Louis: > For the > foreseeable future, places like Argentina and Venezuela are on the > front lines. In places such as these, anti-imperialist consciousness > will fuel the proletarian revolution just as it did in Vietnam, Cuba, > China and many other countries where victory was not achived.
The main advantage held by revolutionaries in Russia in 1917, China in the 1940s, Cuba and Vietnam in the 50s was class consciousness and/or the opposition of weak/unpopular states. What they did not have were the fully developed capitalist economies which would have ensured the long term success of their revolutions. > I wouldn't compare what > happened in Australia to what happened to Nicaragua, however. Me either. > The USA > could have lived with a Labor government in Australia. It was on the > other hand ready to break laws and risk a constitutional crisis to > topple a government that it feared would become another Cuba. You have correctly identified the percieved threat to important US satellite/communications bases (e.g. Pine Gap, Nurrungar and North West Cape) as the main reason why the US state wanted rid of Whitlam. His government was also a direct threat to accumulation by US companies; there were strong left nationalists in his cabinet who were committed to nationalisation of mineral/petroleum ressources owned by US companies. There were other reasons as well, such as Whitlam's embarrassment of Nixon's foreign policy (e.g. unilateral withdrawal of Australian troops from Vietnam and his criticism of US foreign policy generally.) > In a letter to Marx, dated October 7, 1858, Engels wrote: "...The > English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so > that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming > ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a > bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which > exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent > justifiable." > In a letter to Kautsky, dated September 12, 1882, Engels wrote: "You > ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, > exactly the same as they think about politics in general. There is no > workers' party here, there are only Conservatives and > Liberal-Radicals. and the workers gaily share the feast of England's > monopoly of the world market and the colonies." What these quotes do not show is that Marx's view, especially at the end of his life, was very long term. English wage labourers in 1858 were --- apart from Australia and other settler societies --- the best paid working class in the world. English workers benefited directly from the economic growth driven by formal/military imperialism and directly from cheap consumer goods produced overseas. These things could hardly lend themselves to revolutionary class consciousness. But the end had to come and it did. No one could say in 2002 that class consciousness or pauperisation is absent in England. Regards, Grant.
