Date: 	Sat, 1 Nov 1997 22:45:54 -0800
From: bhandari-AT-phoenix.princeton.edu (Rakesh Bhandari)
Subject: Re: M-I: David Harvey on the Communist Manifesto


A response to the James. First, James H noted:

>Rakesh's view that the Brits are jealously preoccupied with industry
>could not be fuirther from the truth.

 Well, I can see here as elsewhere Marxists are out to save their own
capitals from their own fetisistic beliefs, viz. that they can keep on
making money from money--so LM draws selectively from Marx to encourage the
national capital to put itself back on the real foundation of industry?
James, LM really does need to critique Postone's critique of traditional
Marxism and its sentimental affection for industrialisation.

Yet you are right of course to call attention to the imperialist disdain of
production and science--after all, lawyers have are the highest paid
occupation (which is really the best refutation of the idea that IQ is the
main determinant of income). And why else would the majority of Ph.D's
granted in the applied sciences be to foreign-born students whose children
(um...) come to share the general parasatic attitudes, thus stimulting the
demand for more high tech immigrant labor? What do you think of Seymour
Melman's Profit Without Production which seems to have influenced the
relevant sections in Zelig Harris' Transformation of Capitalist Society
(the main focus of which is worker owned enterprise if you are still out
there boddhisatva).

As for James' reminder that we should love tech because we are on the net,
that's just silly. We could just as easily say that the information edge
that this gives us over other people only solidifies the development of
elites, that our desire to be on it comes from the alienation we suffer in
our real lives, that the same system that produces IT is producing ever
more illiteracy, that overall the net only contributes to more run-away,
eco-destructive economic growth by helping firms to cut costs through
better communication with suppliers and to distribute ever more
commodities--despite Chris Freeman's ideas about the ecological soundness
of the new IT techno-economic paradigm.

>From James B. Farmelant:

> The exhaustion of labor is contrary to each capitalist's
>long-term interests but no capitalist can dare to take these interests
>into account (by acting on his own to shortern the working days of his
>own workers) without undermining his own competitive position.
>Therefore, as Yoshie suggests soc democratic and "energetic
>labor +social movements" can actually further the development
>of capital.

Very interesting indeed. Do note in Grossmann's magnum opus the analysis of
how the werewolf hunger of contemporary imperialism had led it to so
overexploit the working class that through its destruction the shortage of
labor at the source of the overaccumulation of capital was only compounded.
At a certain late stage of its development, capital may strive for such a
high rate of exploitation  that it cannot even reproduce the labor force. I
would suggest that we are already near this point; that is why globally
capital has attempted to destroy the socalled family wage through the
exploitation of single girls and to pay immigrant workers less than a
family wage by discouraging them from bringing with them their families.
This was the significance of Gov Pete Wilson's Prop 187; it also seems to
explain why Europe continues to demand immigrant labor without the
immigrants themselves, as A Sivanandan puts it in a recent *Race and
Class*.

Rakesh  




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