In a way it is. Colonial empires maintain the support of the proletariat in the imperial cores by funneling wealth from colonized nations back to those people. If you’re better off than your parents were, and your parents are better off than your grandparents were, why do you care that your ruling oligarchy is genociding its way across the planet and shoveling stolen profits into its insatiable maw?
English commoners forgave their empire’s industrial scale genocide of African slaves on Haitian plantations because that genocide provided white sugar for their tea.
American commoners forgive the wholesale torture and murder of Latin American peasants because we can buy cheap bananas at the supermarket.
The top 20% of Americans control 80% of America’s wealth. But they don’t consume 80% of the resources America consumes. They don’t burn 80% of the gas, they don’t eat 80% of the food, they don’t produce 80% of the pollution. What’s killing the world is the bread and circuses - or rather the cars, cell phones, and factory farms - that give all but the very poorest Americans an artificially inflated standard of living at the cost of the world as a whole.
But telling poor Americans “your standard of living is too high” when the entire capitalist machine tells them they have the right to all the consumption they can buy and the best standard of living they can earn, it’s a hard sell, you know?
In a way it is. Colonial empires maintain the support of the proletariat in the imperial cores by funneling wealth from colonized nations back to those people. If you’re better off than your parents were, and your parents are better off than your grandparents were, why do you care that your ruling oligarchy is genociding its way across the planet and shoveling stolen profits into its insatiable maw?
English commoners forgave their empire’s industrial scale genocide of African slaves on Haitian plantations because that genocide provided white sugar for their tea.
American commoners forgive the wholesale torture and murder of Latin American peasants because we can buy cheap bananas at the supermarket.
The top 20% of Americans control 80% of America’s wealth. But they don’t consume 80% of the resources America consumes. They don’t burn 80% of the gas, they don’t eat 80% of the food, they don’t produce 80% of the pollution. What’s killing the world is the bread and circuses - or rather the cars, cell phones, and factory farms - that give all but the very poorest Americans an artificially inflated standard of living at the cost of the world as a whole.
But telling poor Americans “your standard of living is too high” when the entire capitalist machine tells them they have the right to all the consumption they can buy and the best standard of living they can earn, it’s a hard sell, you know?