Mark Jones wrote:
>Doug's question about what lies behind Chile's alleged 7% growth
>rate implies a judgment that salmon fisheries and apple orchards
>are intrinsically less worthwhile endeavours than say car assembly
>or silicon chip plants. Perhaps we should question that, maybe by
>discussing the existential meaning of labour, in the context of
>Marx's notion that value is the embodied form of human 'alienated
>ability', as Doug also recently suggested.
I suspect the salmon aren't fished for, but farmed, and in any case, the
workers are not the self-sufficient peasants of your apparent pastoral
fantasy here. They're paid pennies for doing ecologically destructive work
that doesn't do a damn thing to feed Chile's urban poor. Hey, I like having
Chilean blueberries in January as much as the next spoiled New Yorker, but
I don't think that's the best thing for the Chilean working class.
>In any case, the model Henwood favours seems to be the
>anachronistic one of self-confident national bourgeoisies (no doubt
>aided and abetted by parliamentary socialists) overseeing the
>creation of large-scale Fordist industries peopled by docile
>'affluent' proletariats.
Is this a roundabout way of saying I'm a neo-stalinist?
>Maybe this is better than the comprador
>class now running Chile, but in any case that kind of industrialisation
>in Chile would only decant poverty, rural distress and latifundism
>elsewhere in the 3rd world, would it not? Or does Doug suppose that
>development is possible everywhere equally, providing only that
>sufficiently enlightened elites exist?
Was the CPSU one of these enlightened elites in its day?
Really, what ever are you talking about, Mark? You're getting a bit carried
away with your celebration of the Anglo-American model - which, these days,
really is an American model, with a few Brits comically trying to ride the
slipstream of U.S. prestige. How can you be so sure that industrial
development in Chile would necessarily "decant poverty, rural distress and
latifundism elsewhere in the 3rd world"?
I'm no fan of elites, enlightened or benighted. I'm talking about different
strategies of economic development, looking within existing capitalism for
hints of a better post-capitalism. This is an old Marxist tradition, no?
Now I know quite well that you can't just separate "models" from real
societies, with all their political, cultural, and historical details. But
if we're trying to do political economy, we do have to try to isolate some
general principles of how capitalist economies work - otherwise, we might
as well stop talking about capitalism at all, and throw it on the junk heap
as another discarded master narrative. I look at the experience of Asia,
compare it with Latin America, and conclude that you need a strong state,
with strong controls over foreign trade and capital flows, to accomplish
anything like economic development - whether you're using hardheaded
standards (like growth and investment levels) or soft ones (like real wage
growth, literacy and health indicators, and poverty reduction). Of course,
since it's capitalism, it's still brutal, exploitative, and unstable. But
tell me, Mark, would you rather be an autoworker in Korea or a berry-picker
in Chile?
Doug
