Marvin Gandall schreef:
We could have a lively discussion about the explanatory power of
the concept of a "labour aristocracy" -a pejorative term describing
the more highly skilled and paid stratum of the working class whose
"privileged" status in many countries is the result of a long struggle
to form trade unions. It originated as a polemical device employed by
the disappointed left wing of the labour and socialist movement to
explain the failure of the organized proletariat in the West to move
beyond nationalism and social democracy to socialist revolution.
Revolutionary Marxists attributed the conservatism of Western trade
unionists - in particular, their lack of internationalist solidarity
with workers in other countries and with oppressed colonial peoples -
to their having grown fat and content on a share of profits from
imperialism passed on to them by their employers in the form of higher
wages and better working and social conditions.
This is certainly part of the answer, but it's not a settled question
that the success of Western capitalism in delivering a steadily rising
standard of living to the working class was wholly or even primarily
due to imperialism. Dynamic technological change resulting in higher
labour productivity has also to be taken into account. In any
case, implicit in the notion of the labour "aristocracy" is that
material betterment corrupts. It's a moral category, which,
IMO, stands in contradiction to the historical materialist premise,
generally supported by the historical record, of cultural advance
through economic progress. It draws an exaggerated picture of the
condition of skilled workers in the West, even after WW II. None of
the people I knew were "aristocrats", or perceived themselves to
be such. Most didn't pay attention to foreign policy and, when they
did, their impulses were more often than not to be on the side of the
oppressed. You would think from the theory that their
representative trade unions didn't challenge capitalism and
imperialism, and instead eagerly promoted both. That may have been
true of American unions at the height of the Cold War, but it was not
the general rule, not even in the US. If they only
challenged capitalism and imperialism weakly, this had less to do
with ideological conviction or the material stake they had in the
system, but with a largely realistic appraisal of the balance of
forces and limits to their own power in the workplace and political
arena.
Clearly I don't agree with Matthijs that a "labour aristocracy on one
side can only exist at the expense of another side." As Jim Devine
earlier suggested, the contemporary "labour aristocracy" includes
himself and, by extension, most everyone on this list and their
workmates, friends, and neighbours. Matthijs would have to demonstrate
that the skilled working class in each country has a material interest
in thwarting economic development and the creation of skilled jobs
elsewhere, or, more to the point, that concerns about foreign job
competition are so pathologically endemic that they lead to support
for foreign wars and imperialism. In fact, America's worried "labour
aristocrats" are still among the strongest opponents of the Bush
administration's foreign policy, and it is preposterous to assert that
the growing army of industrial, administrative and professional
workers in China, India, and other emergent economies are foreordained
to "destroy" their counterparts in the West. Matthijs needs to
reexamine the assumptions which have lead him to these - frankly,
reactionary - conclusions.
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You raise some good objections, but I do want to give a few
counterpoints. The first is that I don't think the 'benefits from
imperialism' thesis necessarily implies that workers tend to actively
support wars and intervention in the abstract, but rather that they
focus on domestic parties that 'deliver the goods' in this respect
(namely the social-democrats) and are willing to accept their support
for imperialism and colonialism in the bargain, even if they don't like
it. Indeed morally they may well feel connected to the plight of the
Third World, but so do many more open-minded liberals, and even perhaps
some conservatives. What matters is what domestic political conclusions
they draw from their worldview, and these are not revolutionary either
in domestic policy or in foreign policy, and in my opinion this is
because they benefit too much from the current world system. You see
this often with particularly industrial workers, where a sort of split
mind appears with regard to capital; on the one hand they oppose and
hate it in their own country, and this inclines them to sympathize with
workers in the Third World as well, but on the other hand they fear the
competition that those Third World workers represent, and the fact that
they have a stake in the global power of their own country. This often
manifests itself merely as intuitive protectionism, but also sometimes
as racism and xenophobia, or outright support for imperialism abroad. Of
course, this remains a question of class consciousness, and I don't mean
to say that it is impossible for Western workers to take up an
anti-imperialist position. But the tendency for social-democratic
parties to engage in imperialist war, combined with the almost automatic
mass support these parties have among Western workers (even during such
times of war), is something that cannot be ignored. Even now New Labour
is vastly more unpopular because of its right-wing domestic shift than
because of the Iraq war. Moreover one can argue the Iraq war and Bush's
policies are a bad example, because they don't actually benefit these
workers at all, unlike some other (and more indirect) forms of
imperialism. It does seem the Iraq war only got truly unpopular when the
US started losing though.
You're right that merely imperialism alone does not account for the
dominant position of the West today, and that the technological and
economic changes in the period 1750-1900 aside from colonialism have
everything to do with it too, although they are intimately related. But
we all know that increases in productivity need not at all necessarily
imply increasing living standards - productivity increases before the
advent of capitalism as such often hadn't done so at all, and we're
probably all familiar with the many applications of technology by
capital against the workers, automatization being the best known
example. Until the later half of the 19th century there was not much
indication at all that the improvements of technology of the Industrial
Revolution were making workers better off. But this changed from then
on, and the only likely explanation I have ever seen is that this is
because colonialism and imperialism in Africa and Asia took off in this
period like never before. There seems a direct correlation between the
intensity of imperialism and the relative strong growth of living
standards among the masses in the West - these increases being exactly
largest when imperialism was making its greatest gains (1860-1914 and
1945-1960), and being least when imperialism was weaker or the
imperialist powers more busy fighting each other, like during WWI and
WWII, the 1930s, and the resurgence of the independence movements in the
1960s-1970s. Aside from its explanatory power re: social-democracy and
conservative unionism, I see all this as clear signs that the Western
working class materially benefits from imperialism as well.
From this it seems to me to follow that the Western working class,
especially those not particularly class conscious or well-informed about
the history of the Third World and its struggles, or about the history
of colonialism etc., has little to gain and a lot to lose by
developmental and independence movements in the Third World, especially
those aimed at competing with the West in the economic sphere, such as
China, India, and formerly the USSR. Equally so, movements in these
countries, and also in even less developed countries in Africa and Latin
America, can only truly have a chance at both developing and moving
towards some form of socialism by throwing off all Western power in
these countries altogether as well as reducing Western power worldwide
overall. Now of course on both 'sides' the workers truly do have the
same interests in getting rid of capital, which is the cause of the
conflict in the first place, but it requires an enormous amount of both
historical understanding and foresight, beyond even the interests of the
nation-state's development, to see this. And I think if we are realistic
we have to acknowledge that both in the US and in Africa most workers
_don't_ see this.
Also to clarify: by "destroy" I didn't mean physically destroy, but
destroy their status as labour aristocracy, i.e. to reduce them to the
level of 'normal' labour without the benefits of imperialism. Basically
to the situation vis-a-vis labor they were in in the 1870s, and that
Chinese, Filipino, Thai, Kenyan, Colombian etc. workers are in now.
Sorry for the long text but I want to make sure I make myself clear.
Matthijs Krul
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