>Well, since imports from countries with GDP per capita levels less
>than a third of the United States are about 1.5% of GDP, it would be
>possible. We'd lose a lot of Chinese-made toys and light consumer
>goods. We'd lose a lot of coffee, tea, and cocoa. But the modern
>world economy is just not very effective as a device for extracting
>surplus-value from impoverished peripheral workers and peasants and
>transferring it to the metropole...
Lenin summed up the "mission" of capitalism thus in _The Development of Capitalism in Russia_: "We still have, in conclusion, to sum up on the question which in literature has come to be known as that of the 'mission' of capitalism, i.e., of its historical role in the economic development of Russia. Recognition of the progressiveness of this role is quite compatible (as we have tried to show in detail at every stage in our exposition of the facts) with the full recognition of the negative and dark sides of capitalism, with the full recognition of the profound and all-round social contradictions which are inevitably inherent in capitalism, and which reveal the historically transient character of this economic regime....The progressive historical role of capitalism may be summed up in two brief propositions: increase in the productive forces of social labour, and the socialisation of that labour" (@ <http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/devel/ch08/06.htm>). As far as the poorest nations on the periphery are concerned (especially in much of Africa, Afghanistan, etc.), however, capitalism has ceased to play _any_ progressive historical role (if it ever did there, that is); it doesn't even socialize labor and increase the productive forces of social labor. What little socialization and modernization that such nations achieved in the past have been reversed, with the result that many of them have plunged into social chaos (the phenomenon of "failed states"). -- Yoshie
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