Imperialism serves Amerika: Oppose Imperialism -- Oppose Amerika!

by MC12

The protests at the Deomcratic and Republican conventions -- like 
the anti-"globalization" protests in the U$ of the last few years 
-- feature a lot of would-be progressives trying to make their 
social base bigger by saying the interests of the Amerikan middle 
class are one and the same with the interests of the oppressed 
nations and the international proletariat. That falsehood 
undermines real revolutionary politics; it fuels fascism and 
reactionary nationalism; and it whips up the richest "working 
class" in the world into a nationalistic frenzy masquerading as a 
defense of "democracy."

The D2KLA coalition, which coordinated different groups for the 
protests of the Democratic National Convention, put out a "Call 
for Celebration and Action." Their agenda listed a lot of 
important things to oppose, including militarism, "criminalization 
of youth," environmental destruction, the "prison industrial 
complex," persecution and deportation of immigrants, "law 
enforcement corruption, brutality and state sanctioned murder."(1) 
It's good to see people protesting these things.

But look how they try to tie global exploitation to the supposed 
rampant and worsening poverty and deprivation in the U$. A few 
typical statements deserve comment:

"Politicians in both parties are more interested in serving 
special interests than in addressing the needs and wants of the 
people they are supposed to represent." Who are they "supposed to 
represent"? MIM sees no reason why Amerikan politicians, who run 
the whole world, should have a special duty to serve people in the 
U$. They should answer to the world. When they bomb the shit of 
Iraq so everyone in the U$ can buy gas for ridiculously low prices 
-- and $2.00 a gallon is still insanely cheap -- who are they 
serving? In Nigeria, 250 people died in July when the spilling gas 
they were desperately scooping up exploded. The free flowing 
energy in the U$ is paid for by the blood of the international 
proletariat.

"Our health, healthcare, and education are a shambles and 
teachers, caregivers and service workers are underpaid." By what 
standard are these workers underpaid? Anyone who makes minimum 
wage or more in the U$ is head-and-shoulders above the world's 
majority, and is benefiting from imperialism. It may not be easy 
to look people in the face who earn $7 an hour and tell them they 
are not exploited, but when they sit down and buy a cup of coffee 
for $1, or some cheap sneakers or candy for their kids, they are 
cashing in. The sooner we get used to that reality, the sooner we 
can get people united on a truly internationalist basis. With a 
truly internationalist perspective you just have to set aside 
local or patriotic prejudice and put the immense poverty and 
exploitation of the world's majority at the center of the 
struggle.

"Housing and transportation are not affordable or accessible and 
rarely meet the needs of those who need it most..." In June, 
hundreds of Filipinos were killed when then garbage dump where 
thousands of people live collapsed. There is a problem of 
homelessness in the U$, but it is just tiny compared to the 
situation for most countries. Again, internationalism demands 
attention to the greatest injustices regardless of national 
borders.

Finally, they say, "The gap between the rich and those near or 
below the poverty line widens every day. ... While the economy is 
supposed to be booming, the majority of people are making less." 
The economy in the U$ is booming, as the collapse of the Soviet 
social-imperialist empire opened up a whole new world of 
opportunity for Amerikan imperialism to grow. There is also a 
growing inequality within the U$, but as MIM has shown over and 
over, it's just not true that the majority in the U$ are doing 
worse than they were 20 or 30 years ago. To listen to this 
argument, it would be impossible for anyone in the U$ to be alive, 
as things just get worse and worse and worse for the majority all 
the time. This kind of hype pays no attention to the facts.

We need to ask the hard questions here. What is "poverty" in the 
U$, and what is its relation to imperialist exploitation?



Put things in perspective!



In 1998, the poorest 20% of U$ households spent an average of $799 
per person on the non-necessary items alcohol, entertainment, 
pets, toys, TVs, and sound equipment.(2) Let's look at this two 
ways.

First, compared to the rich in the U$. The richest 20% spent 
$1,973 per person on those same categories in 1998. That's a ratio 
of 2.5-to-1. In 1984, the first year this stuff is published for, 
that ratio was 2.8. That means there is no more inequality in 
spending on these leisure categories than there was in 1984. It's 
been very stable over those years, bouncing around between 2.6 and 
3.2, with no clear trend. So, number one, the poorest 20% are 
keeping pace with the richest on consumption of non-necessary 
items over the last 15 years. If the poor in the U.$. were being 
trampled on and driven into extreme poverty the way some people 
say, the rich would be running away from them on these non-
necessary categories, but that's not happening. Where do the 
poorest 20% get $799 per person to spend on non-necessary items? 
Furthermore, the fact that the richest only spend 2.5-times more 
per person on these items than the poorest should give people 
pause.

Second, compare this to the rest of the world. The Gross National 
Product per person in what the World Bank calls the "low income 
countries" -- countries with the poorest 3.5 billion people, or 
60% of the world population -- was only $520 per year in 1998.(3) 
The Gross National Product is supposed to be the total size of the 
economy in dollar terms, so you can think of it as the total 
spending on all categories for the whole population. So, ITAL the 
poorest 20% of people in the U$ spend 1.5-times as much on these 
leisure items as the poorest 60% of the world spends on 
everything! END



MIM mostly agrees with this statement by J. Sakai, author of ITAL 
Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, END which MIM 
calls a must-read book: "We have to deal off the truth that the 
revolutionary left has no social base of support in the metropolis 
right now [MIM would say a relatively small base, not no base -
MC12]. To say this is simply facing reality. Because we don't, 
there is a natural tendency to seize on 'get rich quick' schemes. 
To look for 'magic bullets' or some issue we can jump aboard that 
will magically gain us a mass following. This is like furiously 
mining 'fool's gold'. For reasons in the basic class structure, 
Left politics have been marginalized in the metropolis, certainly 
in the u.s. We exist in the far edges of society, politically 
speaking. This is not of our making, and is not even necessarily 
bad. In the world of Babylon, the oppressed are the ones who are 
marginalized, first and foremost. Undocumented workers, classes of 
disposable women, exiles, Third World workers fighting even to 
survive. The world's majority exists at the margins."(4)



The oppressed majority lives on the margins of the imperialist 
countries, that is. But globally and historically, it is 
imperialism and the imperialist countries that live on the 
margins. This is a simple application of the fact that the masses 
make history. So although the international proletariat may be 
marginalized here in Amerika -- and us proletarian revolutionaries 
along with it -- on a world-wide scale, it is strong, it 
represents the rising tide of the struggle to end imperialism, 
capitalism, and patriarchy. If we unite with the international 
proletariat -- even if that means we are unpopular here for a time 
-- we will win our righteous struggle; if we abandon the 
international proletariat for the sake of the "fool's gold" of 
popularity here and now, we will fail.



That is why MIM says to those who want to oppose the worst 
oppression and exploitation in the world: "Oppose imperialism -- 
oppose Amerika!"



Notes:



1. D2KLA quotes are from D2KLA.org.

2. Calculated from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer 
Expenditure Survey, available at www.bls.gov.

3. World Bank data from World Development Indicators, at 
http://www.worldbank.org/data/wdi2000.

4. "Aryan Politics & Fighting the W.T.O.," available at 
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Omega/5844/aryanpoliticswto.html