[lbo-talk] sundry

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at berkeley.edu
Fri Dec 22 10:51:29 PST 2006


On some of the other questions on this list.

Marx seems to have thought that having made their own subsistence on their provision lots, slaves would not work productively in the fields of commodity production and take revenge on technology, as they did not stand to gain from any gains in productivity.Formally free wage workers had the illusion that they were only earning their wage during the working day. Since technology helped them do just that, the wage worker would not be obstructionist towards technical advance. Marx seems to me clearly wrong here. Both as to why slavery restricted technical development and as to whether it in fact did. The technical virtuosity of the sugar mills especially in Barbados does not sit well with this picture.

I have not been able to follow arguments about immigration. Some of what Boddhisatva says was in fact said by LULAC at mid century (don't export oppression, don't drain Mexico of its labor pool). But what is the contradiction between cheap labor and deportation as a real threat? Deportation can be used to intimidate labor, to encourage adult workers not to bring family so that the US wage can be low. The left should take deportation very seriously.

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