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Correction: "the disparity between North and South wage rates is falling
not rising" should read "rising not falling."
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
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"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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