kelley at pulpculture.org wrote:
>
> At 06:55 PM 11/30/03 -0500, Doug Henwood wrote:
> >michael wrote:
> >
> >>Suppose Nike pays some you girls $3 to make a pair of shoes and sells
> >>them for
> >>$150, what does that do to productivity? Or course, if they hide proits for
> >>tax purposes and pretend that the imported shoes were worth $125, then
> >>outsourcing will not improve productivity.
> >
> >But there are also expensive inputs for distribution and marketing. Nike's
> >profits are not extraordinarily high.
>
> what are "normal" profits-- what's the benchmark?
>
> Kelley
>
> don't get me started on expensive inputs aka marketingdroids. *shudder*
>
Aren't we mixing statistics which measure one kind of thing (which exists whether it ought to exist or not) and ethical judgments which say another kind of thing should be measured? I don't see how what happens in the market ('buying cheap & selling dear' as it were) has anything to do with productivity. The possibility (probabiltiy) Michael points to seems only relevant to how surplus value is distributed within the ruling class, not with how that surplus value is created.
And from a socialist viewpoint, what would count, I imagine, is the total world social surplus available for a world of socialist economies. So I'm having trouble seeing the relevance of Michael's questions.
Carrol