At 02:05 PM 7/19/01 -0400, you wrote:
>Jim Devine says:
>
>>Michael wrote:
>>>It may be that intellectual property laws may be the most effective form
>>>of protectionism devised so far.
>>
>>except that it's not the kind of thing that's called "protectionism." It
>>protects individual corporations or other property-holders, not the
>>domestic markets of countries. It's an extension of "normal" property
>>rights like patents, copyrights, trade marks, etc. The owners of
>>"intellectual property" can easily take their property and move to
>>another country.
>
>The decline of protectionism + the rise of intellectual property (among
>other things) = "Kautsky's story of 'ultra-imperialism' (the rich
>capitalist powers unified against the world)...without the positive
>connotations that Kautsky saw (the ending of the anarchy of production)"?
Instead of the _equation_ of the "decline of protectionism" (etc.) with
ultra-imperialism (UI), I'd say that the former is the result of the latter.
The rise of UI started after World War II, when the US became the hegemonic
power in the capitalist sphere. The US power was cemented by elite fear of
the USSR and of various popular revolutions, from Cuba (1960) to Portugal
(1975) and beyond. US hegemony, along with fear of a return to a new
Depression at the end of WW II, encouraged the creation of GATT and other
efforts to unify the world market. In the early phases, US-based industry
was dominant economically, so that they wanted to gain access to other
countries' markets, so the US supported GATT. Over the years, the
superiority of US-based industry has faded, but the generally pro-trade
MNCs have gained much more clout.
The US-led system of UI has changed a lot over the years, partly due to the
disappearance of the USSR. There's a lot more emphasis on solidarity of the
"trilateral" powers. Even though there are a lot of stresses within the UI
coalition (cf. Kyoto), we see nothing similar to the aggressive competition
amongst nation-states that prevailed before WW II.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
