It's certainly true that it was inevitable that Europe and Japan would recover (although there was some deliberate action there too, but I wouldn't dispute the outcome) and that therefore U.S. manufacturers would face increased competition from the period immediately following the war.
But the rest of the inevitability story needs more of an argument, I think, than "laws of motion." I see it as akin to the story of automation. It's inevitable that there are going to be technological advances. But how those advances are applied is a question of social struggle. As David Noble noted, automation in Sweden unfolded differently from automation elsewhere, because workers had more power in Sweden. It is said that globalization has weakened labor, but at least some of the causation went the other way: "globalization" unfolded in a particular way because labor was too weak to prevent it from unfolding that way. On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 10:37 AM, Jim Devine <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 -- Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org [email protected] _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
