Marvin Gandall schreef:
Charles would be the first to agree that Lenin and the other classical
Marxists were influenced by and wrote for the period they lived in, and
didn't hand down formulas valid for eternity. They lived at a time
when the
working class in the West was growing in size and power and a sizeable
part
of it identified with the revolutionary left. They also witnessed
first-hand
the great scramble for colonies by the Europeans, the US, and Japan
and the
brutal misery inflicated on the colonial peoples which Twain, among
others,
documented in relation to the Belgian Congo and other super-exploited
territories. So they properly characterized the period as a revolutionary
and the age as one of imperialism. They thought they were on the
threshold
of capitalist collapse and socialist revolution, and their forecasts
seemed
to be strikingly vindicated both by the imperialist rivalry
culminating in
World War I, and by the subsequent wave of unrest in the armies and on
the
home fronts unleashed by the war which culminated in the Russian
Revolution.
In these circumstances, it was plausible to argue that the narrow craft
unions and reformist leaderships of the workers' parties were running
well
behind the temper of the working class and delaying and obstructing the
world socialist revolution which now looked all but inevitable. The
materialist underpinning they gave to their analysis was that the craft
unionists who controlled the embryonic labour federations and workers'
parties had been effectively been co-opted into supporting the system
with
the extra profits generated by imperialism. But, as Charles notes, they
didn't extend the concept of the "labour aristocracy" to the growing
army of
industrial workers in the advanced capitalist countries who were just
beginning to organize and on whom the revolutionary left pinned its
hopes.
I won't repeat my arguments except to say that I've balked at the much
wider
use of "labour aristocracy" to describe the mass of today's workers in
the
West; that, in general, working class conditions in the West are
stagnating
or declining while those in the periphery are improving; that the higher
growth rates, rapidly developing home markets, and export of capital from
the former colonial territories to the West suggests the age of Western
imperialism is drawing to a close and that the analytical framework of
unequal exchange through which we've understood the world over the past
century needs updating; that the "crisis of leadership" theory is
inapplicable in a period when the leadership reflects the liberal
consciousness of the base, where the socialist left is now wholly
absent;
that we live not in an age of advance and revolution, but of retreat and
counter-revolution, characterized above all by the collapse or
transformation of the old anticapitalist states and movements, the
contraction of the Western trade unions, and the expansion of capitalism
into vast new markets.
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
I don't necessarily disagree that the classical age of imperialism might
be drawing to a close, though I think it is too early to draw
conclusions from it. In any case it would imply that the age of
_western_ imperialism is coming to a close, as I do not think capitalism
can exist without some form of imperialism. But as long as this hasn't
happened yet, I think it is legitimate to refer to the social-democratic
inclined (skilled and/or white) worker in the First World as a labor
aristocracy, and all the more so for the Western union bureaucracies.
It's interesting to see the discussion often mentions as a
counter-measure the support for open borders and more immigration. I've
noted from discussions elsewhere with left-inclined people that there is
a strong tendency to feel that they should take on a pro-immigration
position. I'm not convinced that this is correct - on the basis of what
I've seen and read, it seems to me that strong immigration is bad for
_both_ the home country of the immigrants and the new host country's
workers. The only people who seem to benefit at all are the immigrants
themselves and their relatives back home (the latter due to
remittances), and even that is debatable. Why should we support mass
immigration again?
Matthijs Krul
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
