Roger wrote:
>For them [Baran & Sweezey], "wasting" the surplus is essential to
>realizing it and avoiding stagnation. In Marx's day, most all of surplus
>value was accumulated. Today many other ways must be found (investment
>outlets being dwarfed by the size of the surplus). Most alternatives are
>not as reliable as accumulation. Except for military spending, which not
>only regularly eats up a nice chunk and provides profits to contractors, but
>paves the way for US capital's dominance and exploitation globally. Sweezy,
>in fact, argues the opposite of what you imply; military spending is
>essential to continued prosperity (arguable, of course).
If Sweezy were right, we'd have a world in which money chases its tail in the money and stock markets. And we'd expect apparently gratuitous belligerence from the militarily powerful and strategically unwarranted investment in military technology. We'd also expect the urgent commodification of the formerly uncommodified (to introduce new options for relations conducive to accumulation - such as in the replacement of public services by 'free market' relations and the replacement of women's 'unproductive' role of yore by way of integrating those women into the commodity sector - not a few, unsurprisingly, as carers, cleaners, and sex workers for the double-income middle class. Oh, and as thorough a colonisation as possible of what we used to call culture - the constitutive manifestation of which, communication, would then be redefined as quantifiable and [centrally] controllable data). We'd expect investment growth in niches only - where the potential demand of the currently monied might be tapped - and stagnation in the province of more prosaic sectors.
And Rakesh wrote:
>In this sense the traditional image of a highly exploited deskilled
>proletarian on a sped-up assembly line may become anachronistic, leaving
>Babbage and Taylor behind (so Kenny and Florida among others argue, contra
>Braverman). Will the problem be less the exploitation of an increasingly
>sophisticated industrial working class than the leaving behind of the mass
>of humanity which is not able (it is oft implicitly claimed) to function in
>an increasingly sophisticated computer mediated work environment. As the
>banality goes, those who may have been able to work quick may not be able
>to work smart. In this family of claims I think you will notice important
>elements of the dominant ideology.
Well, I know Castells has said exploitation is passe. Exclusion is the phobic phenomenon du juour for him. Does this not imply that the ensnaring of the unexploited into capital relations might now count as progressive? I'm confused. Even if that did follow, do Rakesh's speculations not also imply that capitalism doesn't particularly need or want the excluded? So then we'd have a systemic need for more accumulation possibilities (eg by tapping the second and third worlds - eg drawing China into the WTO) in direct contradiction with a systemic tendency to rely on an ever smaller and more elite proletarian fragment (eg China, with its many impoverished primary and secondary industrial workers far outweighing its effective demand, looking more the harbinger of excess capacity and underconsumption than a promising new node in the global complex of accumulation relations).
That would seem a fairly immediately significant contradiction, no?
Cheers, Rob.