>Really, Enrique?
>
>1. Oil is the only raw material?
>
>2.What about the Singer-Prebish thesis about worsening terms of trade? Why
>are you sure this made so little contribution to profitability and
>accumulation?
>
>3. And what about the influx of immigrants (often recruited as single
>males, displacing reproduction costs to the third world, aka apartheid, not
>delinking) whose labor widened all kinds of bottlenecks and helped to
>rebuild Europe after its thirty year bout of fraticide? Turkish miners in
>Belgium's Borinage area? Turks in Germany's Cologne plants? Immigrants from
>developing countries everywhere in the most highly dangerous and high risk
>jobs, and working the most amount of overtime? TO SAY NOTHING OF POLICE
>ABUSE about which the mass of the population remained and remains
>unconcerned.
I should like to see someone present a rigorous analysis of replacement costs of oil and all other imports from the poor nations. The debt crisis and the SAPs turned the poor nations en masse away from "import substitution" toward export-oriented production in order to earn forex (in short, they were reduced to the status of raw material suppliers & assemblers of products for export in "free-trade" zones). Increased competition that followed conveniently lowered the prices of inputs, contributing to larger profit margins of the rich nations' corps than otherwise, no doubt. The SAPs also cut social programs and wages in the poor nations. Both increased competition and lower labor costs are causes for the worsening terms of trade. And the misery in the poor nations helps produce migrant manpower that the rich nations can avail themselves of!
Imperialism works!
Yoshie