At 01:50 PM 4/24/01 -0700, you wrote:
>>Does even PK honestly think that, with free flow of capital, there would
>>be competition of sweatshops for labor, as opposed to unemployed workers
>>& landless peasants competing with one another for a shot at sweated labor?
>>
>>Yoshie
>
>Of course he does.
>
>In general there will be both: capitalists will compete with capitalists
>for workers (out of whose labor they think they can make a profit) and
>workers will compete with workers for jobs (better than the ones they
>currently have, or than their other opportunities).
of course, there are other things that capitalists do besides competing
with each other for labor-power. They try to make sure that workers are
atomized (non-unionized, don't belong to labor-oriented political parties,
etc.) and so can't claim a share of any labor productivity increases that
occur. Further, they bring in government force and the IMF to smash any
programs that provide workers with any alternatives to working in
sweat-shops, maquiladoras, etc. Yet further, they strive to limit workers
time-honored access to means of subsistence outside the wage nexus (as seen
in Michael Perelman's book on primitive accumulation and the invention of
capitalism). They try to keep the labor supply large and workers desperate,
to keep wages down. If all else fails -- or even if there's a threat that
all else will fail -- they move to greener pastures where wages are even
lower and environmental restrictions are even weaker. They take advantage
of the fact that they own different factories in different countries,
setting them to compete with each other.
In the long run, the notional supply of labor-power curve may actually
slope upward in the third world as a whole, so that competition amongst the
capitalists leads to higher wages, maybe even wages that rise as quickly as
labor productivity. However, in the long run, we may have suffered from
heat death, massive pollution, world depression, etc. There's a cliche from
Keynes which smashes PK's unfounded optimism.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
