RE: Social Imperialism [DMS]

["David Schanoes" <Schanoes@xxxxxxx>]

Mike--

Couple of points:  I agree that these figures on profits do not tell
the whole story and I wouldn't employ them separate and apart from
further investigation into the export/import of capital/profit.

I think it is important to keep perspective on what the US does and
does not  have invested in extracting profits from the less developed
areas, and what those mechanisms are.

I do not think  that the profits extracted from Latin America, for
example,  in and of themselves, either change the mechanism of
accumulation,  rescue capitalism from the predicament of its own
reproduction, nor provide a reserve, a safety valve, for industrial
capitalism either in terms of ongoing, permanent super-profits, or a
windfall for working classes in the advanced areas.

This is not to say that the development of the advanced areas is not
both producer and product of the forced underdevelopment of  other
areas.  It is.  This is not to say that the profits extracted from the
less developed areas have NOT been utilized to reproduce  an "advanced
capitalism,"  and also an attendant "advanced social structure," with
everything from librairies, to highways, to clean water, to higher wages
, to support the advanced capitalism.  Those profits have been used that
way.  But they have been utilized by being merged into the entire pool
of profits, as part of the general rate of profit extracted and made
available by the general reproduction of capital.  The advantages thus
"bestowed" upon advanced workers are part of a historical development,
and therefore, temporary, to be "devalued," and destroyed in the process
of reproduction itself. And that destruction is exactly what is taking
place now.  Thank you brother Melvin for the insight.

Aggrandizement  of surplus value in agriculture, primary commodity,
extractive industry production can be as you say, with little if any
investment, and certainly it will as you say again be transferred to the
more "capital intensive" industries.  I don't have the number for the
profits extracted in the primary sectors, but Ill give it a look.

In the meantime, the current reality of profit extraction from the less
developed areas is based on considerable capital investment, of the
combination of modern capital intensive production facilities with the
severely reduced wage rates of these areas.  Such was the case with
Freeport-Mc copper mines in Indonesia,  Intel's semiconductor
fabrication facilities in Costa Rica, China, etc. VW's Brazilian auto
plants.   The WTO Trade Reports of 2002,2003 show the rapid growth of
manufacture exports vs agricultural exports of the developing countries
in the 1990-2000 period.

This shift is of fundamental signficance as the massive amounts of
capital investment not only disrupt the entire social structure,
relations of city and countryside, in its need for labor, not only make
overproduction a gross understatment, but indeed work to eliminate the
cost advantage of the low wage areas themselves as the diminished role
of labor in relation to the major capital investment undermines the
"comparative advantage" in a rate of profit without providing a basis
for reproduction of capital as a whole through overall social
development. [Note-- I'm just starting to work on this last concept.]




dms





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