>>> "rc-am" <rcollins at netlink.com.au> 09/28/99 01:20AM >>>
charles wrote:
>Industrialization is complete historically. <
is it? bio-tech industries? extra-utero gestation? tisssue and organ engineering? cybernetics? the privatisation of air and water being pursued as the means of environmental salvation? there are still certain limits to capital, and capital is trying very hard to traverse those as we speak.
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Charles: My meaning of "industrialization" follows that of Marx in _Capital_ where he defines it in contrast with "manufacture". The two elements of "industrialization" were cooperation and mechanization. I would say that mechanization has developed to the point of negating significantly cooperation (meaning amassing many workers in one geographical place or the classical giant factory). The points of production have been scattered, reversing a trend that defined industrialization.
Biotechnical production would very much define a new phase of capitalist production beyond the Industrial revolution, which depended upon non-biological machines. In other words, your examples support my point as I would define industrialization.
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Charles:
>We shouldn't support protectionism for the U.S. , but we should support
protectionism for the neo-colonial countries to the extent those countries
decide they want it for themselves.<
Angela: you're assuming of course that the protectionism of neo-colonial countries is not a feature in the re-organisation of regional hegemonic blocs, emerging in the interstices of US hegemony, as a feature of a new global organisation of capital -- whether it's a basis for war or a basis for stability remains to be seen. perhaps you want to hasten the demise of US hegemony? a worthwhile goal; but it's not halted or speeded up by protectionism.
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Charles: Well, you aren't quite sure that it wouldn't in some cases. Think of it this way. One of the clearcut reorganizations of regional hegmonic blocs in a manner that imperialism considers in its favor is NAFTA, no ? This seems the opposite of protectionism for Mexico, Canada and Brazil, et al. So, to negate this is some sense would involve a "protectionism" from neo-free trade (FT).
It is especially my role as a Marxist in the U.S. to oppose "my own" capitalists first, no ?
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there are different versions of the protectionism we are talking about here: controls on speculative capital to ensure a redirection to productive investments; controls on the outflows of surpluses; controls on the price of imports. all of these are not, claims to the contrary, about regaining the mechanisms of democratic control over the surplus produced by workers in a particular country, or at least putting it to work in the interests of those workers, and nor are they about any ostensible division between national and transnational capitals. they are all about, and have always been about, gaining a greater slice of the _global_ surplus in places which act as the sites of a regional guarantor of capitalist stabilisation and discipline -- South Africa, Australia and Malaysia being instances of those, some of whose bloody effects we have just seen.
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Charles: Yes, different versions of "protectionism". A better phrasing from my standpoint would be neo-colonial national liberation and self-determination in a dialectical unity with proletarian internationalism, but , you know , people start calling you dogmatic when you talk like that.
Charles Brown