Date: Sun, 28 Sep 1997 15:50:00 +0100
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: M-I: third world economic growth


Louis Proyect's astonishing discovery that the 47 poorest capitalist
countries are poor must surely rank as one of the great theoretical
breakthroughs of the twentieth century.

Proyect writes

>The Third World, as the
>figures above show, has been in steep economic decline over the past
>decade. Furthermore, the causes of the economic decline are endemic.

But this flatly contradicts his own comment moments earlier

>2) Of the 47 countries listed, 38 were able to provid figures on GNP
>growth rate. 17 reported positive growth, while 21 reported negative
>growth. 

One must allow for a rhetorical use of language generally, I suppose,
but to say that 'the Third World has been in steep economic deline over
the past decade' having reproduced figures that show only 21 countries
showing negative growth shows that Proyect considers the Third world to
consist of a tiny minority of the world's nations.

(A word of caution about the statistics, those countries showing
precipitate declines in GNP that are formerly part of the Soviet Union,
Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, ought to be read critically. In part the
collapse may be due to the shock of the introduction of the market, but
it also may be a statistical glitch due to the systematic over-
exaggeration of growth figures reported by the old Stalinist apparatus.)

>There is also a grave theoretical error
>they have committed. They have applied a schematic understanding of the
>Communist Manifesto to the Third World. Their Marxism has little use for
>what Lenin called Imperialism, a curious oversight for people living in
>the twentieth century.
>
>The dynamism that Marx and Engels were talking about in the 19th century
>was based on the existence of a revolutionary class --the bourgeoisie--
>which was spearheading the elimination of feudal relations.  The net
>result of the bourgeois revolution was capital accumulation and rapid
>technological and industrial transformation. 

Proyect patently understands nothing of Marx or Lenin (or indeed the
Rvolutionary Communist Party who published an edition of Lenin's
Imperialism in conjunction with the Pluto Press just last year). Lenin
certainly knew that his was not a departure from Marx's theory but a
deepening of it. Lenin does not preclude new rounds of accumulation,
indeed he draws attention to the fact that the epoch of imperialism
begins with massive new investment, and, pointedly, spectacular export
of capital to Africa and Asia, to parasitically exploit colonial labour,
because stagnation precluded profitable investment at home. Look at
growth rates in Africa and Eastern Europe between the world wars and you
will get some idea of developments that Lenin was talking about.

The post war *dis* investment from Africa and the far east, was a
distinctive twist in the accumulation process. As Paul Mattick explains
the massive destruction of capital in Europe through the means of the
Second World War, allowed European capitalists to offset the stagnation
tendencies at home and reinvest there - leading to a massive flight of
capital from Africa and the Far East back to Europe, with all the
destructive consequences that had for the third world in the post war
period.

Trapped in the rhetoric of the past, the aging radical Proyect hopes
that the reheated slogans of the 1960s will count for something today.
But Cuba is not a beacon of hope for anyone today, and world capital has
found new points of growth in Asia and elsewhere. The caricature of a
uniformly starving third world, doubtless makes aid workers feel smugly
superior about their christian charity, but it does not explain the real
dynamic at work in the world today - or the real problems faced by
billions of workers who live in countries whose GNP is growing, while
they are not feeling the benefit of it.

Lastly if Proyect is feeling crabby, pehaps he ought to ask the nurse to
change his incontinence pads instead of ranting off against arguments
that exist largely in his own head. Perhaps senile demntia ought to be
grounds for disqualification from any serious debate.

Optimistically
-- 
James Heartfield


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