"Devine, James" wrote: > > >The Soviet empire was not extortionary, in the sense of providing a > bounty of riches to the imperial center, as India and other colonial > holdings had done for Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries; instead, > it was a drain on Moscow. Without oil, the heirs of Lenin would have had > great difficulty subsidizing their needy allies, their globe-spanning > navy, their 45,000 nuclear weapons, their four-million-man army, their > record-setting Olympians and their space stations. Oil was, in many > ways, more crucial to the Kremlin than ideology.< > > Some scholars (sorry, I don't have the reference here) argue that even the British > empire wasn't profitable for Britain as a whole. But it clearly benefited the upper > classes, who were more important in decision-making. > If you consider the conditions of English workers in the 1840s & 1850s as described by Marx & Engels, and if in addition you consider the _change_ for the worse of that condition between (say) 1750 and 1840, also as described by Marx & Engels, and if, finally, you consider that the engine of that change had been the textile industry (fueled by exploitation of the u.s. south, India, & China), then it becomes fairly obvious that the "Empire" was an utter disaster for English workers. In fact, the Empire could be regarded as a huge, terroristic machine designed primarily to pump surplus labor out of English workers.
Carrol > Jim Devine
