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Waistline, I don't think you really prove the 'mechanics to electronics' theory. I mean you state it, but nothing is offered as proof (which of course doesn't make it wrong at all, it does make it unconvincing, however). I think it's also sort of more of a haiku than serious Marxism. For instance, 1974. An interesting date. It's when in 21st floor of the U.S. Steel building the first of a really bad set of takeway contracts was being experimented with by the board of directors of U.S. Steel and their consultants. In fact the agreement, which spawned one of the largest rank and file movements in the US was even called that: the "Experimental Negotiating Agreement". It helped provide further surplus value to effectively be used in the almost total delocalization of the US steel industry to Japan, Korea and Tawain. The "permanent unemployed", I would argue, had little if anything to do with "electronics" but rather had everything to do with the shift toward total control of the economy by finance capital. We perhaps don't disagree where except for over the means it used. This should come as no surprise (although it did to everyone back then) since it was not the 'captains of industry' as Waistline points out but finance capital that was calling the shots. Useless manufacturing in the US nation-state, "useless" from finance capital's point of view, had to be delocalized, reorganized and deunionized. It was basically. This delocalization was fertilized with the Breton-Woods new monetary world order established a few years earlier and culminated in the this latest orgy of speculative financial depression. But it was not the kinds of productive forces, technologically speaking, that had much to do with this, at least in my opinion. This massive world wide shift of capital investment caused far more unemployed than any school of technology. Waistline posted, several times I think, the massive decades long set of numbers showing the down ward drop of employment in Auto. Ever look at the steel industry? At least the UAW continued to exist. The USW became a shell of itself after *most* of basic steel was gutted. It's not Detroit, alone, even metaphorically speaking that we are talking it about. No, not at all. It's Youngstown, Lackawanna, Loraine, South side of Chicago, Duquene, Pittsburgh, Braddock and too many other steel towns that were made 'redundant' that auto is only now approaching, IMO. It is the future because it's whats been done as finance capital continues it's decline. DW ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
