[PEN-L:27354] RE: LTV, income disparity, and world systems

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:27339] LTV, income disparity, and world systems

>The core truth of the zero sum game of exchange value is *disguised* by
>circumstance and by false ideology.
nancy brumback writes: >The above i don't understand very well. I understand how the truth of the zero sum game is "disguised" by false ideology, but i don't understand how it is disguised by circumstance. <

Marx argued that the nature of a commodity-producing society such as capitalism was such that the circumstances that people faced (mostly buying & selling on the market) were like trees that made it very hard for them to see the exploitative nature of capitalist forest. So people end up with a "fetishized" perspective, having their consciousness ruled by prices, exchange, individual profits, individualism, etc., which they see as natural or normal.  Interest ends up being seen as a natural payment for loans, wages the natural payment for "labor," etc. This is the perspective of individual participants in the system, one shared by orthodox economists, especially microeconomists. This fetishized perspective is partly avoided when people work collectively (as in factories and social movements).

Nancy writes:>I would think that as non-proletarian farmers and craftspeople are sucked into the capitalist system as wage workers, their production of use values would decrease, since now they are spending their time working for wages rather than for their own sustainance. <

In this situation, workers lose because of their loss of direct ability to produce goods for themselves, but gain because their wages allow them to purchase use-values.

>Also, since studying wallerstein and the world systems perspective of capitalism, i have understood the general rise in living standards in the industrial nations to be due to their status as "core" with the power to exploit the "periphery" through all their many legal (legalized by the core themselves, of course) and illegal devices to accumulate surplus value at the expense of the poor....<

while the rise of European capitalism (and its settler colony off-shoots in the US, etc.) was partly based on the exploitation of the periphery, and while the rise of capitalism in Europe has made it more difficult for the periphery to become fully capitalist (as the dependency school, including Wallerstein, points out), there were also internal reasons for the rise of European capitalism. The forceful creation (via "primitive accumulation") of a class of free proletarians (free of the bonds of serfdom or slavery, but free of direct access to the means of survival) gave the bourgeoisie in these rich countries the ability to exploit the proletriat and to accumulate wealth. Getting control over the production process -- in Marx's terms, the "real" subjection of labor by capital -- gave the capitalists the ability to produce in new ways and to sell new products for profit. This also gave the "center" greater ability to dominate the periphey.

(Nowadays, there's been some shift of capitalist production to some parts of the periphery, weakening "first world" workers without helping third world ones much, but I don't have time to get into detail.)

>as before, i greatly welcome your insights and opinions.

>thanks, <

you're welcome.

Jim Devine