-like slumber.

Joaquin