>>What I was imagining was that work (or welfare but NOT revenues from
>>capital) would be paid better ...
>
>What I was asking you to do was imagine the mechanism that would bring
>this about and perhaps describe it in some way that would make it
>believable to us tilting at the Crash windmill.
I don't have to imagine anything. There's a market price for labour which
reacts to supply and demand and thus to macroeconomic policies. When
Greenspan says that he doesn't want wages to go higher, he has the means to
do what he says. There's also labour laws. And there's obviously trade
unions.
What's your problem with that?
>>Do you have an idea of the waste generated by the bosses and the
>>rentiers?
>>[snip] Do you have
>>an idea of the waste generated by excessive advertising, packaging,
>>etc.[snip] Do you have an idea of the waste
>>generated by gross capital misallocations [snip] If anyone had figures, it
>>would be nice to share it.
>
>I will let this whole side of the argument rest upon Sam Pawlett's
>just-posted excerpt of Richard Smith's. Some DO have ideas and figures,
>Julien. ... or at least they are implied.
Sorry, but I don't understand the connection.
>Well. You are halfway there, Julien. When you understand that wages ARE
>natural resources consumed, you'll get it. (If you wish to quibble via some
>Marxist theoretical definiton of wages, okay. I'll just have to throw
>William Forster Lloyd, Bentham and Ricardo at you.)
That's what I said eventhough I said that wages are not only that. In fact, all
definitions of wages I know don't agree with us because they put no ceiling to
the value of non-essentials (they either rely on market prices or on embedded
labour as a fundamental value). But please, throw the classics at me. I'd be
interested to see how they say that wages are a function of ressource
consumption.
>Yes, indeed. I am VERY interested in hearing from you of A way to reduce
>natural resource plundering,
There are really MANY ways. One example? Ban car from our cities, they stink
and they kill. Another more realistic but less fun? Eco-taxes. A really cool one?
Passing of a UN resolution saying that any general with an army outside of his
country must eat the weight of gas consumed by the said army in hamburgers.
Then implementing it with spare cruise missiles.
>b)reduce consumption by 6 billion people without "hurting living
>standards"
Banning advertising. That was just one example.
There are real-world examples of countries with different consumptions for the
same living standards. Do you deny that?
>a)what "an alternative" will be - NEXT YEAR - to this capitalist
>madness b) how "the current flavour of capitalism" is going to disappear
>BEFORE "the big crisis hits".
I've no global solution and I'm not even sure that a global solution would be
desirable. So I'll stay at a hopelessly national level.
I'll be very old fashioned: Electoral victories, general strikes, etc. (recipe
doesn't apply to all countries). That would not end the whole madness, but that
would take us away from capitalism as we know it (at least). Now, I know this is
currently unrealistic but from the beginning of this thread we've been talking
fantasies.
>What is
>missing from the perception and -- dare I say it? -- from these Marxist
>theoretical cloud castles is the realization that values are not sane in our
>cultures, that all the economic systems currently under discussion drive
>values farther from sanity, and that 6 billion consumers at ALL levels of
>"wages" is a kind of madness that make the concepts of values as you wish
>to describe them rather moot.
Is there a misunderstanding? I was talking of actual economic value, not about
the insane ones that are expressed in current prices. Marxist theory
recognizes that there's a difference between values and market prices (or at
least I was thinking so, but Mark who knows better said that there was no
transformation problem).
Driving prices closer to actual values is not extremely hard for most states, as
long as it's recognized that thoses values must be arbitrarily decided. I don't
deny any possibility of applying "real" values, but that would be a lot harder.
>I'll let this just pass. It would be fun to debate the non-existence of a
>united global market and the impending disintegration of same. However it's
>probably just as much fun to ask you to look at the manufacturing labels on
>the products in your house and see how many bear the word "China" upon
>them. <g> Now imagine them all saying "Switzerland" a year from now under
>an alternative-to-global-capitalism. Just exactly what does that look like?
Sorry to insist, but there is not a unified market including China and
Switzerland. Things are traded, that's all. Europeans governments are
struggling to create a unified market among them. Do you think that they have
struggles to achieve a pre-existing goal?
As to the disapearance of things manufactured in China in the Swiss market, it
looks like a problem. Solving that problem however would bring about a better
economic system (the less trade the better, if only because of it's ecological
costs). Now, if the word Kuwait was to disapear, it would be another matter!
>Meanwhile, the citizens of Europe and North
>America -- be they proletarian oppressed or bourgeois bosses -- go to bed
>tonight each having consumed the bread of 13 AIDS orphans in sub-sahara
>Africa. I eagerly await the plan -- and the mechanism -- that adjusts that
>"wage" imbalance.
Can you be clearer about your figure? You're not talking about food
consumption are you? Obviously they are different patterns of gross
consumption both intra-nationaly and internationaly.
As to the plan, I think it's our job to leave them alone and their job to find their
plan. Their plan will have to include getting rid of most if not all governments in
that aera of the world. Not realistic, but the problem is serious enough without
those parasites who love to wage wars.
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