Zak Cope *Divided World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism*,(exerts from interview) Full interview here<http://anti-imperialism.com/2012/09/18/understanding-and-changing-an-interview-with-zak-cope-author-of-divided-world-divided-class/> Pervasive national, racial and cultural chauvinism in the core capitalist countries is not primarily attributable to ‘false class consciousness’, ideological indoctrination or ignorance as much left and liberal thinking assumes. Rather, these and related forms of bigotry are concentrated expressions of the major social strata of the core capitalist nations’ shared economic interest in the exploitation and repression of dependent nations. First, the depredations of colonialism and slavery provided not only the historical impetus for the rise of capitalism, and for the birth of the working class as such, but also a crucial source of food, employment opportunities and land for metropolitan labour. Second, the book highlights a historical shift whereby metropolitan labour first depends upon colonial labour for its existence, then, later, increasingly for its sustenance, and finally, now, upon neo-colonial labour for its entire lifestyle. Third, the book shows that the tasks facing workers in the developed countries are not those facing the workers of the underdeveloped countries. That fact may seem obvious, but the book goes further and shows that there is a deeply rooted contradiction between the aims and interests of the respective workforces, as demonstrated by metropolitan labour’s active engagement in colonial and neo-colonial politics. My initial motivations for writing the book were threefold. Firstly, I wanted to examine why workers in the rich countries seemed to have given up on socialism. As Donald Sassoon’s magisterial *One Hundred Years of Socialism* shows, the working class of the imperialist countries has for a century and more struggled to regulate and socialise capitalism, not replace it. If it is true that capitalism is an inherently exploitative and oppressive socioeconomic system how is it that workers in the rich countries have been so content to put up with it? Moreover, how is it that workers in the developed capitalist countries are so far from having, as Marx wrote, “nothing to lose but their chains”? My second motivation, then, was to counter those ideologies on the left which seek to explain these phenomena (that is, metropolitan working class conservatism and * embourgeoisement*). So, for much of the left, it is its militancy, its productivity or a combination of both, that explains metropolitan labour’s relative affluence. Paradoxically, however, the Western left has felt the need to explain working class conservatism by something other than this. Thus it has tried to excuse metropolitan labour’s conservative, complacent and fully reactionary politics with reference to its having been brainwashed or divaricated from its revolutionary tasks by all-powerful ideological state apparatuses (attempts to excuse it with reference to job insecurity and “precarity” notwithstanding). In short, for much of what passes for the left, it is “false class consciousness” that has led the Western working class to prefer social democracy, social partnership, and blatant national chauvinism (all these predicated on a political alliance with the capitalist class and its representatives) to socialism. Finally, and most fundamentally, the book was motivated by a desire to reinvigorate an internationalist perspective which had been sorely neglected by a Marxism deeply marked by a pernicious Eurocentrism. In that sense, the book was motivated by wholehearted opposition to colonialism and imperialism, which provide the real underpinnings of *embourgeoisement*, reformism, and racism alike. ..the division between the rich and poor countries brought about by colonialism and imperialism is today the most fundamental “group relation” shaping peoples’ worldviews.