AUT: Re: CAPITAL EXPORT

["cwright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I highly recommend the work done by Massimo de Angelis on trade, export,
etc.  http://homepages.uel.ac.uk/M.DeAngelis/writing3.htm

Trade and capital export certainly play a big role under capital, but one
key thing you can raise with the Leninists, which will generally drive them
buggy, is that Lenin provides no means of grasping WHY does the export of
capital happen, what is its 'law of motion' so to speak.  You can also ask
them why Lenin never discusses the transformation of the relations of
production, but speaks of export of capital in a really mechanical way.  The
autonomist discussion of class composition shows its absolute superiority in
these areas (see the Aufheben discussion of Theories of Decadence, for a
great discussion of some other aspects http://www.geocities.com/aufheben2/.)

My approach to this falls within Massimo's approach, broadly.  I think that
class composition changes, that it is driven by class struggle.  But one
aspect of class composition is the presence of multiple class compositions
internationally.  When labor forces capital to try to find a new
composition, it is never simply in the developed countries.  Capital may
still need the goods, services, raw materials, etc produced by the old class
composition.  IMO, capital exports this class composition of capital to
other countries.

Where the tendency in the developed capitalist countries was the real
subsumption of labor to capital, the tendency at first in the less
developed/non-capitalist countries was to impose the formal subsumption of
labor ie old, pre-capitalist forms of labor, to the capitalist market.  This
in part resulted from the loss of struggles against slavery in the US which
pushed European capital to look towards India and Egypt for cotton, without
necessarily transforming the relations of production.

This meant that what the Leninists call imperialism is really the transfer
of an older class composition from the center to the periphery (creating the
periphery in fact), hence the tendency towards exporting agricultural and
raw material production, and some industrial production.

Now, Trotsky recognizes correctly that capital transfers the newest means of
production, not the oldest.  He does not grasp, however, that they are the
newest means of production available to the previous class composition.
This has two impacts.  First, the periphery never catches up to the center,
creating the process that people like Walter Rodney recognized as the
perisitent underdevelopment of the so-called Third World.  Second, the class
composition exported does not look exactly the same as it did in the
developed countries for several reasons.  A) the means of production used
are as advanced as the current class composition in the center, so that
Russia gets the most advanced large scale factories employing THE
PROFESSIONAL WORKER, while the mass worker begins to dominate in the center
(Ford did not export Fordism to Russia, that required post-1917 capitalism.)
B) the class struggle in those places is not the same exactly because the
capital-labor relation is developed by individual capitals who specifically
are trying to develop them only as far as is necessary, putting a deformed
developmental process in place.  Hence colonialism is in fact necessary as
the means of enforcing formal subsumption.  The anti-colonial revolutions
involve, at least in their aftermath, the imposition of the real subsumption
of labor to capital, negating the need for an external imposition of market
discipline.  C) The history is not the same.  Period.  Diffeent people,
different prior social relations, different material history.  Simple
enough.

As such, Trotsky's notion of permanent revolution is both right and terribly
wrong, having no grasp of formal vs. real subsumption and class composition.
Lenin is even less meaningful because he never grasps what Trotsky does and
at the same time never understands class composition.  This does not mean
that anyone does much better than Lenin at the time and we would have to
explain why (in fact, Pannekoek and others rather liked Lenin's imperialism
from what I can see.)

I know this is very sketchy, but it gives us the beginnings of an alternate
dynamic which also engages with the actual interconnection of center and
periphery.  Needless to say, as we face the 21st century, we have a
multiplicity of class compositions, arranged hierarchically, across the
world.  The social worker or Multitude or Global Value Subjects (ugh, that
is a really ugly phrase, even if it is correct, comrade Dyers-Witherford)
exists alongside the professional worker, the mass worker (the basis of
industry in Argentina, South Korea, the Asian Tigers, Brazil, Mexico, India,
etc.), and some pre-capitalist social relations as well.  This is a complex
picture that goes well beyond anything the Leninists can grapple with and
leads to thinking about new social subjects, hence my discussion (mirrored
by the Nick Dyers-Witherford piece, which is excellent in many ways, and the
piece on class struggle anarchism, which is excellent, if a bit muddled on
Marx at times) of the transformation of the notion of the central social
subject which no longer places us as a purely class subject with race,
gender and sexuality as subsets of class.

Right or wrong, I think that the discussion of imperialism dovetails
precisely with this broader discussion.

Good luck,
Chris

----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin Werner Hauge" <whauge51@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2002 5:22 AM
Subject: AUT: CAPITAL EXPORT


> hi ALL
>
> I wounder if anybody on this list have some opinion on 1) the concept of
> capital export, if this essential, leninist or not, and 2) to what extent
it
> is true to speak of marginalisation of developing countries in the world
> economy.
>
> I'm engaged in a discussion here in Norway with som leftists, some of them
> leninist-trots, about imperialism versus empire.I am critical of Lenins
> concept of imperialism. But I think that an analysis of capital export is
> essential here, and I have published an article in norwegian, which
analyse
> this. I argue for a strong increase in capital export the last 20, and
> especially the last 10, years.
>
> In the discussion here I have made some critical comments on to use FDI as
a
> measure of capital export-which I think is mostly a measure of takeovers
or
> fusions and less of new real investments. Is real investment the right
> concept of capital export (if we can use Lenins concept).
>
> In solidarity
> Martin
>
>
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