Charles Brown: >> Marx , Engels and Marx ...all >> linked higher wages for workers in the imperialist countries to super >> profits from colonialism and imperialism. >> >> I think the logic is that the super profits ...allow the >> capitalists to cut the workers some slack in the ongoing wage class >> struggles. In other words, the extra profits from colonialism subsidize >> higher wages in the imperial centers.
Marvin Gandall: > That was then, this is now. There's faster growth in capital formation and > wages in developing countries than in developed countries, suggesting the > beginnings of a world-historic shift in the centre of gravity of the global > economy from the old imperialist powers, including the US, to China, India, > Brazil, and other former colonies and semi-colonies. This trend departs from > classical Marxist theories of imperialism, predicated on the export of > surplus capital from the more advanced to the less developed countries, > rising working class standards in the advanced countries producing a labour > aristocracy, and increased pauperization and the "development of > underdevelopment" on the periphery. two comments: first of all, it's a mistake to focus on the division between the central capitalists (the US, etc.) and those in the periphery or what used to be the periphery (China & India). Yes, new competitors are rising, with an Indian company trying to buy Spielberg's film corporation, etc. But they are joining the nascent world capitalist class, not changing it significantly. The lust for profits persists as the dominant principle. second, I agree that the era of the "aristocracy of labor" in the center has come and gone. The classical era of imperialism (1870?? to 1980??) created a hierarchy of nation-states with the "core" (and especially the US) at the top. That's because the accumulation process was so "autocentric," oriented toward investment inside nation-states or inside the rich countries themselves as a group. But since 1980 or so, the raw material created by the classical era -- i.e., a reserve army of newly-proletarianized labor-power in the periphery or ex-periphery -- has been increasingly exploited. So the old "aristocracy of labor" in the core finds itself increasingly in direct competition with that of the (ex)periphery. There still is a labor aristocracy in the core (and as a tenured professor at a financially secure university, I can see it from the inside). But it is my impression that there is also one in the (ex)periphery. There's a movement toward equalization of the relative role of the aristocracies in different areas of capitalism. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
