Dear Charles for what it is worth, this is the debate of the moment; whence imperialism now!
Hello Greg:
Of interest in Kautsky's article which inspired Lenin's critique, ironically we appear at this moment to be moving through his 'Ultraimperialism'.
There is a waning of imperialist war, as Kautsky thought ( I think).
Lenin vol 39 (notes on imperialism) p431: "The outcome of Kautsky’s “ ultra-imperialism ” and of a United States of Europe based on capitalism would be: 'inter-imperialism'!!"
Lenin counter-poses, in his notes, ultra-imperialism with inter-imperialism.
Yes, inter-imperialist rivalry from Lenin's list of features of imperialism was negated because of the existence of the Soviet Union; the imperialist countries (NATO) ended their rivalry to unite against Socialism.
Remember Lenin's reasoning to inter-imperialism is imperialism in a world without a Soviet Union.
Since the coup in the USSR the US has had something of a clear field, exceptionalism unveiled. In seeking further to increase the rate of profit, by lowering labour productivity (more living vs dead labour), it transferred capital to China, which has overtime put it to good use.
I agree. Scattered the industrial points of production across the globe; made possible by computerization , just in time delivery, containerization. Geographical deconcentrate industrial working class centers like Detroit.
Whence imperialism now? inter-imperialism unravels. The dominate, US faction of finance capital, unhitched the US dollar from any real relationship with the petro-dollar that has since the 1970s kept the inter-imperial juggernaut together. The world is awash with US dollars, and what Russia and China began to do (sell-off US reserves) is now joined by Japan, and others already along that road.
I didn't know that.
Meanwhile unable to actually confront militarily the multi-polar emerging post-inter-imperial world, it has started destructive and pointless brush-wars by proxies throughout Africa and the Middle East. Bullies former 'friends' and generally thrashes about in its senility.
Now this will not pe4rhaps make sense in the USA, but external to it, Trump is doing a splendid job in tearing everything apart.
I agree. It's as if Putin has Trump on a "the-worse-the-better" political suicide mission . Trump is destroying the Republican Party , too. He's doing it by doing extreme rightwing _Republican_ type things. His fanatical , irrational mass base was made that way - not by Trump- but by the Republican Party white supremacist Southern Strategy of the last 50 years , appealing to racism.
I sometimes suspect he is consciously doing it, in fact there could be some method in his madness, to trying to avoid the big bust-up, by a controlled implosion. Who knows?, but to push Turkey into a corner (Erdogan was a US invention), is really something extraordinary given its geography. To pressure NATO to pay-up at this time is another incredible contribution, unquestioned devotion up until Obama, and now it is openly discussed to do without it.
Country after country are refusing to buy American weapons a thing of great significance in many of its dimensions. Russia's sales of S400 defence shields are like a map of dissatisfaction. I have lived my entire life under the American Imperial Regime and it is clearly now ending.
Germany sits down with Russia and talks about alternatives to the US SWIFT exchange, the lynchpin of inter-imperialism was controlling the digital exchange mechanism.
The light at the end of the tunnel is growing stronger and what comes from it is an entirely new political world; exciting times.
Yes, Trump is radically contradictory , a fascist domestically , but reintroducing inter-imperialist rivalry _as farce_ the second time; tragedy the first time in WWI .
On Tue, 21 Aug 2018 at 23:43, Charles Brown
https://www.google.com/search?q=victor+perlo+racism&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari
Part III The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall
Ch. 13: The Law as Such Ch. 14: Counteracting Influences
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch14.htm
If we consider the enormous development of the productive forces of social labour in the last 30 years alone as compared with all preceding periods; if we consider, in particular, the enormous mass of fixed capital, aside from the actual machinery, which goes into the process of social production as a whole, then the difficulty which has hitherto troubled the economist, namely to explain the falling rate of profit, gives place to its opposite, namely to explain why this fall is not greater and more rapid. There must be some counteracting influences at work, which cross and annul the effect of the general law, and which give it merely the characteristic of a tendency, for which reason we have referred to the fall of the general rate of profit as a tendency to fall.
The following are the most general counterbalancing forces: I. INCREASING INTENSITY OF EXPLOITATION
Ch. 15: Exposition of the Internal Contradictions of the Law
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/index.htm
Sent from my iPhone On Aug 21, 2018, at 10:45 AM, Peggy Dobbins
Hi Charles, I thought it was falling RATE of profit in enterprises where ratio of fixed to variable capital was so high — ‘heavy industry: auto, steel — that motivated financial capitalists'support for 1)recruiting Negro labor from South then 2) shifting capital to moving light industry: textiles, sewing, some electronic TO the South,then 3) recruiting women back into the labor force — disproportionately more being Black 4) maquiladoras — along border bringing it altogether: women, foreign, low fixed capital investment, cheap labor intensive, no citizenship rights 5)all out for max return/Global Capital growth investing finance(money) capital in manufacturing (fixed 'plant & equipment’) capital where labor (variable) was cheapest.
This was my take in 1977: "Toward a Theory of Women’s Liberation and Wage Labor” published in Radical Sociologist. Had to google hard to find for you. I was in study group I’d asked BWC (Black Workers Congress) organizers I met at Boycott South African Coal meeting to organize in Tuscaloosa. It was my GRA and co-author Jeff White, who pointed me toward Falling Rate of Profit.
Thinking of that time in the context of the Counterpoint article on independent organizing outside the Den party, …. well, I have to move on this morning… but we do grow wiser with years.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/089692057700700304#articleShareContainer
peggy
On Aug 21, 2018, at 7:59 AM, Charles Brown (via marxism-thaxis Mailing List)
Skip to site navigation (Press enter) [Marxism-Thaxis] Imperialist booty and the wages of opportunism in the long run c b Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:18:16 -0800
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/102-102/4659-the-myth-of-american-exceptionalism-implod The myth of 'American exceptionalism' implodes Until the 1970s, US capitalism shared its spoils with American workers. But since 2008, it has made them pay for its failures A homeless encampment known as Tent City in Sacramento, California A homeless encampment known as Tent City, in Sacramento, California, in 2009. Since the 1970s, real wages stopped growing and the gap between rich and poor expanded as the US economy slowed down after decades of growth. Photograph: Rich Pedroncelli/AP One aspect of "American exceptionalism" was always economic. US workers, so the story went, enjoyed a rising level of real wages that afforded their families a rising standard of living. Ever harder work paid off in rising consumption. The rich got richer faster than the middle and poor, but almost no one got poorer. Nearly all citizens felt "middle class". A profitable US capitalism kept running ahead of labour supply. So, it kept raising wages to attract waves of immigration and to retain employees, across the 19th century until the 1970s. Then everything changed. Real wages stopped rising, as US capitalists redirected their investments to produce and employ abroad, while replacing millions of workers in the US with computers. The US women's liberation moved millions of US adult women to seek paid employment. US capitalism no longer faced a shortage of labour. US employers took advantage of the changed situation: they stopped raising wages. When basic labour scarcity became labour excess, not only real wages, but eventually benefits, too, would stop rising. Over the last 30 years, the vast majority of US workers have, in fact, gotten poorer, when you sum up flat real wages, reduced benefits (pensions, medical insurance, etc), reduced public services and raised tax burdens. In economic terms, American "exceptionalism" began to die in the 1970s. The rich, however, have got much richer since the 1970s, as every measure of US income and wealth inequality attests. The explanation is simple: while workers' average real wages stayed flat, their productivity rose (the goods and services that an average hour's labour provided to employers). More and better machines (including computers), better education, and harder and faster labour effort raised productivity since the 1970s. While workers delivered more and more value to employers, those employers paid workers no more. The employers reaped all the benefits of rising productivity: rising profits, rising salaries and bonuses to managers, rising dividends to shareholders, and rising payments to the professionals who serve employers (lawyers, architects, consultants, etc). Since the 1970s, most US workers postponed facing up to what capitalism had come to mean for them. They sent more family members to do more hours of paid labour, and they borrowed huge amounts. By exhausting themselves, stressing family life to the breaking point in many households, and by taking on unsustainable levels of debt, the US working class delayed the end of American exceptionalism – until the global crisis hit in 2007. By then, their buying power could no longer grow: rising unemployment kept wages flat, no more hours of work, nor more borrowing, were possible. Reckoning time had arrived. A US capitalism built on expanding mass consumption lost its foundation. The richest 10-15% – those cashing in on employers' good fortune from no longer-rising wages – helped bring on the crisis by speculating wildly and unsuccessfully in all sorts of new financial instruments (asset-backed securities, credit default swaps, etc). The richest also contributed to the crisis by using their money to shift US politics to the right, rendering government regulation and oversight inadequate to anticipate or moderate the crisis or even to react properly once it hit. Indeed, the rich have so far been able to use the crisis to widen still further the gulf separating themselves from the rest, to finally bury American exceptionalism. First, they utilised both parties' dependence on their financial support to make sure there would be no mass federal hiring programme for the unemployed (as FDR used between 1934 and 1940). The absence of such a programme guaranteed that real wages would not rise and, with job benefits, would likely fall – as they indeed have done. Second, the rich made sure that the prime focus of government response to the crisis would benefit banks, large corporations and the stock markets. These have more or less "recovered". Third, the current drive for government budget austerity – especially focused on the 50 states and the thousands of municipalities – forces the mass of people to pick up the costs for the government's unjustly imbalanced response to the crisis. The trillions spent to save the banks and selected other corporations (AIG, GM, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc) were mostly borrowed because the government dared not tax the corporations and the richest citizens to raise the needed rescue funds. Indeed, a good part of what the government borrowed came precisely from those funds left in the hands of corporations and the rich, because they had not been taxed to overcome the crisis. With sharply enlarged debts, all levels of government face the pressure of needing to take too much from current tax revenues to pay interest on debts, leaving too little to sustain public services. So, they demand the people pay more taxes and suffer reduced public services, so that government can reduce its debt burden. For example, California's new governor proposes to continue for five more years the massive, broad-based tax increases begun during the crisis and also to cut state services for the poor (reduced Medicaid funding) and the middle class(reduced budgets for community colleges, state colleges, and the university system). The governor admits that California's budget faces sky-high interest costs and reduced federal government assistance just when the crisis increases demands for public services. The governor does not admit his fear to tax the state's huge corporate and private individual wealth. So, he announces an "austerity programme", as if no alternative existed. Indeed, a major support for austerity comes from the large corporations and wealthiest Californians, who hold the state's bonds and want reassurances that the interest on those bonds will be paid. California's austerity programme parallels similar programmes in many other states, in thousands of municipalities, and at the federal level (for example, social security). Together, they reinforce falling real wages, falling benefits, falling government services and rising taxes. In the US, capitalism has stopped "delivering the goods", as it so long boasted. The reality of ever-deeper economic division clashes with expectations built up when wages rose over the century before the 1970s. US capitalism now brings long-term painful decline for its working class, the end of "American exceptionalism" and rising social, cultural and political tensions. • Richard Wolff gives his monthly talk on global capitalism at the Brecht Forum in New York on 18 January; for more information about Professor Wolff's lectures, podcasts and media appearance, visit his website _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to:http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis Previous message View by thread View by date Next message Reply via email to Submit The Mail Archive home marxism-thaxis - all messages marxism-thaxis - about the list Expand Previous message Next message The Mail Archive home Add your mailing list FAQ SupportPrivacyAANLkTi=Zc1Z+tEfW_FB2ysnKfYCmoN-+T+OQ5YgOVY9-@mail.gmail.com Sent from my iPhone Sent from my iPhone Begin forwarded message: From: Charles Brown
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