The People Of The Abyss In The Heart Of Empire
In 1902, Jack London was the most successful writer in America, and that was in an era that revered writers far more than we do in the present. So what did Jack London do now that he had struggled up from poverty and a life of strenuous physical labor to become rich and famous? He traveled to London, England, traded his clothes for rags, and spent over a month in the worst slums of England. From his experiences there, he wrote the non-fiction book called People Of The Abyss. He knew it wasn’t going to be a runaway best seller like The Call Of The Wild or White Fang, but it was a story he felt compelled to tell.
In the East End of London, Jack London finds men and women who have worked hard all their lives but have nothing but the meagerest necessities to show for it. He sees children stunted from the dirtiness, disease and foul air. He finds himself one of the fortunate few allowed into a workhouse, where he exchanges his labor for 2 days’ lodging and food. Lodging consists of dozens of men crammed together in a room, while dinner consists of a mixture of corn and water with bread. He spends the night after that feigning homelessness, where he learns from other homeless men that anyone caught sleeping on the streets at night can face two weeks in jail for the crime. He meets elderly men and women who will work — and work hard — until they die. He mentions that 21% of London’s population is forced to go to the church for assistance just to get by. He says that the slums are hugely overcrowded and are constantly filling up further.
The time in which Jack London lived this and wrote about it was at the height of the British Empire, the largest empire in history. It had access to the mineral wealth of much of the world and all the labor it could possibly require. Its banks profited immensely from loans to other nations. And yet, in the very heart of its empire was great misery for its own people. Inexcusable misery the likes of which we would condemn some third-world nation for subjecting its people to even as we subjected it to crushing sanctions.
The lesson that can be learned, and which is driven home in our own times, is this: empires don’t bring wealth to the common people. It’s little different now in the United States, where homelessness is a large and growing problem in all major cities and even the smaller ones. The United States has a quarter of the world’s prisoners with only 4% of the world’s population. 37 million Americans, nearly 1 in every 8 of us, lives in poverty, and 40% of us don’t have $400 dollars in the bank in case of emergency.
For all the wealth empire extracts from other nations in terms of raw materials and cheap labor, the average U.S. consumer sees almost no benefit, while the average U.S. worker is mostly harmed by it. While consumer goods like textiles are cheaper, wages for American workers buy even less than when clothing was made in America. A pair of Levis with the words Made in America could be purchased for $20–25 in 1985, while those same jeans now produced overseas cost $69 or more on the Levis web page. Minimum wage in 1985 was $3.35, while today it is $7.25. The price of gas in 1985 was $1.20, thought it dipped for the next three years to under a dollar.
Where, then, does the wealth taken by empire from other nations go? It goes to a wealthy few and to pay for maintaining an empire that benefits that wealthy few. It goes to a tiny percentage of people with a greed so great that it cannot be sated by the exploitation of the hardworking people and vast resources of its own country. And it also goes to a massive military budget needed to maintain an empire, as well as to propaganda outlets and various forms of bribery that grease the wheels of empire.
All the average citizen of empire really gets from empire is a false sense of superiority to people in other nations. Citizens of empire take pride in the might of their country that cares little more for them, if at all, than it does for the citizens of the nations it exploits and subjugates. For this meaningless pride, the citizens of empire overlook the violence and cruelty imposed upon other nations that is needed to maintain empire. They rationalize a system of oppression that they then inevitably come to accept at home. If dominance and force is required in international relations, then it in time becomes a necessity within our own country. Whatever lip service we give to coexistence and cooperation is mere subterfuge to mask our true ideology of domination and exploitation. And seldom if ever does the average citizen of the hegemonic state stop to consider that they are themselves victims of the same system. It is a challenge for those of us who see things as they really are to remember that they too are victims and forgive them their delusions.
The mentality of empire is that foreign people, governments, and politicians are enemies that must be defeated. The inevitable next step is that we in the heart of empire begin to see our neighbors and the political opposition in the same way. Paradoxically, the moment the mentality of empire has firmly taken root is when the empire itself begins its inexorable decline. It cannot be otherwise, because an imperial mentality is fundamentally flawed. We need not argue the specifics of the current empire, we need only study the recorded history of those that came before.