However this does not mean (and has never meant) that they don't exploit workers in their "home countries." And every marxist thinker and leader in the world (from Lenin to Mao to the leaders of todays movements) insist on this -- because it is an important basis of the internationalism between the workers of the world.
MIM implies that U.S. workers live off of the labor of people all over the world -- and aren't exploited themselves.
It is true that because the U.S. is an imperialist nation -- its economy is more robust, more articulated and rational. The u.s. no longer has a peasantry that is being ruined by capitalism, and flooding as desperate poor into the cities (depressing wages). In the third world there are the extremes of "super exploitation" -- where the existance of semi-feudalism in the countryside allows workers to be exploited BELOW the value of their labor power.
However none of this means that tens of millions of workers in the U.S. are not exploited -- (and scientifically speaking, that they are only paid around the "value of their labor power" -- meaning they barely make ends meet.)
It is also not true that most of the profit the U.S. capitalists get is from outside the U.S. -- or that it is mainly from the third world.
In fact the U.S. ruling class invests about 1.4 trillion overseas every year, and many many times that much domestically.
If y ou analyze where it invests overseas -- most of it is in the OTHER IMPERIALIST COUNTRIES. Which just confirms that there are proletarians in those countries to exploit. (And huge amounts of theinvestment of the Japanese, German etc. imperialists is within the U.S. -- exploiting the labor of the multinational u.s. working class).
The ratios of this are worth looking at briefly:
This is true for the U.S. ruling class -- their investment, and the amount of "profit" extracted within the U.S. is many times more than their investment overseas. Throughout history they have brutally exploited working people within the u.s. -- using the most extreme means (like slavery) and in modern times working millions of people under intense conditions for wages that barely keep body-and-mind together.
Clearly, both today and historically, this has involved the special exploitation of Black and Latino people and immigrants -- who are often held at the bottom of the working class, in castelike ways.
As imperialism developed in the U.S., there were a number of parallel economic trends -- associated with the export of capital to the third world, the extraction of superprofits from there, and the ability of the U.S. imperialists to develop all kinds of operations in the U.S. that were parasitic (i.e. removed from value creation, like vast banking and speculation, advertising, etc.)
International exploitation has become vital to imperialism (for many reasons) -- and expanding their share of that exploitation is a major goal of each imperialist class.
However this does not mean (and has never meant) that they are not ROOTED within a national market, where the bulk of their surplus value comes from exploiting the workers there. The notion (in the current book "Empire"
that international capital is now rootless and "transnational" refers
to important trends and developments, but is essentially false.And, even when you look at the amount of investment and profit, the U.S. ruling class does overseas -- it is mainly concentrated in OTHER IMPERIALIST COUNTRIES not in the third world. (I.e. the exploitation of Japanese workers is very important for the U.S. bourgeoisie -- and is itself a sign of the existance of an exploited working class in Japan. And furthermore, many foreign imperialists put a huge amount of their investment capital in the U.S., to exploit the proletariat there.)
If you look at the overseas investment, here are the figures:
all countries: 1,381,674 million
Investments in other imp countries
Europe: 727,793 million
Canada: 139,031 million
Japan: 64,103 million
total: almost a trillion dollars
Investments in the third world
Latin am: 269,556 million
Africa: 2,063 million
Middle East: 12,643 million
total: almost 300 billion dollars.
(Figures are taken form the Department of Commerce, Survey of Current Business from January 2003. The numbers are all for 2001, and are measured in millions of dollars. There are figures there on the INCOME from those investments too, and so on. Profit income does not correspond simply and directly to surplus value -- but the overall ratios are revealing. http://www.bea.doc.gov/bea/ARTICLES/2003/01January/D-Pages/0103DpgG.pdf)
Side note:
This does not mean that the super exploitation in the third world is not important for imperialism. Thought it just means that the bulk of surplus value in the world does not come from exploiting the workers of the third world.
Exploitation in the third world is important because the RATE OF EXPLOITATION is extremely high (because of suppressed wages and other reasons) so the investments by imperialism in those regions increase their global competitiveness with their rivals. (this is a whole discussion, which i have only touched on.)