Lou on the Foster/Panitch debate

["James Daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks to Lou for a post of breathtaking clarity about things great
and small. The points made now seem self-evident -- but they didn't
before. First, the lack of inter-imperialist aggression.

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What is entirely missing from Panitch's analysis is the role of the
USSR and the colonial revolution in effecting this rapprochement
between the USA and other imperialist powers. It was necessary for
their joint survival to create a united front that would stave off
socialist revolution both in Europe and in the South....

All of capitalist Europe and Japan united with the USA to prevail over
the USSR and the colonial revolution. The Cold War was essentially an
imperialist crusade to eliminate the institutional foundations of
collectivized property relations and to prevent the rise of other
Soviet type states.

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I would like to know what Lou would say is the relation of that to
Stalin's "two camps" theory? and to China's post-rift foreign policy,
"Russia's enemy is China's friend"?

Second, the relation of imperialism to the third world, if that term
may be used.

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Ultimately, capitalism is not about development. It is about profit.
If there is profit building IBM plants in Great Britain, the
capitalist will invest. If there is no profit in Burkina Faso or
Paraguay, it will neglect them.

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Third, and shown to be analogous to the second, the vexed question of
first and third world exploitation, super-profits of imperialism, and
labour aristocracies.



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Based on a schematic reading of the chapters on the production of
surplus value in V. 1 of Capital, some Marxists argue that a worker in
a highly mechanized factory in the USA is more exploited than a
Guatemalan coffee-picker because they produce a higher proportion of
surplus value relative to their wage. What this fails to take into
account is the overall ability of the worker to reproduce their own
existence, which is not only a function of the wage but the material
conditions of society as a whole. If your wage cannot pay for adequate
medical care, the amount of surplus value you produce is irrelevant.
To paraphrase Keynes, you will be dead -- but in the short run. There
is no greater form of exploitation than early death because of
inadequate food, shelter or medical care....

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A humanist correction to pseudoscience. The correction is genuine
science, because it takes the whole into account. A wage is the value
of labour power, i.e. subsistence. If it does not buy subsistence, the
price of labour power has been driven by supply and demand below its
value. Doesn't that mean that the value extracted is not even just
surplus value but actually some of the *value* of labour power?
Besides, there is the privileging of the first world worker by the
historic and cultural difference (only secured by class struggle) that
Marx speaks of in the measurement of subsistence in the two
situations.

One last little point, if I may. The first world workers' adoption of
the entertainment industry's perception of third world workers as
Manuels is some of the oil which lubricates their bourgeois
relationship to them.

Comradely

James Daly