> Ricardo's wage theory has seemed untrue. The supply of competent
> workers
> in a given place is not unlimited; neither workers nor industry are
> perfectly mobile, and labor demonstrated in the 19th and 20th centuries
> that it could mobilize and defend itself. The iron law of wages would
> seem to function only if the supply of labor is infinite and totally
> mobile.
>
> Unfortunately that day, for practical purposes, has now arrived, thanks
> to globalization.
Methinks he is exaggerating somewhat. The Internet has not perfectly globalized all production of goods and services. When my car needs fixing, it doesn't make much sense for me to ship it to China rather than take it to the garage down the street. So at least some workers are not yet perfectly mobile. I don't think labor in even the poorest countries is completely unable to mobilize and defend itself (even slaves have been known to revolt); if Marx can teach us anything, it is that capitalist class relations naturally induce worker resistance to exploitation (though it can be and usually is very hard to manifest that resistance). And the supply of workers is hardly infinite -- in fact, with the progress in birth control, it is less so than in Ricardo's day, and there are very unfortunately still plenty of diseases such as AIDS to help limit the supply.
Furthermore, it's not just abstract labor that capitalists need; they extract surplus value and hence profits by producing specific commodities, which require specific numbers of workers with specific skills. True, in a number of industries, it is no longer necessary that those workers be located geographically in certain places, but that does not mean that it may be easy to find them even by scouring the planet with the Internet.
> Globalization is removing the constraints imposed in the past by
> societies possessing institutions, legislation, and the political will
> to
> protect workers.
The question is, how rapidly is it removing which specific constraints in which specific ways? And what sorts of countervailing tendencies, producing new constraints, are there? In my view, understanding an economic system such as capitalism requires enumerating and balancing a host of specific tendencies and counter-tendencies; broad generalizations like this are seldom very informative.
> Free trade doctrine is hostile to unions, social legislation, and legal
> restriction on industry's labor practices, all of which deprive poor
> countries of their comparative advantage, which is poverty.
But is it the case the workers in poor countries are completely helpless? I think that view comes perilously close to a libel on those workers' intelligence and ability to collaborate with each other. (Although resistance is always tough, as I said above.)
> Labor today has almost entirely lost power in the places where it once
> possessed it. Western Europe provides limited and unrepresentative
> exceptions: Germany with its national unions, and the civil service
> unions in France. In both countries unions survive because of political
> rather than economic factors.
Perhaps in the US too. But politics ain't chopped liver (as I believe Engels or Kautsky or someone once said.)
> Many arguments have been offered by economists as to why the
> comparative
> advantages of poverty and non-regulated industry would eventually and
> automatically do away with themselves, so that in the end we will all
> be
> high-wage societies - if not with advanced social protections.
It's too bad that Pfaff didn't have room to explain to us what he thinks is wrong with those arguments. He might be right, but I'd like to see a more detailed discussion of this.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt