Robert Naiman wrote: > 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 don't know anything about this "inevitability." I didn't use that word and when I do use it, my habit has always been to plug the word "almost" right in front of it. (BTW, if you want a serious discussion, it helps to reply to what people say.) Nothing is inevitable, including the rise of Germany and Japan after WW2. Things could have gone differently. The idea of "laws of motion" is not the same as inevitability. There are processes that occur outside of our heads that happen -- and are predictable in many ways, like the "laws" of supply and demand -- despite there being no conscious force guiding them. It's as if Adam Smith's Invisible Hand were guiding capitalist competition -- except that that Hand doesn't exist and often has bad results. Just because _some_ of the political economy acts like a "second Nature," with predictable results does not mean that _other parts_ can work following the conscious decisions of elites (the Visible Hand). The point is that capitalism _always_ has to deal with the conflict between what's good for the capitalist class as a whole and what's good for individual capitalists.[*] In the 1950s & 60s US, the former involved a large domestic market, thus allowing high wages. But without concerted efforts by the power elite (which required a clear understanding of these issues), there would always be a move by some capitalists to try to get the best of both worlds, i.e., low wages _and_ access to the large domestic market. This "free rider" behavior undermines the "collective good" unless there is a clear effort to stop this pressure. BTW, US organized labor might have added backbone to the power elite on this issue, but it didn't. > 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. Since I wasn't talking about anything being "inevitable" and because I wasn't talking about technical change, I don't see how this is relevant. For a time, Sweden enjoyed the combination of an enlightened power elite and a strong labor movement, which could deal with the conflict that I sketched above. But Social Democratic Sweden also suffered from some capital flight and other individual capitalist efforts to ride for free. -- Jim Devine / If you're going to support the lesser of two evils, at least you should know the nature of that evil. [*] for those who care, Marx talks about this contradiction in the GRUNDRISSE. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
