Re: Nick Cohen on Thomas Frank

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> Charles' reference to Lenin's idea that there is a
> labor aristocracy" that is bought off with the
> superprofits of imperialism doesn't fit the "Kansas"
> case very well, and specifically doesn'y explain why
> people act against their own economic interests. The
> labor aristocracy in the theory acts in its own
> immediate economic interest.

Lenin was trying his best to understand World War I. And he grasped (as
did Rosa Luxemberg) several essential facts. One was the reality (at
that time) of international capitalist rivalry that _could not_ achieve
the 'superimperialism' posited by Kautsky. A second was that capitalism
(as exhibited in the leading capitalist nations) could _not_ be
duplicated universally. Luxemberg and Lenin (like Marx, I believe)
assumed that capitalism itself would collapse before it could become a
universal system. But now that it has, we can see that they were still
correct in a crucial way: capitalism in India, China, Latin America
simply cannot duplicate _for most of the workers_ what it provided (and
is still providing) workers in the core imperialist nations. I don't
think the theory of superprofits used to bribe workers can hold water;
but that was merely an empirical jab by Lenin to explain the facts,
unfortunately turned into a religious dogma in the Third International.
But the facts it was intended to explain, both in respect to politics of
workers in core capitalist (imperialist) nations _and_ in respect to the
condition of the working classes in the rest of the world, still remain.

If current theories of 'superimperialism' hold that the world working
classes will ever achieve, under capitalism, the status that workers in
imperialist nations have achieved (and partly lost), then those theories
are nonsense, and only a deflection from trying seriously to understand
capitalism. Holding on so grimly to what was never a very good theory
("superprofits" as a source of bribery of 'first world' workers) plays
into the hands of contemporary 'Kautskyists' by providing an easy target
for them to attack. (Capitalists in China, India, & Latin America may be
collecting superprofits, and bribing a portion of _their_ work forces
from those profits, but it is really absurd to imagine u.s. workers as
collecting not only the full value of their own labor power but a
portion of the surplus value produced in China, etc.)

The vast gap between workers in the core capitalist nations and workers
outside that core is a fact, and it is a fact that will not change
(unless the former are themselves reduced to the level of the latter).
That fact probably underwrites the national chauvinism and the racism
that grounds support for imperialist wars. But there is no need to
appeal to superprofits as the source of that difference.

It is an overwhelmingly obvious empirical fact that capitalism and
imperialism are inseparable; that the latter is the very mode of
existence of the former. The theory of superprofits was an early (and
not unreasonable) effort to explain that fact, but rejecting
superprofits only shows that we must look further for an explanation of
the fact, not deny it.

Carrol