At 05:05 PM 5/4/99 -0500, Yoshie wrote: >I think that this war is, in an important sense, an expression of the fact >that a huge part of the working class have become expelled from productive >labor under neoliberalism. ... There is no currently >legal & profitable way to incorporate, for instance, most if not all of the >Russian working class in the capitalist world economy. What do capitalists >do with the working class people they do not need to employ? Imprison them, >starve them, or kill them. ... I don't get this. In the US, a lot of people have been kicked out of productive labor by neoliberalism, but a lot have gotten new jobs, often in productive industries. (BTW, from a capitalist class point of view, i.e., from the point of view that defines "productive labor" for Marx, service labor is productive.) The rise in incarceration lowers the unemployment rate, but even when you correct for this to allow comparisons over time, the unemployment rate so far in 1999 looks pretty good except compared to the late 1960s, at least in the US. We also must remember that capitalism is an expansionary system. Neoliberalism has lowered wages and boosted profits. The latter encourages capitalist accumulation and increased demand for labor-power. So nowadays, in the US you hear capitalists complaining about shortages of labor... You'd think that the capitalists would want to increase the availability of cheap labor in the Balkans (as with the Rambo accord's demand that free markets prevail in Serbia) rather than killing off a bunch of workers. Now it's true that capitalism is irrational, i.e., it won't always serve capitalist class interests, as when they _prevent_ cheap labor by killing a bunch of people and destroying the economies in the Balkans. But your description makes it sound like the capitalists want to get rid of surplus population and are pushing war in order to attain these goals. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html Bombing DESTROYS human rights. US/NATO out of Serbia!
