Comrade Anthony wrote: > > >3. Transportation costs were cut to almost nothing - making mass >exports of > >heavy machinery - especially automobiles for the new mass markets, > >economically possible. Is this an evidence that capitalism has survived its own contradictions? In the third world, many people can not afford to buy cars. In core capitalist countries, car may not be a luxury, but in my country, it requires a high level of income to afford a car. In other words, car is not a basic need there as it is here (geographical location of cities matter in the US too). Furthermore, if cars became economically possible, it was because of the reduction of labor costs in third world countries. Expansion of mass markets is a core-periphery issue, *not* a market (demand/supply) issue in some abstract sense. Many countries in the South East Asia and Latin America (S.Korea, Honkong, Mexico) reduce labor costs by either avoiding unionization through oppressive means or by offering sexy benefits to workers (high wages, better working environment) to reduce demand for unionization. Global Maquiladora industries on the Mexican border (US subcontractors) hire workers, mostly from working class women and children, at low levels of costs such as 1.65 per hour. The reason for this is that women are seen as cheap domestic laborers. As my adviser Greg told me once, in the Japanese auto-industry, wage differentials between men and women highly matter in the periphery of Honda lean production-- outside Tokyo- despite the preachers of Japanese capitalism to the contrary. > > >The Marshall Plan, the GATT, the World > >Bank, and the IMF, were the first major step to globalization - >followed > >soon by the European common market. > There is a nuance here. Globalization strategy is not an expansion of markets or an increase in the volume of trade only. Some see globalization a recent evidence for the removal of trade barriers. However defined it is, globalization has been in existence since the emergence of capitalism as a world system , the 17th century, so it is not a new trend. Marx was writing in the age of globalization already. Sometimes I wonder why the lefties suddenly have discovered the concept "globalization", as if the world was a system of nation states and then became global after the W.W.II. Globalization is a process, not a breakthrough. The protectionist Keynesian strategies that were implemented after the world war to contain the capitalist system was already part of the globalization of American hegemony. Globalization, in many respects, is the "Americanization" of the world system at the moment. It does not matter if the European Union controls this or that dimension of the world economy if we think that EU's economic policies significantly differ from Americanism. It makes a very little sense. The model as Gill, Cox, PiJl and other writers in the Gramsican IPE tradition point out, is the "Anglo-American neo liberal" model. For example, however exclusive the EU seems, and despite the struggles among different fractions of capital over profit (agriculture versus industry in France against the free market model imposed by Germans), the EU exactly follows the US hegemonic model. Other regional blocks in the world, such as ASEAN, NAFTA, imitate the same model: reducing labor costs to expand profit globally and regionally. > >I think a look at what capitalism achieved - as a system - with >European > >fascism and WWII clearly shows that it overcame all of the basic >elements > >of its crisis of overproduction and oversupply of capital. > > >1. Population growth increased dramatically - expanding the size of > >national and world market beyond any dreamt of in 1910. > > >I think a look at what capitalism achieved - as a system - with >European > >fascism and WWII clearly shows that it overcame all of the basic >elements > >of its crisis of overproduction and oversupply of capital. > > >1. Population growth increased dramatically - expanding the size of > >national and world market beyond any dreamt of in 1910. Population growth is a not a crisis of over-production. Capitalism solves the problem of population by actually "eliminating peoples" of certain variety, not by increasing population globally: Racism. Did you know that african american women are sterilized at a higher degree than white women in the US? The same applies to women in India, where women are forced to abort female fetuses. In the Saudi Arabia, the same model is justified in the name of prescreening women before birth giving. The assumption that resources are scarce and population growth puts a limit on the sharing of world resources justifies the assumption that population growth should be adjusted accordingly. This is a closet neo-malthusian world view and it has serious racial, gender class repercussions on third world people and oppressed minorities in the US. Who is adjusting whose population in the name of population control? US transnational policy makers, IMF and the World Bank. In a nutshell, the issue is to approach critically to the thesis of population growth in the "rhetoric about third world people". Sometimes I wonder the same. Why is, for example, "immigration" emphasized in the rhetoric about Mexicans, Moroccans and Indians in the US, but not about Canadians, French or whatever? Don't the Canadians migrate here? Why does control or freedom of migration concern Mexicans only? On the relation between population growth and capitalism, I am sending an e-mail book review by Andy Austin comrade: Mine, Robinson uses a modified Gramscian mode of geopolitical analysis to reveal the underlying structural imperatives and the collective-behavioral/ideological orientation of polyarchic-style transnational policy formation. His is a historical materialist theory of globalization that conceptualizes a post-national hegemonic political dynamic driven by the transnational corporation. He theorizes the end of the cycle of hegemons as reflective of a global capitalist class that transcends the nation-state framework (which is not to say that nation-states are irrelevant). The policies of the global elite are popularly articulated as "democratization" and their theoretical underpinnings are modernization and structural-functionalism. The relevance of his theory and method for the question of population, and this emerges from his book but I know this mostly from our conversations, is that population control is based on modernizationist ideology, a component of which is the universal application of sledgehammer abstractions like the demographic transition, and is imposed upon "third world" people. Thus population control and other policies of this sort flow from the theory advanced by the global elite - and this is not speculation, since elites articulate this point of view (some of our list members advance the same oppressive line) - that the poor breed because they still struggle under a cultural idiocy, i.e., "traditional culture," and that the key to lowering their birth rates is to put in the place of their backward/primitive institutions a modern industrial system with polyarchic political structures (bougeois democracy). Through their institutions they provide loans to the nations of the periphery, organize EPZs, a domestic police force, birth control regime, etc. All of their policy masquerades under the authority of bourgeois science. I would not think it necessary to point out, but after the discussion on the list of late it is crystal clear that one cannot proceed on the grounds of shared understanding, that the "traditional culture," i.e., extreme poverty, is the creation of the core through centuries of imperialism, that EPZs and the modern machinery of liberal republicanism are the reorganized mechanisms of neoimperialism under conditions of a global civil society and a nascent transnational state. Their "scientific ideas" embed in popular consciousness because of their power to distribute their propaganda through the mass media and through the university system where professors and graduate students then indoctrinate their undergrad and grad students. Again, we have clear instances of their success in creating a legion of the faithful on this very list. The frame is the uncritical mind. Incidentally, it was Robinson who pointed out to me (and this follows logically from the facts he presents at the end of his book, which are incontrovertable) that the "third world" could be eliminated and the pending ecological holocaust would not be averted because it is the core who are burning up the earth. I think that many would profit from reading Bill's book and articles. Andrew Austin Knoxville, TN -- Mine Aysen Doyran PhD Student Department of Political Science SUNY at Albany Nelson A. 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