Reply to Julio: growing importance of imperialism

[Nicholas Siemensma <nsiemensma@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sorry if my reply isn't substantial, Julio, for I
agree that debate should be based on empirical data
and not airy wittering, but I lack both the time and
the motivation to really argue this case with you.  To
my mind it is clear, and here I think the burden of
proof falls on *you*, that since the 1970s the global
peripheries have been forced off their previous (since
the 50s) growth-path, and a massive redistribution of
wealth and power from the peripheries to metropoles
has occurred, and this in line with the overall logic
of capital accumulation and its own valorisation
crisis.  This has resulted in mass immiseration, a
vast and *unprecedented* amount of pauperisation and
unmet human need.  Here your point about population
trends being external is simply wrong: Marx analysed
the formation of *relative surplus population*, which
he called "the absolute general law of capitalist
accumulation", and this surely describes the existence
of at least 4 billion deprived people spinning in a
vortex around the "Golden Billion" of the privileged
West.  I think this secular long-run dynamic is
visible and incontrovertible, and it can (and must, if
we are Marxists) be related to the other law which
Marx described, the tendency of the profit-rate to
fall, and so connected to the "forms of appearance"
which are: low levels of social productivity since the
70s, deflationary gulfs in inequality, forced debt
repayments, dollar hegemony and the US deficit, energy
crises etc.  

Eric Hobsbawm, certainly no Third-Worldist, says
somewhere that at the beginning of the 20th century,
45% of the global population lived in the core
industrialised countries, while today that figure is
closer to 15%.  This *is* class struggle under
capitalism.  

We have to work harder, IMO, to discove the real
reason for the apparently wanton, capricious,
irrational desire of the Bushies, but also the IMF and
others, to plunge crisis-stricken countries and
sectors deeper into trouble.  Some of the people on
this list are very good at this, but I don't think
your analysis helps at all.  The metropolitan enclaves
are shrinking, with a greater concentration of power,
centralisation and wealth.  Again, sorry I haven't
gone to the trouble of providing the figures, but they
are relatively easy to find with a Google search. 
Maybe a deeper analysis another time.

Nick


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