[PEN-L:27355] Re: Re: Re: LTV, income disparity, and world systems

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 6/28/02 9:25:33 AM Pacific Daylight Time, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx writes:


> At 04:18 PM 6/28/2002 +0000, Justin Schwartz wrote:
> > In the North
> >capitalism has made things a  lot better for almost everyone--a lower middle
> >class standard of living today would in many ways be the envy of all but the
> >very rich 100 years ago.


Well, of course this is true, but what is being compared and confused is different technological boundaries within the productive forces as capital on the one hand and the specific role of Anglo America (Yankee) imperial colonization on the other.

A society driven by steam and horse power is qualitatively different from a society with a developed industrial infrastructure. Of course society is wealthier today than 100 years ago because the productive forces are more developed. One hundred years ago the majority of the people on this continent were still wedded to the land as producers and the North was undergoing the impact of the industrial revolution and the rise of financial-industrial capital.

Heck the consumer economy - that is the development of the "light industry" infrastructure was just starting to take shape. Electricity was in its infancy. Transportation was primitive compared with today. What an odd comparison - like declaring that I am bigger and stronger than I was at age 5. At almost 50 I have probably crossed the threshold - nodal line, of my ascendancy but still remain bigger and stronger than I was at age 5.

I have no desire to return to the past - for obvious reasons, and such a return is not the motion of history.  

Industrial society by definition produces more material values - wealth, than a previous configuration of society. This development in the productive forces occurred at the expense of hundreds of millions of people colonized by the imperial masters. The wealth of the North is inseparable from the grinding poverty of the South - specifically the former slaveholding areas of large plantations, which remained intractable between roughly 1865 and 1940.

A development in the productive forces - the mechanization of agriculture, reconfigured Southern society on the basis of the industrial infrastructure. The results of World War 2 and Europe lying in ruin was the conditions for the massive expansion of Yankee finance capital and the destruction of the closed colonial system.

The material standard of living of the North - the Anglo American working class proper, meaning all the workers of the Anglo-American nation regardless of color or nationality, based in colonial possessions and imperial plunder and the post war reality.

I of course acknowledge the inherent superiority of industry over manufacture.

What an odd proposition.

Melvin P.