Robert Naiman wrote: > There's a lot of good stuff here. But it is striking how such articles > overwhelmingly tend to treat "globalization" as an exogenous shock, > rather than seeing it as (at least having components of) a deliberate > strategy.
yes. But you've got to give him credit for stuffing so much history in so few column-inches. "Globalization" of the US economy has been a deliberate strategy for some of the power elite, but more importantly it's an aspect of the normal workings (the "laws of motion") of capitalism. In the 1950s & 1960s, the US had a relatively closed economy (while its main manufacturing rivals were still recovering) stabilized by the warfare/welfare state. In that situation, far-sighted capitalists with market power (Porter's example is Kodak) could see high wages could as a benefit -- by providing a domestic market, i.e., demand. But a lot of smaller capitals with no market power weren't benefiting. Businesses started moving to the right-to-work states in the late 1950s, to take advantage of the low wages there. It's just one step further to go global, especially since the US had moved away from tariffs in the aftermath of the Hawley-Smoot disaster (while trade rivals recovered). Eventually, this mix had to go, even without the stagflationary mess of the 1970s. Now the US has switched over to where capitalists largely see wages as a cost, with no demand-side benefits. (The main remaining benefit is the maintenance of the system's legitimacy, but many small capitalists -- e.g., the Tea Party -- don't understand this.) -- Jim Devine / If you're going to support the lesser of two evils, at least you should know the nature of that evil. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
