[PEN-L:9533] Re: My Ideologies

[Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> >the deaths in Indonesia need to be attributed to liberal U. S. capitalism.
>
>Which is the political economy analogue of the point I was making the
>other day about the bourgeois subject: the prosperous "freedom" of
>the BS and the imperial hegemon thrive on marginalization and
>oppression elsewhere.
>
>Doug

No one can dispute that strong capitalist economic growth at the
world economy's industrial core structures domination and oppression
at the periphery. Before the rise of the Netherlands and its strong
demand for grain, it just wasn't worthwhile for Polish nobles to
chase down peasants and enserf them. Before the rise of strong
British demand for the high-value mind-altering products--coffee,
tobacco, sugar--of the Americas, it just wasn't worth the trouble to
buy guns, sail to Africa, sell the guns for slaves, take the slaves
back across the Atlantic, whip them, and set them to work.

Strong external demand for the things that an elite's subjects can
make is one of the principal things that can make the elite turn up
the screws of exploitation--and make life a living (or dying) hell
for the people they rule, conquer, or enslave.

Does this mean that unfreedom at the periphery is functional for
capitalism at the core? I would say clearly not. The OECD gains
enormously more from trade with high-wage Taiwan than with low-wage
Vietnam, even though the rate of surplus-value is much higher in the
latter (with all of the apparatus of the Communist Party of Vietnam
to act as proxy gang boss). A bunch of the surplus extracted by the
CPVN is consumed in the industrial core--but the imperial hegemon
would thrive even more if there were less marginalization and
oppression. Generated by, yes; functional for, no.

Do the "deaths in Indonesia need to be attributed to liberal U.S.
capitalism"? To the U.S. national security state, perhaps. But even
there you have to construct a counterfactual picture of what the
succession to Sukarno would have been like: rule by the PKI is scary
to think about. And don't overestimate how much control the imperial
center has over its clients: it's not fair to attribute to Leonid
Brezhnev responsibility for the crimes of the Dergue in Ethiopia, or
for the ethnic cleansing conducted against Vietnamese citizens of
Chinese descent in the late 1970s.

It was Schumpeter I think (and also Norman Angell) who first pointed
out the severe disjunction between the thoughts of generals and
diplomats (who saw political control over territory and resources as
the source of wealth, prosperity, and power) and traders and
industrialists (who saw productivity, comparative advantage, and open
markets--the ability to trade what is cheap here for what is cheap
there--as the sources of wealth, prosperity, and power). The profits
of American corporations today are no higher because hundreds of
thousands of inhabitants of East Timor have been slaughtered over the
past quarter century.


Brad DeLong