A belated question: why should we calculate profits as a ratio of GDP, as
Doug does? I don't think any country (other than the smaller W european
countries) will have a high ratio? For the US obviously much less so,
given the size of the domestic market. Why don't we look at the profit
rates as
From: Doug Henwood
Charles Brown wrote:
CB: Ok , how about just profits ? Why would U.S. imperialism and U.S.
based transnationals go through so much, invest so much in creating and
protecting capitalist relations of production outside of U.S. territory if
profits were not made there ?
For
From: Carrol Cox
Profits are the _ultimate_ goal but never necessarily the immediate goal
of capitalist action (particularly of the capitalist state, which among
other things is the domain of intra-capitalist struggle).
^
CB: Yes, I agree with this ( though it is often said that the
Charles Brown wrote:
CB: My thought on that is that the 30%-40% is the icing on the cake, and the
icing is the extra profit ( so super means extra rather than
gigantic; above and beyond the regular profit). I don't know if the
concept of margin applies to this. The idea is that super means extra
On Thursday, May 6, 2004 at 16:11:31 (-0400) Doug Henwood writes:
...
My pleasure. I keep wanting to see some rigorous proof that the First
World is rich primarily at the expense of the Third, which is
something I hear people assert pretty often. I'm open to the
argument, if someone wants to make
Bill Lear:
How does one measure the opportunity cost of, say, 10 million
slaughtered peasants over the last 40 years?
You really need to expand your time-frame in order to make sense of this
question. Like 400 years rather than 40. If it were not for the colonial
exports of silver, gold, fur,
Doug Henwood:
Total profits from MNC investment in poor countries - all except the
rich industrial countries of Asia, Europe, and North America, plus
the Asian NICs - was about $25 billion in 2002, or about 0.25% of
U.S. GDP. That's a pretty thin layer of icing.
CB: Yes, it is a thin layer
Doug Henwood wrote,
I keep wanting to see some rigorous proof that the First
World is rich primarily at the expense of the Third, which is
something I hear people assert pretty often. I'm open to the
argument, if someone wants to make it.
Depends first on what you mean by rich and poor.
