I have suggested that there has been little broad based progress, as well as horrifying regress on important fronts, since Keynesianism went up in stagflationary ashes (indeed adjustment was most forcibly and disproportionately imposed on the third world to *catastrophic* effect--see Biplab Dasgupta, Structural Adjustment, Global Trade and the Political Economy of Development, 1988; also Guglielmo Carchedi, Frontiers of Political Economy, 1991; also Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalisation of Poverty, though I don't agree with the underlying framework).
You do cite India's impressive performance in the improvment of life expectancy (do note that the 1997 figure should be a projection).
However, you miss many crucial points: first India's full experiment structural adjustment began only in 1991, and already the removal of subsidies on potassic and phosphatic fertiliser, as well as the massive curtailment of public investment esp. in irrigation, power and other related agricultural and rural needs, has led to a deterioration of social life in a number of social indicators such as poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy and inequality--to say nothing of a decline in the rate of growth in per capita consumption of clothes and sugar (though that for edible oil and tea has gone up.) (Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity, 1995, p. 180-81, quoted by Dasgupta whose book focuses on Lat America and Africa) In these conditions there may well be further deterioration in women's access to food within the family, exacerbating the .94 ratio of women to men, which has led Dreze and Sen to calculate that 13% of the women of Pakistan and India may be missing.
You also fail to note that the most rapid employment growth this decade has been in the informal sector, not the public and unionized private sector. The condition of landless laborers in the rural sector and casual wage labor in the ubran sector seems to have deteriorated, esp under the pressure of increasing unemployment. Do note that if the average bombay textile worker or coal miner makes about$2.5 and $1.10/day, wage rates in the unorganized sector are 1/4 that. So things in the informal sector must be even worse, but I haven't read Jan Bremen's Footloose Labour yet.
Evidence from the National Sample Survey indciated that between 89 and 93, the proportion of the population livng below the poverty line (as defined as a nutritional minimum in temrs of calories per day increased from 34 to 41 percent, while the number of persons living below the poverty line rose from 282 million to 355 million. (Amit Bhaduri, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalization, p. 102)
In these conditions I would be surprised if there is much continued progress, if not regress, for the poor and the most poorly paid sections of the working class in life expectancy, literacy and per capita income. This seems true of course in the case of Indonesia where Bremen filed a most troubling report in Economic and Political Weekly on the distorted nature of the poverty stats.
You do not cite any data disaggregated by class or income group on improvments in life expectancy (or infant mortality or literacy or per capita income) in Africa and Latin America though their subjection to structural adjustment began earlier than India's. Why? Do you have such data? Does it weaken your case for general progress? What about the World Banks's composite index of life expectancy,educational attainment and per capita income? How has that index been moving by income group and class? You think I am selectively citing data?
It was widely held that the miracle NIC economies of East Asia have been the only case of solid progress for the working class in the last decade (of course from 65-96 GDP per capita increased 3 fold), despite the authoritarian political and factory conditions under which the proletariat there labored. It seems to me that this great example of rapid progress in per capita income or real earnings has been slowed down in terms of worker gains while the proletariat will now suffer ever greater insecurity from the threat of unemployment. Note here that the real wage need not decline for social and physical misery to increase.
Simply, it does no good to tell me that things have improved over the last 40 or 50 or 100 years, and statistics about improvements in mean life expectancy over the last 25 years do not speak to the point either (and in India's case the question of inequality has only become sharper this decade or perhaps you think the Congress Party and the BJP are up to some good). Moreover, that capitalism is still intact is equally irrelevent to the determination of whether it has proven itself over the last 25 years to any longer be an instrument for broad based human progress.
Yet this might be your most astonishing evasion. You replied to the following I had written:
>>Dealt already with the fall and stagnation in real wages. Even if this has
>>been reversed in the last two years, the intervening 25 have to be
>>explained, not denied.
>
>But the difference is that I do explain the fall and stagnation in
>wages. I have always insisted on the destructive side of capital. It is
>you that is denying the real increases in standard of living.
Not only have you failed to explain the near 25 year fall and stagnation in real US earnings--the invocation of the destructive side means nothing--you have denied it on the grounds that due to the compulsions of the production of relative surplus value, unit values of the commodities that enter consumption must tend to decline, thereby raising the real wage.
Yet this is what did NOT happen for almost 25 years (suggesting that the rate of real investment or accumulation had slowed down), and we will see how long lived this hiatus is (even now earnings gains have been concentrated among the financial wizards--let us not forget how precipituous the fall in relative and absolute terms have been for the most vulnerable proletarians though there has been some improvement in the last 2 years). I have given something of an explanation for why there has been some exceptional real earnings gains in the US in the last two years.
In terms of the US economy, you may want to consult Galbraith's Created Unequal for good statistical evidence of how weak output, productivity, wage, and total employment growth has been over the last 25 years.
Now I do appreciate your criticism of H Grossmann's wage theory--see here as well Kenneth Lapides *Marx's Wage Theory In Historical Perspective* and trans. of Grossmann (HG) in History of Political Economy 26:2 (1994).
But it seems obvious that you don't understand your hero:
>It was not surprising, then, that he [HG] should place his emphasis upon what
>was characteristic of that time, increase in absolute surplus value,
>fall in the quantity of use-values the workers' wage would secure.
Another most uncareful and inaccurate formulation of what HG wrote. He wanted to demonstrate how despite an increase in the quantity of use values that the workers' wage would secure, Marx's theory of increasing misery was still justified: "The problem is thus...to explain on the basis of Marx's law of value the *tendency for wages to increase*, and at at the same time to show, without contradiction, how Marx's theory of increasing misery is justified, that is, his contention that 'in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer...must grow worse.'. *Hic Rhodus, hic salta"
Grossmann did not concentrate on the increased intensity of labor (Taylor and Bedeaux systems) to the exclusion of the positive effect productivity improvements had on the real wage. And he certainly did not argue that the quantity of use values had to fall for the social and physical misery of the working class to increase. That was the puzzle he attempted to solve; you have read this final chapter of his magnum opus, correct?
By the way your real hero Levitt or Gross defends Vincent Sarich's ideas about deep racial difference in his latest intervention in the science wars. They are waiting for you, Jim; go ahead.
Yours, Rakesh
ps I have left many other points unchallenged.