[Marxism] Imperialism and the US working class (Was YADL)

[S. Artesian]

And when people cite the price of coffee or sugar vs the price of industrial 
goods, as if that discrepancy in price is the mechanism by which 
super-profits are extracted and realized-- as if the "unequal exchange"--  
quotes intended because it is a notion that is so poorly supported as JB's 
own post evidences-- of industrial for resource or agricultural goods 
constitutes a significant portion of capital accumulation--  well, it 
doesn't drive me up a whole-- it just proves that they cannot find, cannot 
evaluation, cannot produce, anything to support their contentions about 
wealth transfer.

If anyone is harumphing around here, it's JB, who folds his arms across his 
chest, quivering with indignation and wonders, aloud, how anyone could dare 
ask for proof, data, information about what must be, always has been, 
surely was, and will be the TRUTH with big block capital letters about the 
IMPERIALIST ROOTS of capitalism-- which you see must have existed forever 
because Marx referred to them in his discussion of primitive accumulation.

Well, JB ought to go back and read more  Marx and reread Marx on primitive 
accumulation a little bit more closely, because what Marx describes as 
primitive accumulation is not the transfer of wealth from poor, from slaves, 
from the indigenous to workers in the European countries-- but in fact a 
process where land, and the means of production, are transformed into 
capital by their expropriation into private property, and the dispossessed 
populations are left with nothing but their labor power, which has no use to 
them, save its use in exchange with those means of production in order to 
gain means, again, to the means of subsistence.

So certainly the rivers of blood and sweat and black skins and red skins 
sacrificed in the slave empires, initiated, maintained under the 
semi-feudal/merchant capital extensions of Europe into the Americas, Africa, 
Asia were converted to gold-- but 1) such gold in and of itself did not 
create modern capitalism  2) merchant capital itself did not transform into 
industrial capital-- slave traders did not become industrial capitalists 
[Eric F. Williams to the contrary nothwithstanding-- and his book Capitalism 
and Slavery is truly one of the great, but mistaken, books on the origins of 
capitalism]-- the Liverpool, and Bordeaux merchants did not reinvent 
themselves as the industrialists of Manchester and Lyon, nor where they the 
great financiers of industrial production  3) the workers in those 
"metropolitan" countries hardly reaped a windfall wage from that miserable, 
vicious slave system  4) the slave system itself was incapable of becoming, 
morphing into a modern capitalist system, creating neither industrial 
capitalists nor proletarians in either expansion or decay.  And that's just 
for starters

Right, no workers in the advanced countries would want to trade places with 
workers in the poorer countries-- but that is not the issue.  The issue as 
JB put it is that the workers in the advanced countries have a material, 
classwide, economic interest in maintaining the "superexploitation" of, not 
the workers, but the poorer countries qua countries in order to preserve 
their share of the loot.

So where is the evidence-- where are the super rates of profit that the 
capitalists are supposed to obtain from their imperial exploitation which 
they can then divvy up with their greedy,  pig-eyed, workers?

Does capitalism today still support, engender, encourage, and take advantage 
of   near slave-like conditions in poorer countries?  Absolutely, 
positively.  The great power of  exchange value, of value composed from 
labor time, is its plasticity-- its ability to lend its own identity to all 
other commodities in the market, to render them "AS IF" they were produced 
under the terms and conditions of capitalist exchange even when those 
commodities are products of forced, compelled, labor.  But that process is 
not the lifeblood of capitalist reproduction as a whole.

And if Nestor wants to get involved here, well, whew, maybe he wants to 
provide the actual data that somehow JB can't be bothered to produce...

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo at gmail.com>
To: <sartesian at earthlink.net>
Sent: Sunday, April 05, 2009 9:20 PM
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Imperialism and the US working class (Was YADL)