rate of return on capital
Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
It's not just about competing levels of profit. MNCs locate abroad to build market share, be closer to foreign markets - and increase the mass of profit (a separate consideration from the rate of profit). I've read papers that argue that MNCs are actually less profitable than their domestic counterparts. I don't know that that's a certainty, but multinationalization is a very complicated thing.
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CB: It really seems we need a theory of strategic and long term planning specifically with respect to the class struggle, as well as short term profit maximization or intracapitalist competition, to explain these late capitalist patterns. The U.S. industrial workers' overall bargaining position was significantly undermined by the plantclosings and increased mobility of manufacture of the 80's, and I assume some of this was done by increasing the mulitinational character of GM, Ford, Chrysler and others, maybe.
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Years ago, I talked with a grad student at the New School who was doing a diss on the multinationalization of U.S. firms in the 1950s. She said that the U.S. government urged them to invest abroad as part of the post-WW II plan to get dollars overseas and kickstart the global trading mechanism - and the firms were reluctant at first. I lost touch with her, and don't know what came of her research.
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CB: I am tempted to speculate that in the 1950's , the U.S. government was trying to compete with and contain socialist and national liberation revolutions all over the world, and the above is the economic component of the infamous military policy. In other words, the U.S. government was looking out for , again the long term interests, and interests of the capitalist class as a whole, and trying to persuade individual capitalist firms to act according to this longview/wider view.