Louis Proyect wrote: “I subsequently learned that Weeks and his wife Elizabeth Dore were Maoists ideologically.”
Maoists? Not of the third-worldist variety, certainly. In the 70s Dore and Weeks were opponents of the dependency theorists, arguing in particular that third-world workers were not super-exploited in comparison to workers in the imperialist countries. Weeks’s death prompted the editors of Historical Materialism to make available two of his papers published in their journal. In one of them, “The law of value and the analysis of underdevelopment” ( http://ow.ly/4KeB50AN5y4) he seems to have gone even further. He writes, “In simple terms, competition in the capitalist sector results in a transfer of value to the pre-capitalist sector via a movement in relative prices against the capitalist sector.” A systemic transfer of value *from* the colonialist/imperialist countries to their dependencies rather than the reverse? In an epoch of massive, even genocidal, domination, looting and exploitation of the Global South? This is the conclusion of a dense and convoluted argument, the gist of which is that under capitalism, competition enforces the drive to increase productivity through technological advances; thereby, the values of capitalistically-produced commodities tend to decline. Under pre-capitalist conditions, however, there is no drive to increase productivity, hence no drive to decrease prices. So the terms of trade between capitalist and pre-capitalist countries tend to change in favor of the latter: a given output of pre-capitalistically produced goods exchanges for more of the capitalistically produced goods over time, since the latter decrease in price and the former don’t. Assume for the sake of argument that the terms of trade do change as claimed – although such an assumption flies in the face of the well-known complaint from Southern countries that the prices they get for their raw materials (aside from oil) rarely keep up with the costs they have to pay for machinery and other goods from the North. Even accepting Weeks’ reasoning, such an adjustment in the terms of trade is minor in comparison with the massive extraction of value from the South that characterizes imperialist relations. There is no “transfer of value to the pre-capitalist sector” – at most there is a factor that may reduce the overwhelming transfer of value the other way. Super-exploitation is still the missing term in Weeks’s analysis. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#850): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/850 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/76405542/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES<br />#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.<br />#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.<br />#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
