Merger Mania

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Mon Dec 7 06:47:50 PST 1998


Louis, your head is so full of Trotskyist jargon that it did not even occur to you that I was joking! I don't actually think formal logic, the principle of non contradiction or bourgeois science is decadent. The joke was made in the context of our conversation on the Sokal affair and my own comments in favor of the Della Volpean school, which has even suggested at times the essential unity of method between the natural and social sciences. Of course you may be joking as well, but we are condemned to misunderstand and hate each other.

Of course I was not joking about the violent direction of the system, and I do take seriously your criticism that I will need to get off my ass. But I have to get my own union card, i.e. write a dissertation.

The other topic I was not joking about was the international transfer of value through through the sale of advanced capital goods above value.

I should have said the following.

1. The tendency towards a world wide equalisation of profit rates is not thwarted, as the extra profits made by the imperialist firms are passed on to professional legal and engineering talent while the profits that are lost by the third world firms are compensated for by pressing wages below the value of labor power, which of course is generally possible in the the authoritarian to fascist conditions in most third world countries.

2. The other way third world firms counteract rising capital output ratios and therewith falling profit rates is stepping up exports to the first world. This flood of cheap imports of course undermines the profit rate especially of rival capital good using firms in the first world, though such firms in the first world have the advantage of proximity to the advanced capital goods producers and may thus be able to incorporate the latest technology more easily and quickly. Nonetheless, in the imperialist countries we should expect the problems of excess capacity to be most severe here (in the consumer goods sector generally) and de-industrialisation to hit here first.

I think Galbraith's book provides evidence for such tendencies. He gives a disaggregated view of the industrial structure.

yours, rakesh



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list