On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 6:19 AM, Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > About 1/2 of the LatAm profits were from Caribbean tax and regulatory > shelters (like the Bahamas); about 45% of Asian profits came from Japan, > South Korea, and Singapore. So no more than $25 billion of corporate profits > came from poorer parts of the world - and of that subset, far more came from > Latin America than Africa. > > For comparison, total domestic profits that year were $1.3 trillion, and > compensation of employees, $4.9 trillion. > > I'm really open to hearing a counterargument, but I've never really heard > one. > > Doug
No counterargument, but perhaps an amplification - something I have a "sense" of that is on my research agenda. I think this is true, but may represent a fundamental change in capitalism. I think at certain stages of US capitalism, (not the earliest ones) that material benefits from land thefts and slavery were so great that the white working class actually materially benefited from them. At some point following the creation of whiteness, the white working class may have been richer than they would have been compared to an imaginary egalitarian utopia. If true I also get the feeling the slavery was marginal in this regard, that the real source of stolen material wealth at that time were land and resources stolen from the Indians. Timber, fur, fishing, land for agriculture (including land for the the tobacco and sugar on which early slavery was built). Carrol once argued that US racism is always culturally about black and white. I can rephrase this (maybe shifting the meaning a bit) to say that the psychic wages of whiteness were always about African Americans. But my sense is that the material wages of whiteness came from resources extracted from the Indians. (Louis probably can provide backing or refutation of this. One counter-argument is that bond-servants and slaves would run away and joint Indian nations when they could; but I don't remember many stories of large numbers of whites not in some form of slavery doing the same. Of course "some form of slavery" included women at the time, and while women running away to joint Indians was rare , there are a lot of stories of woman being kidnapped into Indian nations, and then being reluctant to return to white society. ) OK this true (or not) at least through the early 19th century, probably through the mid-19th century, and possibly through the early 20th century. By WWI, I would argue that if this had ever been true it no longer was. Norman Angell had the misfortune of arguing that major wars were now impossible because they cost more than any possible benefit. The scorn this earned him well deserved; he failed to note that what was not in the interest of society as a whole might be profitable for a class or part a class, and also assumed an absurd degree of rationality in decision making. But his arithmetic was induitably right. Technological progress meant that fighting a war would inevitably cost even the victor more than avoiding a war. (But of course losing a war or being taken over and dismembered by another nation would cost even more. ) At some point (maybe early in capitalism, maybe not until the late 19th century) the majority of surplus value came from unshared increases in the value of an hour of labor, as opposed to mere increases in the hours of labor. It came more from relative immiseration than absolute immiseration. (This tendency of course was one of Marx's fundamental immiseration.) As society grew more complex, opportunities for waste grew as well. There were more and more ways resources could be deployed wasteful, where the same production could have occurred with same or less labor and a great many fewer resources. Why did this increase? Because as the percent of surplus value increased, more ingenious means had to be found to maintain class differences. Control over labor had to take priority over efficient use of labor. (Again, as wealth production grew it became even more important.) Also, I think the losses from this control grew. Keeping workers atomized and relatively powerless makes it more difficult to tap their knowledge to as workers to spot opportunties to reduce waste. But as production becomes both greater and more complex, on the one hand the value of these lost opportunities is greater, and on the other, the odds of such opportunities being well enough buried that only the workers can spot them is greater. Every now and then a company will put a program in place where very tiny incentives are offered to workers to find ways to improve production, sometimes nothing but praise and recognition. Possibly due to some human instinct for solidarity, such programs almost always succeed, and often produce improvements year after year for decades. Almost always, sooner or later in a downturn such programs are terminated even though they are producing benefits for the company. As at least one manager is quoted saying, it is never a good idea to let the monkeys think they can run the zoo. But what is interesting is that these opportunities don't seem ever diminish. The waste is so great inside capitalism that decades of spotting and correcting it does not noticably reduce it. I think waste is fundamental to capitalism, and to any society with a huge degree of top down hierarchy and atomization. A number of liberals have turned against capitalism, claiming that the growth it depends on is inevitably distructive, that we need a zero growth society to survive. Although this has been a long term argument of a certain kind of environmentalism, I think a late convert to it, Speth articulates it best, and lays out the argument most intelligently and with the best support. I think though that they have it wrong: waste, not growth is the fundamental environmental problem with capitalism. A system that throws away human lives is not going to respect nature or natural resources. Often capitalist growth is compared to cancer. I'm to reframe that, replacing the metaphor with one I think I can refute more easily. I think this charge equates capitalism to acromegaly; growth is good up to a point, but capitalism creates growth that goes past that point and will probably prove fatal. My counter metaphor is that capitalism is not acromegaly, but simply adolescence. Many adolescents have huge appetites, often needing unbelievable amounts of food. They grow amazingly fast. They tend to flail around, often extremely destructively. A fair number of adolescents manage to exercise sufficiently bad judgment that they die of bad choices - for instance drunk driving. Whatever we mean by socialism, I don't think we mean that humanity should stop growing, merely that growing needs to include growing up. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
