Re: Re: Keeping focus after the WTO

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Brad de Long:

>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 may come over in an unconvincing and schematic way, but I suggest
marxist categories are essential here for an overview. This sort of thing
has to be discussed by reasoning.

Of course according to a simplistic model of marxism, capital ought
immediately to migrate all over the world to whereever labour power is
cheapest, thereby increasing the latter's bargaining power. Instead, the
ratio of the average wage in the advanced countries and the industrialising
countries is of the order of 30 to 1.

What labour power needs in a capitalist world, ironically, is capital. Free
trade may speed the circulation of commodities and knowledge but if capital
flees from the periphery to the centre, development may at best be a mixed
blessing.

This is where the marxist distinction between use value and exchange value
is also relevant. Marxists recognise that capitalism has been a
tremendously revolutionary force, in reducing the labour content of
commodities and greatly increasing the amount of wealth in the form of use
objects available in a society. However, exchange value is independent of
productivity and is about how capital, living and dead is distributed in an
economic system. The larger the global capital in the metropolitan
countries the less the capital for wages in the peripheral countries.

Tony Blair particularly emphasised a reformist solution at the Florence
conference of the New Left, to the problem of technology in the more
peripheral countries: they should all get on the internet! While some help
might speed the development of the "middle class" (bourgeoisified educated
workers/intelligentsia and professionals) in these countries, what matters
is whether the technology is in the form that workers can use, and that
requires capital.  Once again we are dealing with greatly uneven
differences in the speed with which different factors of production
circulate around the globe.

A country needs to balance its trade account but stop capital flowing to
the centre. It also needs the stimulation and the economies of ready trade.
This is a more complicated dynamic than can be solved by saying that either
free trade or not free trade is desirable.

What is desirable now is increased social control over finance capital at a
global level.

I note Robert Naiman's post says that demonstrators are already discussing
further protests at the spring meetings of the IMF and the World Bank in
April in Washington DC....


Chris Burford

London