Date: 	Fri, 14 Nov 1997 02:23:45 -0800
From: bhandari-AT-phoenix.princeton.edu (Rakesh Bhandari)
Subject: Re: M-I: First vs Third World Labor


Of course the joke is in the heading.  Now Jim B writes:

>There are millions upon
>millions of workers doing productive labor on these plantations -- rubber,
>sugar, bananas, etc. -- and in transporting the produce
>Then consider mining. What is the level of exploitation, pray tell, of an
>oilfield worker in Saudi Arabia, Mexico, or Venezuela? Of a gold miner in
>South Africa?
>Then there is some (though not all that much) manufacturimng industry in
>the Third World. There are iron/steel com0plexes in India, Brazil, etc.
>Construction. Road building. And so on. Add the new pseudo-industries of
>the maquiladora type in Mexico, Thailand, etc.: here the workers are
>miserably underpaid but they are indeed surrounded by a lot of capital
>equipmemnt, some of it very high tech indeed.

Jim is backing himself into a corner here. On the one hand, he has
emphasized that only the most wretched of the earth (the poorest, those
with the highest infant mortality rates, the permanently unemployed) will
make the revolution. Now, on the other hand, he calls attention to certain
kinds of third world workers whose wages (he fails to point out) are often
*considerably* higher than the national average within the third world.

It almost dawns upon Jim B that despite these higher wages, these workers
may still be the most exploited of all, though it is common for
nationalists like Jim to remind these workers that they are priviliged
vis-a-vis  peasants or workers in "secondary labor markets".

In fact it has become the order of the day to single out their wage demands
as the major inefficiency in global capitalism. Indeed we can expect Jim B
to write off all industrial workers everywhere as a labor aristocracy as he
already has the first world working class. In doing so, Jim will have
remained true to the most important function of bourgeois ideology--to
mystify productive labor about its social role and social position.


On top of it, Jim downplays all aspects of technological dynamics. It does
not occur to him that the third world often gets stuck with sectors in
which productivity from scale economies and learning curves cannot be
increased such that through reduced unit values markets would have been
expanded and eventually more value  realized over ever greater use values.
The constraints on productivity increases in these sectors  can either be
technical in nature or from simple market constraint. That is, he pays no
attention to the use value aspects of the imperialist division of labor, as
does Tilla Siegel in her contribution to the International Journal of
Sociology, vol 14, no 1.

It is no surprise that those economies which have been most ruthlessly
subordinated by imperialism to raw material export have been most locked
into stagnation and poverty--why else were South Korea and Taiwan able to
capture high tech assembly instead of El Salvador and Haiti?

There is also the terrible problem of how many raw materials have been
substituted, jute for synthetic, copper for fiber optics.

That is, imperialism is not only about the dynamic extraction of surplus
value but also about lock in into technological stagnation and economic
obsolesence. Yet  even the surplus value that is produced is drained off in
myriad ways (unequal terms of trade, transfer pricing, overcapitalisation
of FDI, etc), perpetuating stagnation and horrific poverty. This transfer
of value, coupled with specialization in stagnant economic sectors, ensures
this poverty and its consequence--that even for the most identical work,
there remains glaring cross-national differentials in wages. This will be
true until the international working class creates a society free from the
rule of capital.

Enough for now.

Rakesh







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