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In my view, comrades, these two reviews are written without thinking
about - much less working through - the most profitable aspects of
(South-to-North&BRICS) value transfers, namely the expropriation of
'free gifts of nature' by colonial, neo-colonial and multinational
corporate extractive industries. It's as if Rosa Luxemburg's and Samir
Amin's most profound insights don't exist.
On 2018/08/18 03:16 PM, Barry Finger via Marxism wrote:
For a critical assessment of “unequal exchange”:
https://isreview.org/issue/107/unequal-exchange
On Aug 18, 2018, at 8:16 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism
<[email protected]> wrote:
https://www.epw.in/journal/2018/32/perspectives/imperialism-21st-century.html
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To remind, here's Luxemburg's statement from The Accumulation of Capital
(p.349 in the Verso edn):
"What is most important, however, is that, in any natural economy,
production only goes on because both means of production and labour
power are bound in one form or another. The communist peasant community
no less than the feudal corvee farm and similar institutions maintain
their economic organisation by subjecting the labour power, and the most
important means of production, the land, to the rule of law and custom.
A natural economy thus confronts the requirements of capitalism at every
turn with rigid barriers. Capitalism must therefore always and
everywhere fight a battle of annihilation against every historical form
of natural economy that it encounters…In detail, capital in its struggle
against societies with a natural economy pursues the following ends:
(1) To gain immediate possession of important sources of productive
forces such as land, game in primeval forests, minerals, precious stones
and ores, products of exotic flora such as rubber, etc.
(2) To ‘liberate’ labour power and to coerce it into service.
(3) To introduce a commodity economy.
(4) To separate trade and agriculture."
Please let's not neglect point (1), because the natural resource
depletion component of this process - i.e., minerals and other
non-renewable resources stripped from poor countries without adequate
compensation - is measured now at around $150 billion per annum from
Africa alone. (Specifically, that's 'net natural capital depletion'
within the 'Adjusted Net Savings' accounts in the World Bank's Changing
Wealth of Nations 2018 database.)
Soon we'll have a much deeper analysis of this process online at Paul's
Research in Political Economy, but I try to explain it simply here:
https://www.pambazuka.org/economics/new-evidence-africa%E2%80%99s-systematic-looting-provided-increasingly-schizophrenic-world-bank
And in a video version on RealNews:
https://therealnews.com/stories/corporate-looting-sub-saharan-africa-loses-100b-a-year
Adding not only resource depletion but also the other crucial missing
category - the 'subimperial' layer of super-exploitative regimes -
here's where I address the debate between Smith and Harvey:
http://roape.net/2018/04/18/towards-a-broader-theory-of-imperialism/
Why is it so hard for otherwise well-equipped Marxist scholars to
address these points, especially natural resources extraction?
After all, in his latest book (from MR Press), Amin certainly
did:"capitalist accumulation is founded on the destruction of the bases
of all wealth: human beings and their natural environment. It took a
wait lasting a century and a half until our environmentalists
rediscovered that reality, now become blindingly clear. It is true that
historical Marxisms had largely passed an eraser over the analyses
advanced by Marx on this subject and taken the point of view of the
bourgeoisie – equated to an atemporal ‘rational’ point of view – in
regard to the exploitation of natural resources." (Modern Imperialism,
2018, p.86)
So please retire those ecology-erasers, dear comrades, and factor in the
depletion of non-renewable resources!
Cheers,
Patrick
(I'm writing a new essay dedicated to Luxemburg-in-Africa now, so if you
disagree, please help by explaining why.)
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