Mark Jones and Louis Proyect may try to evade the point on which they heaped such scorn, but if Louis denounces the argument as "idiocy" he speaks presumably with as much authority and rashness, as when he informed this list that there is no such thing as neo-lberalism.
As for Mark's reference to my quotation from Lenin about the importance of analysising contradictions between different sections of international capital, I do not see how the logic of that argument is affected by any information Mark might give me off the internet about my role in prosecuting, presumably, armed conflict. But if Mark wants "to march under Lenin's flag", a curiously idealist phrase of his, not mine, he no doubt will wish to answer questions at an internal meeting of the Communist Party Refoundation about how his handling of differences with his co-moderator on Leninlist, conformed to Leninist conventions of collective responsibility. To refer to another argument from Lenin,
"as we proceed with the building of a *real* party, the class-conscious worker must learn to ... insist that the duties of a Party member must be fulfilled not only by the rank and file, but by the 'people on top' as well." (One Step Forward, Section Q).
But leaving aside the attempt to ridicule or dismiss the analysis of the contradiction I am drawing attention to, Doug tried to pose a much wider theoretical question of analysis, to which I would like to attempt to respond.
At 09:36 AM 11/2/98 -0500, Doug wrote:
>Louis Proyect wrote:
>
>>Capitalism is a world system. No generalizations can
>>be made about Hong Kong unless you trace its historical roots in the global
>>banking system. The "success" of places like Hong Kong or Switzerland are
>>dialectically related to the failure of Indonesia and the former Yugoslavia.
>
>On an instinctive level, I know this is true, though I'd probably want to
>pair, say, the Netherlands and Indonesia, and the U.S. and Mexico. I have
>no doubt that the initial European takeoff was fundamentally dependent on
>colonial plunder. But just how much does the prosperity of the First World
>depend on the immiseration of the Third today? How much value is actually
>extracted from the neocolonies? I mean this as a real question and not a
>provocation.
>
>Doug
On this major, extremely major question, I take Louis's implication that capitalism is a zero sum game. (I do not of course, as my whole thread on Hong Kong argues, think that capitalism is an *undifferentiated* world system)
I have argued explicitly more than once that the present struggle is about which sections of capital are going to be destroyed. So to some extent it is true, that if Hong Kong capitalists succeed in keeping their stock of capitalism together more effectively, it means that other capitalists are going to have to accept bigger hits.
China, including Hong Kong, look as if they are going to come out of this crisis with their position somewhat strengthened relative to Japan, for example.
Certainly the world system has been behaving through this crisis as if there is indeed an invisible ceiling - the total global Value which cannot both provide an unlimited source for the accumulation of surplus, and provide growing purchasing power for the glut of commodities, that are brought into existence.
The unequal exchange of value from the third to the first world is a somewhat different question. Lenin's analysis based on Hobson in 1916 is no longer accepted as a sufficient explanation for the accumulation of additional surplus value in the metropolitan capitalist/imperialist countries. The theme of "unequal exchange" was explored for 20 to 30 years by third world economists who were dismissed by mainstream marxist economists who it seemed to me, disliked the potentiality for criticism of the Soviet Union.
Others produced a list of half a dozen mechanisms that are "unfair" in economic exchanges between the first and third world. Certainly there is political oppression, but I feel that there has to be a more fundamental scientific answer.
My own hypothesis is that the unequal exchange arises the dynamics of exchange in a world with a massive gradient in the value of labour power between different economies. Depending on how labour power is priced, and the comparisons made, the difference in wages between the third world and developed capitalist world range up to the order of thirty times.
Marx wrote "In order to examine the object of our investigation in its integrity, free of all disturbing and subsidiary circumstances, we must treat the whole world as one nation, " (second footnote in Chapter 24 of Vol 1 of Capital).
In applying Marx we therefore have to try to move from the abstract to the concrete.
The value of a commodity depends the socially necessary labour time for its production. What is that, in a world with a 30 fold gradient of wages? There is a pull towards the cheapest wages, but clearly the dynamics are such that capital does not immediately fly to the areas of lowest wages, thereby rapidly equalising the immiseration. There are clearly counter-dynamics about the centralisation of capital in the metropolitan countries and the emergence of a privileged "middle class", educated market, which in turn provides sophisticated labour power for the complex processes of an advanced capitalist economy.
One formula I have seen about international exchange is that international value is determined by the average unit of universal labour by all the coutries participating in international trade. Logical from a marxist point of view, but what does one mean by average? And why average, and not the cheapest socially necessary labour time, or the socially necessary labour time in the heartlands of monopoly capitalism? This is complicated by the speed of technological change which Marx argued creates temporary extra surplus-value for the capitalist through a temporary monopoly of the new methods of production.
The trouble is that the speed with which these new processes equilibrate within the notionally uniform capitalist world economy is very varied, for capital, for labour power, and for different types of commodities.
My view therefore is that fundamentally the secret of unequal exchange will be found in the riddle as with the exploitation of the worker's labour power that the exchange is actually *fair*, in terms of the narrow bourgeois right of who owns what commodity at what moment in the exchange. But of course the application of a narrow bourgeois right on a uniform basis to a complex social process that is very non-uniform is in the round essential *un* equal.
Thus the massive gradient of wages and living standards in the world, contributes to, as well as being caused by, massive gradients in Value locally in relation to global Value, so that it would be wiser to see it as a field, varying in its force in a highly irregular way like a gravitational field.
The speed at which economic components such as labour power, capital and commodities can circulate, is one of the things that are subject to human control, even if the world capitalist system cannot be taken over by a world proletarian revolution next month, and be subjected to perfectly orderly central planning. Therefore the exploration of reforms, to which some sections of the capitalists are already being propelled, about the management of the volatility of finance capital movements, whether by greater transparency, or a tax on transfers or whatever, is potentially a fundamental structural reform that raises the question of the ultimate ownership and accountability of the whole world economy, but in a way that starts to give openings for real change.
To heap contempt on the exploration of these issues and the contradictions between the capitalists themselves, does not speak well for the marxist credibility of those subscribers who find it quicker to scorn than to analyse. Dogmatism is less daunting, when you realise that fundamentally it is a manifestation of laziness.
Chris Burford
London