Re: What's a life worth?

On Fri, 28 Apr 2000, Spectors wrote:

>Randy --- I really don't want to attack your integrity. Perhaps you didn't
>mean for your words to sound the way that they do.  But what you wrote 
>above
>definitely does SEEM TO IMPLY that it is "not as bad" to destroy the lives
>of millions of darker-skinned people of the world than it would be to "kill
>your 'own' people."

Terrific point, Alan.

His statements are also deeply problematic because capitalist countries do
in fact round up laborers in their own states or for export to their
colonies. English labor history is full of periods of rounding up
vagabonds, vagrants, orphans, etc., and selling them into bondage to
capitalists in their North American and Australian colonies. In the
United States, Indians were rounded up and forced to migrate across the
country. After slavery, blacks were rounded up by capitalists and forced
to work under the most degrading and dangerous of conditions. In the West,
Latino labor forces were subject to such treatment. And perhaps no groups
suffered more explicitly harsh treatment of this kind than the Chinese
immigrant. Now we have a vast prison system to contain the fallout from
structural unemployment, and increasingly this system is being transformed
into a slave-labor force.

There is also a problem with the notion of Soviet "colonialism" or
"imperialism" if by that term we mean the economic exploitation of a
"periphery" by a "core." In the relations between the core and periphery
in the capitalist context there is often a flow of surplus out of the
periphery into the core. Thus the periphery was underdeveloped by their
relation with the core. By contrast, relations between core and periphery
in the Soviet system system led to development in the satellites. They
were, as the capitalist ideologue would have it, propping up their
satellites. Capitalist have exploited this fact by noting how much former
Soviet satellites - "propped up by the Soviet Union" - have suffered after
the "fall of communism." One can hardly claim that the extension of the
Soviet Union was of an exploitative nature analogous to the relation
between core and periphery in world capitalism, let along worse.

Andrew Austin
Knoxville, TN