Keeping focus after the WTO

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Brad:
>One view--a view that has evidence supporting it, but that I am not
>sure is correct--is that our best chance for large-scale technology
>transfer is free trade: more economic contact between center and
>periphery means more technology transfer to the periphery. And the
>bosses won't be able to appropriate *all* of the gains.

This is a ridiculous notion. As always, Brad issues sweeping generalities
about the world economy but with little meat to support it. Speaking of
meat, Nicaragua enjoyed a profuse injection of high technology in the 1960s
during the Alliance for Progress and Somozista transformation of the
countryside into cotton plantations, cattle ranches, etc. When I was in
Nicaragua I saw all the latest advances that were still in place, although
badly in need of maintenance. There were airplanes for cropdusting, the
latest John Deere tractors, etc. The problem, of course, is that many of
the technicians who used to work on the vast holdings of the Somoza family
and his cronies fled to the US. The other problem is that murderers and
rapists on the US payroll used to get paid to blow up these very airplanes
and tractors. In economic terms, although there was a sharp rise in GDP
during the Somoza years, there was a sharp decline in living standards for
the average campesino. Profits made on ranches and plantations were used to
finance shopping trips in Miami. Meanwhile campesinos who got evicted from
their land moved to Managua to shine shoes or sell chewing gum. As I
pointed out in a post here a while back, the largest gain in "employment"
in the last 20 years in Latin America has been in the so-called "informal
sector". Drugpeddling, prostitution and mugging are the main economic
beneficiaries of free trade, imperialist incursion and export-based
agribusiness. This is the concrete reality as opposed to Brad's empty
Panglossian justifications for a murderous economic system.

Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)