Preliminaryy Draft

Preliminary (incomplete) Draft of Work in Progress
Comments Welcome Do U.S. Workers Gain from U.S. Imperialism? Gerald Epstein*
First Draft: May 9, 2003 *Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Political Economy Research
Institute (PERI), University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I thank Anita
Dancs, Carol Heim, Michael Klare, William Hartung, Stanley Malinowitz,
Seymour Melman, Dorothy Power and Michael Remer for providing important
materials and/or helpful discussion on aspects of this project. I also
thank Dorothy Power for excellent research assistance. Unfortunately, I
can't blame them for any remaining errors.
Abstract This paper attempts to answer the following question: Do U.S. workers
currently gain from U.S. imperialism? The tentative conclusion is that
U.S. workers do not, on balance, gain from U.S. imperialism, at least since
1985. Though they gain from more stable and (probably) lower oil prices and
the prices of other commodities, the tax system which shifts the cost
burden of U.S. imperialism onto US workers, and cheap imports from abroad
which are facilitated by US backed globalization that hurt U.S. workers'
wages and employment, on balance, U.S. workers loose substantially. On top
of that, of course, are the costs to US workers, who make up most of the
military, in blood.
The situation was probably different in the 1950', '60's and '70's.
At that time, U.S. workers had much more power to extract rents from U.S.
capitalists, and globalization tended to work to the benefit of U.S.
workers. Therefore they had much more power to get a piece of the
imperialist pie. Oil prices were extremely low and very stable. Taxes,
which paid for U.S. imperialism were more progressive, so workers had to
pay a lower share.
I. Introduction
This paper attempts to answer the following question: Do U.S. workers
gain from U.S. imperialism? In writing this paper, I immediately ran up
against a slight problem: this appears to be an almost unanswerable
question.
For one thing, virtually every term in the question is ambiguous, and
even contentious. First on the list, of course, is the term "U.S.
imperialism". Many would vehemently deny that the U.S. engages in
imperialism. Others would argue just as strongly on the other side. This
debate is made much more difficult by a second central problem: what do we
mean by the term imperialism? There is a huge literature on imperialism,
but uses of the term are far more numerous than attempts to define it. And,
to make matters worse, even when people do define the term, they do so in
many different ways.[1] For example, should we define imperialism simply to
mean colonial occupations? Should it refer only to military interventions,
such as the U.S. interventions in Vietnam, Central America and Iraq? Or
should we include the whole set of political and economic interventions
used by the United States to promote the "Washington Consenus" of neo-
liberalism?
In addition, there is the matter of the term "U.S. workers"? Is it all
U.S. workers, including lawyers, doctors, etc. or is it the "working class"
classically defined?
Then there is the word "gain". In some ways, this may be the most
difficult problem of all. The problems here are many. First, do we mean
only economic gains? Or do we also mean political, psychic, and security
gains? Second, what "run" are we talking about: short-run, medium-run, long-
run, long, long, long-run? Related to this is a third, and extremely
difficult problem: what is the counter-factual? That is, what would the
world look like if the U.S. did not engage in imperialism? Some classic
theorists, Lenin, for example, argued that the cost of imperialism was war
and the alternative would be socialism. Depending on what you think about
socialism, this is a pretty easy call. Marx, on the other hand, who never
used the word "imperialism", argued that colonialism was not inevitable or
necessary, but that once it occurred, there was no going back. What is the
counter-factual here? In a teleological approach to history, what does it
even mean to talk about "counter-factuals"? (Brewer, 1990: chs, 2,3, and
6).
Perhaps the counterfactual we should assume is a more cooperative and
peaceful, social democratic world. Or, perhaps it is just things more or
less as they are, with less military intervention and a smaller defense
budget (the closest thing to a "partial equilibrium" approach).
After having seen so many problems inherent in this exercise (and
there are more), the reader might reasonably ask: why bother? There are
least three reasons. First of all, many people think they already know the
answer. When I proposed this paper, one of my colleagues sent me an email
and said, "What's the answer? I assume it's no." And when I went to
discuss these issues with another colleague he said, "Well, I assume the
answer is yes." Faced with this, I thought it might be a good idea to try
to move a bit beyond assumptions, but just how far beyond we can get
remains to be seen.
Second, for someone, myself included, who believes that some form of
political economy and class analysis is necessary for understanding the
world, analyzing the distributional consequences of policies is critically
important. In fact, this is my main motivation for writing this paper.
What can explain U.S. workers' attitudes toward U.S. government policies
such as the invasion of Iraq? Of course, there are many elements involved.
But to what extent is this invasion and the whole set of international
interventions of which it is a part in the "material interests" of U.S.
workers? I somehow believe that making progress on answering this question
will help us understand the forces driving such policies and, more
importantly, the actions that could possibly change them.
For example, the U.S. population's attitudes toward the Iraq war have
evolved from indifference, to concern and opposition, to -- it seems - wild
enthusiasm. Does this support have an economic basis? If so, it might be
more difficult to get workers on the side of an anti-imperialist political
movement. On the other hand, whereas the AFL-CIO strongly supported the
Viet Nam war and other U.S. military interventions in the 1950's, 60's and
70's, they opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Does this evolution
have a material basis? Does it make it more likely that the majority of
workers could support an anti-imperialist policy? It would be nice to know
the answer to these questions, and if not the answer, at least some range
of likely answers.
In the next section, I very briefly discuss classical writers of
imperialism and describe their views of the impact of imperialism on the
well being of workers in the imperalist countries. We will see that the
variety of answers they come to have to implicate this set of problems I
have identified. Then I turn to empirical work, first looking at the
existing studies which have tried to asses the impact of imperialism on
workers. We will see, however, that that there is very little literature
on the costs and benefits of imperialism in the United States to draw on.
In fact, I could only find two papers, and neither of them explicitly
studied the impact of U.S. imperialism on U.S. workers (Zevin, 1972;
Lebergott, 1980). However, there is a vast economics literature on the
costs and benefits of the British Empire. But even this literature includes
relatively little discussion of the distributional impacts of British
imperialism in Britain itself.[2]
In section four I briefly survey this literature because it will be
helpful in developing a framework for studying U.S. imperialism. The
section following, defines the term imperialism, in the ways for purposes
of use this paper. It also describes the framework I use to assess if U.S.
workers benefit from U.S. imperialism. In section V, I present the
estimates. Section VI summarizes the conclusions and make suggestions for
future research.
It is important to make clear at the outset what this paper is NOT
about. This paper is not about what most of the literature on imperialism
has concerned itself with. This paper is not about the causes of
imperialism, for example, whether it is an inevitable part of capitalism,
whether it is due to the export of capital, or underconsumption, or the
search for raw materials, the interests of some narrow business interests,
or a vestige of some previous class formation. (See Brewer, 1990 and Owen
and Sutcliffe, 1972, for excellent discussions of many of these issues). It
is also not about the impact of imperialism on groups other than U.S.
workers. That is, itt is not about the impact of imperialism on profits,
or, on the beneficiaries and victims of U.S. imperialism elsewhere in the
world. Of course, these issues are all very important. And they inevitably
interact with the issues discussed here at various points; indeed, at some
points, I will not be able to avoid referring to them. But, however
important these issues are, I am not writing about them in this paper
because I am afraid I may have bitten off more than I can chew as it is. II. Theories of Imperialism and Its Economic Impact on Workers in the
Imperialist Countries[3]
Classical Theory Of course, over the years, there has been an enormous amount of
theoretical discussion about the distributional impact of empire and
imperialism.[4] The classical authors in the Marxist tradition had
something to say about this, but not a lot. Writing about British imperialism in India, Marx notes: "As to the working classes, it is still a much debated question whether
their condition has been ameliorated at all...But perhaps also, in speaking
of amelioration, the economists may have wished to refer to the millions of
workers condemned