Reply to Anthony

[Philip Ferguson <plf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>I think that you are off about the "stagnation of the productive sphere".
>
>On the world scale the production of "old economy" commodities: steel,
>metals of all sorts, machinery of all sorts - especially consumer durables;
>energy - petroleum, natural gas, coal and electricity; and consumer
>non-durables - clthing, food products etc., has been over fifty years
>increasing with only minor ups and downs.


It wasn't really the level of production - ie output totals - that I was
talking about.  It was stagnation in the rate of profit.  This is what
drives capital out of the productive sphere and into speculation and so on,
and also forces the development of ways of shifting goods and making
payments (eg plastic cards, e-commerce etc).

The IT sphere still depends on the 'old economy' even at the most basic
level - ie the pomos forget that you can't have computer technology without
industrial workers making computers on a production line, nor all the other
workers involved in mining and making the metal and other parts of
computers.

>Their domestic economies however, can not be understood as "national"
>entites - but only as part of the already global economy. Where your
>postmodern opponents talk about the "creative" sector - other would have
>called that part of the economy the non-productive, and parasitical sector.
>I don't. But the shift to "service" economies - i.e. administrative,
>financial, research, military, and cultural centers is clear in all of the
>economies of the imperialist centers.


Well, I think Marx's distinction is key.  Under capitalism it is productive
if it produces surplus-value; if it merely draws from the pool
surplus-value it is unproductive.  Some parts of the creative sector do
create surplus-value; other parts parasitise on surplus-value created
elsewhere.

Something like the military is interesting.  Coz on the one hand it creates
surplus-value for the industrialists who make the bombs and planes and so
on, but ultimately it is a drag on surplus-value because the government
pays for these weapons and troops out of the total surp;lus-value of
society.  Moreover, the rate of profit falls faster in the arms sector than
elsewhere because increased productivity in armaments does not lead to a
decrease in the value of either constant or variable capital the way
productivity rises elsewhere do.

I thought I read somewhere that only 2 percent of the world's population is
on line.  But, apart from the numbers on line, I am also thinking of the
rate of development of IT.  I also read somewhere - it might have been in a
thing on the Internet written by Keith Teare (a Silicon Valley millionaire
internet innovator/entrepreneur who used to be a Marxist) - that the actual
rate of development of IT has slowed down.  At the time (about 1995) he
explained it as a result of the obstacles capitalist profitability puts in
the way of technological development.  (He moved from Britain to Silicon
valley just after that and seems to have become more a fan of the magic
qualities of US-style 'free' market since then.)


>Earlier today I
>looked at a map of the world IT market - and it showed Brazil ranking
>higher than some European countries as an IT market (the map was dated
>1997, however.)"


Doesn't Brazil have over 150 million people?  The Brazilian middle class
alone is bigger than the population of countries like Sweden or
Switzerland, probably even bigger than the population of the Netherlands,
so there's a ot of scope for an IT market there.  But I wonder how many car
workers in Sao Paulo are on line, let alone how many peasants.

Philip Ferguson