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On 10/18/2017 7:03 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-20/why-workers-are-losing-to-capitalists
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-20/why-workers-are-losing-to-capitalists
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"No one would like to see capitalism transform into the kind of dystopia
envisioned by Karl Marx. That’s why even though the decline in labor’s
share has so far been relatively modest, economists are racing to
diagnose the cause before the problem gets any worse."
Read: 'We have to shape up to ward off communism, the age-old bugaboo,
the 'spectre haunting Europe'" - which has never been given a chance to
prove its merits, because the terms of trade on which all depend for
life-sustaining resources are rigidly dictated to all the globe by
capital, and most importantly, the sources of true conditions are
concealed and distorted by the capitalist kept press and monopolized
popular culture, backed by overwhelming police and military coercion -
and Marx envisioned a system which this Bloomberg hack cannot
acknowledge for a moment, whatever he may by now understand.
"The IMF economists also predict that global financial integration
should help alleviate the pressure on labor in poor countries. If
American, European, Japanese and Taiwanese companies are able to invest
in a developing country like China, the inflow of foreign money will
boost incomes for local workers and compete down the profits of local
capital owners."
Walt Rostow and his 'stages of growth' platform still being mindlessly
channeled, after 65 years, ignoring that 65 years later much of the
planet's inhabitants lives on $2 a day or less, the disparity between
North and South wage rates are falling not rising, and we're not one
flea-hop closer to solving the world's, the climate's and the working
class's pressing problems. And completely ignoring anything to the left
of Rostow, Stiglitz or Krugman, such as John Smith's fine book
'Imperialism in the 20th Century,' which if any loutish, mouthpiece
pundit would take the trouble to read, lays it all out plain and clear.
Here is what John Smith has to say about Rostow:
The Suppression of free labor mobility and the making of the South
The proclaimed free movement of capital and commodities must also be
applied to that which must be above all else: human beings. No more
bloodstained walls like the one being constructed along the American-
Mexican border, which costs hundreds of lives each year. The persecution
of immigrants must cease! Xenophobia must end, not solidarity! —Fidel
Castro, Durban, 2 September 1998
A facile analogy between the modernization processes taking place in
the Global South since the Second World War and the nineteenth-century
development of capitalism in Europe and North America is central to
capitalist ideology in both its liberal and neoliberal variants.
Convergence between developing and developed nations was both the
premise and the prediction of Walter Rostow’s paradigm-setting The
Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, which argued that
developing countries would naturally pass through the same stages of
development as did Europe and North America a century earlier, from
agrarian societies to industrialized societies, eventually attaining
development and convergence with developed countries. Sixty-five years
on, and only Taiwan and South Korea have risen from the ranks of
developing nations, and the global crisis will test how secure is their
grip on the higher rungs of the development ladder. Rostow’s seminal
work helped to turn this deterministic and Eurocentric notion into
the intellectual foundation both for the mainstream academic theories of
development and for the policies promoted by imperialist governments and
international financial institutions (IFIs) from the 1960s until now.
Rostow argued that Europe’s takeoff resulted from internal processes:
'All that lies behind the breakup of the Middle Ages is relevant to the
creation of the preconditions for takeoff in Western Europe. Among the
Western European states, Britain, favored by geography, natural
resources, trading possibilities, social and political structure, was
the first to develop fully the preconditions for takeoff. The more
general case in modern history, however, saw the stage of preconditions
arise not endogenously but from some external intrusion by more
advanced societies.'
But is it true that Britain and Europe’s “takeoff ” was due to
endogenous factors alone, as Rostow asserts? Marx had a different view:
“The veiled slavery of the wage laborers in Europe needed the
unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal. . . . The
treasures captured outside of Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement
and murder flowed back to the mother-country and were turned into
capital there."
Rostow presents the more recent external shocks triggering modernization
processes in “traditional societies” as benign and progressive. In
continuation of the earlier quote, he says: “These invasions—literal or
figurative—shocked the traditional society and began or hastened its
undoing; but they also set in motion ideas and sentiments which
initiated the process by which a modern alternative to the traditional
society was constructed out of the old culture.”
But did the “invasions” of ideas, commodities, missionaries, and
soldiers from “advanced societies” play a beneficent, progressive role,
or did they create obstacles to progress? “Politically, the building of
an effective centralized national state—on the basis of coalitions
touched with a new nationalism, in opposition to the traditional landed
regional interests, the colonial power, or both, was a decisive
aspect of the preconditions period; and it was, almost universally, a
necessary condition for takeoff.” But corrupt, kleptocratic elites often
violently resisted change, and elites in the advanced nations—and states
under their control—often colluded with them, out of desire to
continue plundering natural resources and exploiting cheap labor, or for
fear of independent nation-states pursuing their own interests and
making their own friends, or to crush rebellious subject populations,
and often all three.
Rostow was well aware of this: “In . . . a setting of political and
social confusion, before the takeoff is achieved and consolidated
politically and socially as well as economically . . . the seizure of
power by Communist conspiracy is easiest; and it is in such a setting
that a centralized dictatorship may supply an essential technical
precondition for takeoff and a sustained drive to maturity.” In
practice, the impulse to develop and modernize thus took the form
of civil wars and wars of national Southern Labor, liberation, in which
struggle against old and new forms of colonialism and neocolonialism
meshed with struggles to overthrow domestic elites who were too afraid
of their subject peoples to dare to mobilize their energies in a
push for modernization and development. This, not Soviet expansionism,
explains why the struggle for modernization often took the form of
socialist revolution—for example, in China, Cuba, Vietnam. The
pro-Moscow Communist parties often played a deeply ambiguous or even
counterrevolutionary role in these struggles.
The rest is at http://resistir.info/livros/imperialism_john_smith.pdf
pp. 105-7
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