Re: Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
Asks Jim, did the dominions -- and the colonies -- have any choice in this matter? Yep, we did. The one thing about which I agree with Brad is that it was no bad thing we went the way we did. But we've actually had the sovereignty since 1901 to decide for ourselves whether we'd enter wars, shoot our own chaps, allow nuclear tests on Australian soil, and so on. Generally we are very weak at such decisive moments, and, when we're ultimately - almost inevitably - exploited, soiled or embarrassed, we inevitably wholly blame the superior. It could easily be argued it was our fault our lads' guts ended up all over Gallipolli and the Somme, that they shot Breaker Morant and his like, that they wafted great clouds of radioactive filth all over central Australia etc etc. But I've never heard anyone put that argument. It was all those bloody poms, y'see. And now it's all those bloody yanks ... Cheers, Rob.
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I asked: did the dominions -- and the colonies -- have any choice in this matter? Rob said: Yep, we did. The one thing about which I agree with Brad is that it was no bad thing we went the way we did. yeah, I think it was good to fight Hitler, too. Too bad so many -- including the US gov't -- gave up on the fight against fascism so quickly when the war ended and started to embrace fascists as allies ... But we've actually had the sovereignty since 1901 to decide for ourselves whether we'd enter wars, shoot our own chaps, allow nuclear tests on Australian soil, and so on. but isn't there a lot of evidence that the Governor General of Australia (a British appointee at the time?) cooperated with the US to oust an inconvenient PM? (was that Gough Whitlam who was ousted?) If so, official sovereignty works different in practice. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
Ken wrote: Interesting that you should say this in a post that includes the title Canada and Australia. I don't know about Australia but Canada joined the war very early, in 1939 I believe. Brad writes: Touche... All the dominions did... did the dominions -- and the colonies -- have any choice in this matter? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
After I read what follows, and which deserves no answer at all, I am beginning to believe that I am not debating with Brad DeLong, but with Spruille Braden DeLong. From now onwards, I will put things in clear by addressing Mr. Braden DeLong... En relación a [PEN-L:1685] Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina, el 10 Sep 00, a las 22:25, Brad DeLong dijo: En relación a [PEN-L:1549] Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argen, el 10 Sep 00, a las 3:37, Rob Schaap dijo: Australia, too, consciously nourished its (relative) independence, largely through mutually constitutive ties between Australia's government and bourgeoisie - ensuring that the latter would not serve as a compradorial local elite for foreign interests. This is EXACTLY what Peronism attempted to do here, and failed. Funny to see again how different are things in an imperialist country and in a colony. In more senses than one, Peronism, which is widely known outside Argentina (and particularly in the United States) as a Fascist South American overgrowth that remained alive for a decade after Nazism was swept away from Europe was in fact a domestic version of a Labour government in Australia... Any Labor government--hell, *any* democratic government or *any* left-of-center non-democratic government--would have been eager to join the war against Hitler. Peron was not--hence the classification of his regime as "fascist South American overgrowth" seems not unfair... My dear Mr. Braden DeLong: Argentina wasn't, by any means, the only country that remained neutral during World War II. Most peoples weren't even allowed the possibility to have a saying, because they were under occupation: there were imperialist troops deployed all over Africa, over a good deal of Asia, even over Latin America -you the democratic Americans had put in prison our cherished and beloved Albizu Campos, who died in prison in Atlanta, because of the sin of fighting for the independence of Puerto Rico against your democratic will; India's leader Ghandi, out of calculation, decided to side with Britain, but not before a long debate took place and not before he intentionally had visited Mr. Mussolini against the advice of every "democratic" imperialist in Europe. Hadn't the colonial empires existed, be sure that most people in the world would have been indifferent to Mr. Hitler's actions. "What's new with that, would many have said, he's just doing to white people what all of them have been doing to us for decades and centuries?" Not that I agree with that position. I, personally and as an isolated individual, are for war against all imperialists. That is the position I would have raised in Argentina, 1939. But our neutrality was an absolutely justifiable one. And, as I explained, it even was of help for the war effort of Great Britain. Let me show now that countries who profited from the war, and who in many ways gave help to the Nazi regime, are considered "democratic" by Brad, whereas this treatment is denied to Argentina. Among others which I could mention, I prefer to center on two: Switzerland. Sweden. Switzerland proved a "neutral" hideaway for Nazi money and riches stolen from many, particularly from the Jews, as it has recently been shown. Sweden was still worse: the Socialist government there allowed the Nazi troops to traverse its Northern territories in order to occupy Norway (by the way, in order to protect their own citizens, the Swedish government put the militant union leaders of the North in prison while the Wehrmacht merrily toured the Kiruna steel mines on way to the Atlantic). Why do you slander the Argentinians, who were victims of Anglo- American expoliation and thus had at least a reasonable motivation to remain neutral, while you do not slander the Swiss or the Swedes? I will tell you again, Mr. Braden: that is because you are an imperialist under "Leftist" robes. As for Peron's social and economic policies, I have always been fascinated with the extraordinary economic success of post-WWII western Europe relative to Argentina. Ah, that's reasonable. Your country made a strong investment effort in an Europe that was ruined but still had strong assets to rebuild itself. Argentina had to clumsily manage by herself, against the pressure of the American Department of State and the cold hostility of other imperialist regimes. The Europeans had a full bearded bourgeoisie, while the first minister of Economy of Peronism was the chubby owner of a small manufacturer of tins for a minor peach packer. Miguel Miranda, a man with no Universities, proved however that it was possible to boost popular consumption, rise wages, and have an economic boom all at the same time. He could not prove (and this was his doom) that all this was sustainable without socialist measures, but at least he gave millions of people four or five years of happiness and a sense of personal dignity that they
Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
G'day Nestor and Brad, Why do you slander the Argentinians, who were victims of Anglo- American expoliation and thus had at least a reasonable motivation to remain neutral, while you do not slander the Swiss or the Swedes? Or the Americans? Whose own popular president (if you don't count the views of the big cappos, anyway) couldn't manage to bring that mighty democracy into the war against tyranny until it got one of its colonies bombed by it (and Germany, rather ambitiously, declared war). How long would Unca Sam have sat and watched, selling its hardware to the combatants all the while, if events hadn't forced his mighty hand? C'mon Brad. Be fair. Cheers, Rob.
Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
After I read what follows, and which deserves no answer at all, I am beginning to believe that I am not debating with Brad DeLong, but with Spruille Braden DeLong. From now onwards, I will put things in clear by addressing Mr. Braden DeLong... En relación a [PEN-L:1685] Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina, el 10 Sep 00, a las 22:25, Brad DeLong dijo: En relación a [PEN-L:1549] Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argen, el 10 Sep 00, a las 3:37, Rob Schaap dijo: Australia, too, consciously nourished its (relative) independence, largely through mutually constitutive ties between Australia's government and bourgeoisie - ensuring that the latter would not serve as a compradorial local elite for foreign interests. This is EXACTLY what Peronism attempted to do here, and failed. Funny to see again how different are things in an imperialist country and in a colony. In more senses than one, Peronism, which is widely known outside Argentina (and particularly in the United States) as a My dear Mr. Braden DeLong: Argentina wasn't, by any means, the only country that remained neutral during World War II... Hmmm. My count was Sweden (which profited immensely from shipping iron ore to Germany, and letting Wehrmacht trains run across its territory), Switzerland (which profited immensely for other reasons), Franco's Spain, and Argentina. Anybody else who remained neutral to the end? Any other countries that received Nazi refugees with open arms after the war? I'm not aware of any. Hadn't the colonial empires existed, be sure that most people in the world would have been indifferent to Mr. Hitler's actions. "What's new with that, would many have said, he's just doing to white people what all of them have been doing to us for decades and centuries?" No. Very few people in the world believe in such doctrines of racial collective responsibility. Those guilty of crimes are those who commit them--not others who happen to look like them. None of the east european Jews herded into Auschwitz had ever taken hostages from a Burmese village. None of the Gypsies herded into Dachau had ever served as a vector of disease transmission to Mexico. None of the Russians summarily shot as the Wehrmacht entered a village had ever placed any Chinese migrant worker into debt peonage. And very few of the people in the world thought the victims of genocide were just "getting what they deserved". Only Nazis thought so, and people who think like Nazis. Although your post suggests otherwise, relatively few people in the world have ever thought like Nazis. Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
But Díaz Alejandro is... the ultimate sepoy, and it is not a matter of chance that, in the economic circles of the United States of America, the Braden DeLongs consider his 600 page long bunch of half-muttered hardly digerible stupidities a "standard book" on Argentina. To argue that the Peronist economic strategy looked like a very reasonable one to adopt as of the end of World War II, but proved ultimately disastrous because it had unintended catastrophic consequences for the rate of capital accumulation--that's the core of Diaz Alejandro's argument. It's not a bunch of half-muttered hardly derigible stupidities. And whence comes "sepoy" as a term of abuse? "Sepoy" is an English misspelling of "sipahi", the Turkic term for the elite cavalry of the Turkish empires, which after the Islamization of the Turks fought from Hyderabad to Moscow, from Urumchi to Vienna. Under Turkish rule commerce flourished and long distance trade grew: Turkic kingdoms played a key role in transferring technology and thus encouraging economic growth from one end of Eurasia to the other for a thousand years. Skilled, loyal, bold, clever--the British East India Company wanted to recruit sipahis from the declining Moghul Empire for their armies because of their virtues. Perón sought to generate rapid growth and to twist terms of trade against rural agriculture and redistribute wealth to urban workers who did not receive their fair share. False. Perón sought to fuel industrial growth with the remains of the differential rent on the world market that had bestowed such a gift on Argentinian landed oligarchy for decaedes. He redistributed wealth the country over. "Urban workers" were already the large mass of Argentinians, but also "rural workers" were benefitted. Everything I've seen suggests not. Lower prices for agricultural commodities blew back into lower standards of living for rural workers under Peron... The redistribution to urban workers and to firms that had to pay their newly increased wages required a redistribution away from exporters, agricultural oligarchs, foreigners, and entrepreneurs. Yes, quite fair, but not "entrepreneurs" nor "foreigners": the first is an obviously senseless category, Marx did not think so... Landowner and exporter elites had always appropriated the lion's share of the benefits of free trade. They had in the 1930's shown a willingness to sacrifice political democracy in order to stunt the growth of the domestic welfare state. Another idiocy. "Landowner and exporter elites" were in no way interested in stunting the growth of a domestic welfare state because this state did simply NOT exist. And why didn't it exist? Because during the Great Depression--when FDR built the welfare state in the United States--Argentina's landlord and exporter elites used the army to make sure that no FDR-like figure held power in Argentina. The Peronist program seemed prima facie reasonable given the memory of the Great Depression, and it produced almost half a decade of very rapid growth toward the end of the 1940s. Quite true. Only that "rapid growth" is not precisely what one would say of a programme that at the same time reconstructed the country and gave more than half its population a new sense of personal dignity. But we are among economists here, who cares for these stupid issues? Then exports fell sharply as a result of the international business cycle. And exports fell further as the consequences of the enforced reduction in real prices of rural exportables made themselves felt. What do you mean, "enforced reduction"? On the contrary, the state monopoly on foreign trade (the IAPI, a bourgeois forerunner of a socialist self-defence mechanism, in fact) obtained better prices for farmers than the prices they had ever obtained from the trade monopolies of foreign capital. What is true is that a share of those better prices was redistributed, via the State, to industries and not to luxurious consumption. Better prices for the state when it sells overseas, worse prices for farmers (and farmworkiers) when they sell to the monopsonistic state. Domestic consumption rose. The rural sector found itself short of fertilizer and tractors. Squeezed between declining production and rising domestic consumption, Argentinian exports fell. Argentinian main export commodity was by those times meat. Meat needs no tractors in the pastorile conditions of those times. Meat needs a *lot* of grain for the final fattening-up process On the other side, Perón arrived at agreements for local design and construction of agrarian machinery and tractors At five times the resource cost of John Deere: expensive tractors are a very bad thing for temperate agricultural development. The enemy was already in combat outfit by 1950. Korea was to be the first demonstration. Oh God! Not another idiot fan of Kim Il Sung! Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
At 10:25 PM 9/10/00 -0700, you wrote: Any Labor government--hell, *any* democratic government or *any* left-of-center non-democratic government--would have been eager to join the war against Hitler. Peron was not--hence the classification of his regime as "fascist South American overgrowth" seems not unfair... so you believe that Eldridge Cleaver's old dictum that "if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem"? So the fact that the US was "neutral" against the Spanish fascists during the Civil War there indicates that the US was semi-fascist? This fits with the consistent trend of US foreign policy since then, i.e., the willingness to ally with fascists and to impose fascist governments (as in Chile) when democracy didn't serve US interests. That said, I don't think that the over-used word "fascist" really fits the US government. Rather, the US gov't is pro-crypto-fascist (as Gore called Bill). [That's Vidal and Buckley, not Al and Clinton.] Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
so you believe that Eldridge Cleaver's old dictum that "if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem"? So the fact that the US was "neutral" against the Spanish fascists during the Civil War there indicates that the US was semi-fascist? Lots of people refused to aid or tried to harm the Loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War (including, IMO, the Soviet Union--much more interested in smashing Trotskyism than in defeating Franco). IIRC, only four governments--Switzerland, Sweden, Franco's Spain, and Peron's Argentina--had failed to join the United Nations by the end of the war against Hitler. Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
Lots of people refused to aid or tried to harm the Loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War (including, IMO, the Soviet Union--much more interested in smashing Trotskyism than in defeating Franco). IIRC, only four governments--Switzerland, Sweden, Franco's Spain, and Peron's Argentina--had failed to join the United Nations by the end of the war against Hitler. Brad DeLong You leave one not unimportant country out of your list of neutrals-- Ireland (Eire). Not to mention one "democratic" European country that was allied with the Nazis throughout virtually the entire war--Finland. Shane Mage "Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
Shane Mage quotes Brad DeLong: Lots of people refused to aid or tried to harm the Loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War (including, IMO, the Soviet Union--much more interested in smashing Trotskyism than in defeating Franco). IIRC, only four governments--Switzerland, Sweden, Franco's Spain, and Peron's Argentina--had failed to join the United Nations by the end of the war against Hitler. Brad DeLong You leave one not unimportant country out of your list of neutrals-- Ireland (Eire). Not to mention one "democratic" European country that was allied with the Nazis throughout virtually the entire war--Finland. Shane Mage "Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64 Brad, is the correct inference that you would have supported the Loyalist cause? And where do you put the USA on the spectrum of "refused to aid or tried to harm"? After all, winking at oil companies who sold oil to Franco in spite of an embargo must go in that spectrum somewhere. And wasn't UK and USA "neutrality" designed to harm the Loyalist cause? Gene Coyle
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
Shane Mage quotes Brad DeLong: Lots of people refused to aid or tried to harm the Loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War (including, IMO, the Soviet Union--much more interested in smashing Trotskyism than in defeating Franco). IIRC, only four governments--Switzerland, Sweden, Franco's Spain, and Peron's Argentina--had failed to join the United Nations by the end of the war against Hitler. Brad DeLong You leave one not unimportant country out of your list of neutrals-- Ireland (Eire). Not to mention one "democratic" European country that was allied with the Nazis throughout virtually the entire war--Finland. Shane Mage "Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64 Brad, is the correct inference that you would have supported the Loyalist cause? Of course. Brad DeLong
Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
Interesting that you should say this in a post that includes the title Canada and Australia. I don't know about Australia but Canada joined the war very early, in 1939 I believe. Cheers, Ken Hanly Touche... All the dominions did... Brad DeLong -- J. Bradford DeLong Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley 601 Evans Hall, #3880 Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 (510) 643-4027 voice (510) 642-6615 fax http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
I think most of the larger British Commonwealth countries declared war around September 1939, at least Australia and Canada did. Casualties:(approximate) India 25,000 New Zealand 10,000 Canada 37,000 South Africa 7,000 Australia 23,000 Cheers, Ken Hanly - Original Message - From: Brad DeLong [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, September 11, 2000 9:53 PM Subject: [PEN-L:1791] Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina Interesting that you should say this in a post that includes the title Canada and Australia. I don't know about Australia but Canada joined the war very early, in 1939 I believe. Cheers, Ken Hanly Touche... All the dominions did... Brad DeLong -- J. Bradford DeLong Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley 601 Evans Hall, #3880 Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 (510) 643-4027 voice (510) 642-6615 fax http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
Hi again, Nestor, This is EXACTLY what Peronism attempted to do here, and failed. Funny to see again how different are things in an imperialist country and in a colony. In more senses than one, Peronism, which is widely known outside Argentina (and particularly in the United States) as a Fascist South American overgrowth that remained alive for a decade after Nazism was swept away from Europe was in fact a domestic version of a Labour government in Australia. In fact, one of the parties on which Perón built his initial electoral victory in 1946 was the Argentinian Labour party, a party based on the workers of the La Plata city foreign owned meat packing and slaughterhouse industries. I'm not disagreeing with anything you say, comrade, but am left wondering if a significant difference between Australia and Argentina might not be precisely that we did follow our masters to war. It certainly occasioned a massive and belated shift from the almost entirely agricultural economy we'd been. This at once reduced an aspect of dependence, diversified our stock market, and made us less reliant on a low-value staple (we were more the price taker than the price maker in our agricultural exports). The Pacific War (beginning with the pathetic Singapore disaster in '42) significantly contributed to a resentful suspicion of the UK (already in place, given the equally pathetic Gallipolli disaster and the continued and expensive mediocrity of British general staff on the Western Front), itself occasioning a popular desire for less dependence on 'em - indeed a distance from them (funnily enough, many on the left were persuading everybody we should make for Unca Sam's open arms with expedition). And it made Australia's Labor Party, and a large slab of the public, look away from the old Commonwealth in its strategic (we immediately signed some treaties with NZ) and trade policies (even Asia copped some overtures, but that stopped when the Tories got in). So both the sectoral structure (higher value production and the creation of a new and integrated national bourgeoisie) and the political culture (self-reliance and nation-building) of the country were very much positively affected in the context of the times. Not lastingly and not completely, but perhaps decisively at and for the time. Perhaps the ALP did not face the problems Peron faced because of the war, then? What say you? Cheers, Rob.
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Bill Rosenberg wrote: New Zealand was probably more successful than Australia until the UK joined the EU (and both countries began to lose their privileged access to the UK market), and less successful since then, showing the weakness and essentially dependent nature of its bourgeoisie. speaking of dependency: from the point of view of the US, one crucial aspect of "globalization" has been the slow (but sometimes rapid) conversion of the US from an autocentric economy toward being a dependent, outward-oriented one. For example, in his book THE WORK OF NATIONS, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, one of the few well-known pro-labor liberals (of the US sort) around, puts forth the line that the way that US workers can do well is by offering high-skilled labor and well-built infrastructure. Though his emphasis is on trade issues rather than capital mobility, this policy is one of "if you build it, they will come," an effort to woo the affections of transnational capital. Autocentric policies are out. Of course, the US-based capitalist class isn't dependent but is instead merging into the global capitalist class (as the dominant partner). However I'll relate a little anecdote which to me illustrates an important point: that nationalism is a danger in the imperial countries, such as the US and UK, but a necessity in the dependent (and would-be independent) ones, as long as it is not allowed to become chauvinist. That's still a problem, despite the changes limned above. A national economy that's declining can spawn all sorts of reactionary ideologies. It's the financial and macroeconomic bubble (a.k.a. the Clinton boom) that has prevented the US fascist movements that were burgeoning 8 years or so ago from continuing their growth. That's one reason that even though I expect a bad recession to hit sometime in the next year or so, I don't welcome it: the "worse" often doesn't produce the "better" but instead a bunch of Brown-Shirts. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
En relación a [PEN-L:1490] Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina, el 8 Sep 00, a las 10:22, Bill Burgess dijo: However, by the mid 1980s the US-controlled share of all non-financial industres in Canada declined to levels below the post-WW2 buildup (the US share has risen slightly since then, as has foreign control in all countries). I consider this 'repatriation' partial evidence that Canadian capital never lost _overal_ control of the domestic economy, which they originally gained, as I think Paul agrees, by around WW1. Just as a 'national bourgeoisie' was able to develop while formally still a British colony, it was able to survive and even gain relative strength despite extensive US ownership and control in _some_ industrial sectors. I don't think the Argentine bourgeoisie ever developed this kind of hegemony over the economy and state. The Argentine bourgeoisie doesn't even have a consciousness of its own existence as such bourgeoisie. What we have here is an oligarchy, a capitalist BUT NOT BOURGEOIS ruling class, which thrives under imperialist control of the country and in alliance with imperialism. This class is ORGANICALLY against any transformation of our economic structure that puts in danger the chain of dependency. And the constitution of a self-centered bourgeoisie such as happened in Canada was for decades the greatest threat to its domain. Thus trapped between a huge working class and the imperialist-oligarchic "rosca" our domestic bourgeoisie is a caricature of a bourgeoisie. During the same 1980s that saw the Canadian bourgeoisie regain some degree of control of their own economy, the Argentinian bourgeoisie was either physiclly destroyed (Gelbard and Broner, two of the mainstays of Perón's national-bourgeois government after 1973 -both were of Marxist intelectual origin, by the way, and Gelbard, Peron's Minister of Economy, a secret affiliate to the Communist Party-, were deprived of Arg. citizenship and had to take the road of exile; others, like arts patron and editorial owner Vogelius, were kidnapped, tortured, and killed due to alleged connections with terrorist cells, and so on), socially degraded (it is easy to find taxi drivers in Buenos Aires today who have been, for example, owners of a small industry), transformed into managers of foreign concerns or turned rentiers after they closed plants or sold them (and thus coopted into the oligarchy), etc. [...] Where we differ is that Paul interprets this as Canadian and Australian dependence a la Frank. This would be appropriate for Argentina, but Canada and Australia are in the qualitatively different position of secondary imperialist countries. They get bullied by the US as do other secondary imperialist countries (e.g. in Europe, by the US and Japan, Germany, UK, etc.) but the politics of this relationship are very different than the politics of Frankian-like dependency. Sorry to harp on this issue but I think the failure to distinguish between the two kinds of relations with bigger-power imperialism has long been a key failing of socialism in Canada (and I think the same applies to Australia and New Zealand). I am afraid that on this issue I would agree with Bill. Whoever wants to discover the difference between a minor imperialist power (that is, a cub of shark) and a wealthy semicolony (that is, a fat tuna), should compare Argentina with Australia or Canada, say, by the 40s or 50s. A hug to all, Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
Bill, Paul and Nestor are very much on to something, I think. Australia, too, consciously nourished its (relative) independence, largely through mutually constitutive ties between Australia's government and bourgeoisie - ensuring that the latter would not serve as a compradorial local elite for foreign interests. Straight after the war, we nationalised Cable and Wireless's international communications monopoly (funny that, they now control our erstwhile public telco's main competitor), nationalised QANTAS, opposed US aspirations over sovereignty over the SW Pacific islands they had garrisoned (the Manus group near PNG), and arrived at a cozy balance throughout many sectors (eg aviation, broadcasting, banking, education, insurance, health) whereby private operators got to seek profit, but standards were regulated and ensured by public sector competition. They poured money and people into publicly funded universities and technical colleges, funded mammoth immigration schemes. The war had also provided the impetus we needed to get a decent manufacturing sector going, and publicly subsidised enterprise was promoted in a new, urban Australia (proving, I guess, that Australia's rural 'squatocracy' had lost much of the political clout they'd had). In the bush, the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric project, a public undertaking, was to ensure reliable and sufficient power for the manufacturing turn and irrigation for New South Wales and Victoria. And nearly all funded from public debt acquired within the country. (the domestic share of public debt went from 50 to 77% between '39 and '50). Taken together, all these developments served to strengthen the infrastructural and social capital available to domestic capital, and it had become inextricably linked with Canberra and the State Governments. Tariffs, quotas and subsidies were poured into the coffers of the new manufacturer capitalists, whose fortunes and investments depended on the government rather than Wall and Threadneedle Streets. Then the Tories came in on a tide of 'red under the bed' scaremongering in 1949. The corporate state Labor had put in place throughout and immediately after the war was not instantly to be undone though, as domestic capital knew where its interests lay by then and Menzies conservatices (called Liberals here) had very little interest in policy anyway, and were happy to allow their phalanx of nation-building civil servants (all brought up during the wise-making years of the depression) to have their way. Yep, it took decades to ruin all that ... Apologies for the nationalist-Keynesian tone - but it does all sound rather better than the particular mode of 'globalisation' currently afoot, no? Cheers, Rob. I consider this 'repatriation' partial evidence that Canadian capital never lost _overal_ control of the domestic economy, which they originally gained, as I think Paul agrees, by around WW1. Just as a 'national bourgeoisie' was able to develop while formally still a British colony, it was able to survive and even gain relative strength despite extensive US ownership and control in _some_ industrial sectors. I don't think the Argentine bourgeoisie ever developed this kind of hegemony over the economy and state. The Argentine bourgeoisie doesn't even have a consciousness of its own existence as such bourgeoisie. What we have here is an oligarchy, a capitalist BUT NOT BOURGEOIS ruling class, which thrives under imperialist control of the country and in alliance with imperialism. This class is ORGANICALLY against any transformation of our economic structure that puts in danger the chain of dependency. And the constitution of a self-centered bourgeoisie such as happened in Canada was for decades the greatest threat to its domain. Thus trapped between a huge working class and the imperialist-oligarchic "rosca" our domestic bourgeoisie is a caricature of a bourgeoisie. During the same 1980s that saw the Canadian bourgeoisie regain some degree of control of their own economy, the Argentinian bourgeoisie was either physiclly destroyed (Gelbard and Broner, two of the mainstays of Perón's national-bourgeois government after 1973 -both were of Marxist intelectual origin, by the way, and Gelbard, Peron's Minister of Economy, a secret affiliate to the Communist Party-, were deprived of Arg. citizenship and had to take the road of exile; others, like arts patron and editorial owner Vogelius, were kidnapped, tortured, and killed due to alleged connections with terrorist cells, and so on), socially degraded (it is easy to find taxi drivers in Buenos Aires today who have been, for example, owners of a small industry), transformed into managers of foreign concerns or turned rentiers after they closed plants or sold them (and thus coopted into the oligarchy), etc. [...] Where we differ is that Paul interprets this as Canadian and Australian dependence a la Frank. This would be appropriate for
Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
Nestor and Bill,
Let me reiterate my main point which I take you both would either
agree with or at least accept as a reasonable argument. The first
world war consolidated industrial capitalism in Canada and the
governing elite was firmly under control of industrial capital which
no longer had a dependence on British finance which it previously
had. The interwar period did not increase dependence on foreign
capital in part because three quarters of it was marked by
depression. The main investment was in railways in the late
twenties over half of which was publicly owned.
The reliance (dependence) on foreign capital, now from the US,
came after the 2nd WW in the form of resource based investment
and branch plant. Because of the alarming increase in foreign
control of the economy and the negative economic results of this
increase, (Watkins report, Grey report, etc.) Canada introduced the
Foreign investment Review Agency which restricted foreign
investment where there were no direct benefit demonstrated. Along
with the national energy program, this had the effect of decreasing
the proportion of foreign investment. With the conservatives in
power in the 80s, these national interest restrictions were lifted and
eventually abolished with C-USFTA and NAFTA and almost
immediately, the proportion of foreign ownership began again to
rise. However, Canadian foreign ownership also expanded
representing the fact that Canada is, in its own way, a junior in the
economic imperialism game though most of the non-resource
investment has been in the United States and frequently in sectors
that were originally in Canada state protected and organized
industries (e.g. CPR and CNR railway investments).
On the issue of dependency, my definition of dependency is quite
different than yours and is not in the early Frank model. I define
dependency in terms of two or three major parametres -- the
direction of causation, the balance of economic power and the
expropriation of surplus. To illustrate, the early Canadian fur trade.
Fur was important to Canada but was miniscule to the British
economy such that changes in fashion in hats in Europe had little
major impact on the European economies but they could boom or
bust the Canadian commerical economy of the day. Changes in
Canadian supply, however, had little or no effect on the British
economy. Canadian policy, such as it was, was determined by the
London council of the HBC and the British crown which granted the
monopoly charter. Finally, the profits accrued to the headquarters
of the HBC in Britain, almost none of which was reinvested in
Canada. This was a classic case of staple dependency which
characterized the early economic 'development' of Canada.
Does that same dependence exist today? Yes, though to a lesser
extent. Investment in Canada is largely determined by US demand
whereas Investment in the US is minimally affected by Canadian
demand. Trade in Canada is a macroeconomic issue, in the US
more of a microeconomic issue. Research and Development,
technological change, etc. is in most advanced industries,
determined by foreign companies and is generally poorly developed
(except in the state sector). Canada's economic laws are dictated
by the US or its international client agencies, the WTO, IMF, WB,
NAFTA etc. e.g. the pharmaceutical patent legislation that was
introduced to conform to US demands which has led to an
enormous increase in drug costs in Canada which threatens to
collapse the medicare system. Canada has a huge, and growing,
net deficit in services and in payments of interest, dividends and
profits. Almost all of the increase in foreign ownership in Canada is
financed either from retained profits of existing investment or from
borrowings of Canadian savings from Canadian banks.
It is for this reason or in this context that I say the Canadian
economy is dependent. And I agree that this is a very different
form of dependency that Frank argues for Latin and South America
which is, following Baran, based on an alliance between imperial
capital and a local landed ('feudal") and military elite who retain
control over the domestic political spoils and block the emergence
of a truly national-bourgeois political state.
Nas vidinje,
Paul
Paul Phillips,
Economics,
University of Manitoba
From: "Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky"
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date sent: Sat, 9 Sep 2000 11:46:48 -0300
Subject: [PEN-L:1545] Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
Priority: normal
Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
En relación a [PEN-L:1490] Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina,
el 8 Sep 00, a las 10:22, Bill Burgess dijo:
However, by the mid 1980s the US-controlled share of all non-financial
industres in Canada declined to levels below the post-WW2 buildup (the
US share has
Re: Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
En relación a [PEN-L:1553] Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argen, el 9 Sep 00, a las 12:17, [EMAIL PROTECTED] dijo: Nestor and Bill, Let me reiterate my main point which I take you both would either agree with or at least accept as a reasonable argument. Dear Phillip, I do not consider myself at all in a position to contest anything anyone says on Canada, particularly if the such is a Canadian. What I tried to muse over was on the qualitative difference that obviously (for me, at least) exists between the Canadian dependency towards the United States and that of Argentina or, for that matter, Mexico. Probably a comparative investigation of issues at both borderlands of the United States would prove extraordinarily fruitful in this sense. But, again, I am nobody to speak of Canadian issues, at least while they do not have a relation with Argentinian issues. I try to be careful in this sense. A hug, Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
En relación a [PEN-L:1553] Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argen,
el 9 Sep 00, a las 12:17, [EMAIL PROTECTED] dijo:
It is for this reason or in this context that I say the Canadian
economy is dependent. And I agree that this is a very different form
of dependency that Frank argues for Latin and South America which is,
following Baran, based on an alliance between imperial capital and a
local landed ('feudal") and military elite who retain control over the
domestic political spoils and block the emergence of a truly
national-bourgeois political state.
Within some weeks, I intend to post on this list a criticism of
Frank's ideas that, if I am not wrong, will make the oceans swell and
mountains tremble.
Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
En relación a [PEN-L:1549] Re: Re: Re: Canada, Australia, Argen, el 10 Sep 00, a las 3:37, Rob Schaap dijo: Australia, too, consciously nourished its (relative) independence, largely through mutually constitutive ties between Australia's government and bourgeoisie - ensuring that the latter would not serve as a compradorial local elite for foreign interests. This is EXACTLY what Peronism attempted to do here, and failed. Funny to see again how different are things in an imperialist country and in a colony. In more senses than one, Peronism, which is widely known outside Argentina (and particularly in the United States) as a Fascist South American overgrowth that remained alive for a decade after Nazism was swept away from Europe was in fact a domestic version of a Labour government in Australia. In fact, one of the parties on which Perón built his initial electoral victory in 1946 was the Argentinian Labour party, a party based on the workers of the La Plata city foreign owned meat packing and slaughterhouse industries. Failure, however, must not put us in a sobering mood as to the achievements of Peronism (re. Jim Devine's ideas that both Peronists and antiPeronists were bad for Argentina). Peronists achieved great things, for example (and missing lots): *an impressive redistribution of wealth that, from the point of view of the bourgeoisie, sought to create a domestic market; from that of the workers, however it gave the Argentinian worker a level of living that was the envy of their Latin American counterparts (thus boosting by the way a wave of Latin American migration into Argentina that partly mitigated the alienating consequences of the European inflow of previous decades), and opened up the road to higher education to the children of the working class *a huge wave of nationalizations cut short the multiple sources of capital outflow through the financial, commercial and industrial foreign control of pre-Peronist Argentina. It is interesting in this sense to note that the Spanish word "extranjerización", or "extranjería", has no English equivalent. A whole set of political and economical experiences is condensed in this assimetry. *the State took it as a task of its own to develop industrial concerns not only in a simple "import substitution" schema, as it had been the case after the 1930 crisis, but also as a conscioulsy directed policy of independent and self-centered economic growth; the plants of this new and vast system were, on the other hands, located outside Buenos Aires, thus injecting new life to the up to then decaying cities of the Inland country And lots more (nationalization of insurance, banking, generation of the conditions for domestic technological advance, social democratization of access to University, creation of a trading fleet in a country that depended basically on foreign trade, management of the nationalized railroads to boost entire regions, massive housing plans, and so on). But Peronism was limited by its attempt to develop Argentina _as just another capitalist country_, an attempt tragically put to light by Perón in his later government (1973-74) when he said that he sought to turn Argentina into a "World Power, an Argentina Potencia". The bourgeois programme proved fatal, in the end, because our ruling oligarchy wasn't a feudal class, but a dependent _capitalist_ ruling class. So that Peronism never attacked its ECONOMIC positions (you begin by expropriation of large estates, where do you end?). But this harshly abstract comment -on which antiPeronist Leftists build their whole nutty edifice that sets workers abstractly apart from national revolution, a building that unfortunately for these Leftists has never been inhabited by the Argentinian working class- must be made more concrete, because the actual going of history is - in a semicolony- full of unexpected events. It was history, not an economic predestination which made that the movement be in a sense doomed, because in fact it could have generated its own, massive and powerful, Left wing, and at the first moments Perón himself tried to do it.. In fact, the ultimate reason for this attempt to have failed is, again, partly because of the stupidity of local bourgeoisie, partly because of the constraints of a national-bourgeois programme with overwhelming proletarian support under the increasing pressure of imperialism in Latin America, and partly because of the tragic limitations of our anti-Peronist (abstractly "anti capitalist" thus, when the moment of trial came objectivelly -and sometimes subjectivelly- proimperialist) domestic "Left". In 1945, and not because he actually needed them, but in order to generate a front as broad as possible to oppose the antinational bloc that had gathered around the unbelievable American Ambassador Spruille Braden, Perón offered the Communists and the Left wing of the petty bourgeois Radical
