[lbo-talk] made in china

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sat Oct 15 15:29:56 PDT 2011


A 'problem' of capitalism that isn't quite superficial is how to consume the total product: if it isn't consumed, misery ensues. Luxury consumption by capitalists, no matter how much, is never enough. If I remember correctly there is long and rather tedious section in Theories of Surplus Value attempting to show how the total product could be consumed.

Carrol

On 10/15/2011 5:08 PM, Nicholas Roberts wrote:
> I wonder how much of US domestic consumption is luxury items?
> I bet the plutonomies share is bigger than the working poors purchases from
> Walmart, i.e. China's share of US consumer spending
>
>
> in other words, I bet the plutonomy skews the stats a hell of a lot
>
> http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2011/el2011-25.html
> the charts give dollar value and not volume of items, and so if you are
> shopping at Wal Mart its all about China, if you shop at Sotheby's it's US
> and Europe
>
> reminds of the book Washinton's China
> http://books.google.com/books?id=AA-jbmyfl54C&source=gbs_navlinks_s
>
>
> there is trope floating around those stinky foreigners are taking money out
> of America, and MSNBC is giving it space
> a kind of leftist, producerism, a liberal version of Glenn Beck
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI_P3pxze5w&feature=player_embedded
>
>
> btw, I heard Christian Parenti's interview on Tropics of Chaos today, and I
> am glad to see he supports the Occupy Wall St movement, i.e. regulating
> finance for better environmental outcomes. Which makes the Occupy Wallt St
> action even more important, content free indeed!
>
> In fact, I went to the Occupy Berkeley event and it was far from content
> free, or hollow at core. What was at core, was a diverse collection of
> Berkeley's radicals, progressives, liberals. After all, KPFA still puts
> Doug's show on the air, unlike WBAI.
>
> Christian's book is interesting, but a better historical overview comes from
> Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts, The Making of the Third World
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts I think its wrong to
> focus on the tropics or sub-stropics. Think Katrina and New Orleans. There
> seems to be a pretty big Failed State within the US. i.e, the State of the
> Poor. AS Chomsky pointed out many years ago in Failed States.
>
> The Occupy Wall St movement is what Chomsky mentioned 2 years ago, this is
> Obama's Army breaking loose of the heavily managed top down campaigning. Its
> going global.
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list