Date: Wed, 25 Jun 1997 19:29:18 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: M-TH: OCC/globalization


Later we could examine the limits of capital-saving innovations as a
countertendency to falling profitability (there is a superb discussion of
this problem in both Alexander Gourvitch's Survey of Economic Theory on
Technological Change and Employment  and Jim Miller's e-mail paper ) .

 It may well be that based on the example of information technology, such
capital-savings innovations have been wildly exaggerated; indeed, the
production of microprocessors, no matter how much their declining unit
values and increasing power have contributed to the cheapening of
information technology,  has itself required ever more capital-intensive
production (see numbers quoted from Wm Greider, which I posted some time
ago).

But I think globalization is itself a confirmation that there has been
upward pressure on the OCC and a resulting shortage of surplus value. Doug
takes globalization to be evidence of capital's strength; I disagree.

 The most basic reason for the globalization of foreign direct investment
(e.g., Japan's auto transplants in the US) is the attempt to escape the
non-tariff trade barriers employed by the respective stagnant OECD
economies (e.g. voluntary export restraints, trigger price mechanisms, and
targeted trade practices--see discussion in Nicolas Spulber, The American
Economy, p. 175). Most FDI remains concentrated in the OECD, and has been
undertaken for two reasons: to circumvent or preempt such hidden, as well
as open, trade barriers or to form joint ventures so as to mobilize the
necessary capital for research, development and construction of ever more
capital intensive plant.

 All this suggests that we are in the midst of a global crisis of the
shortage of surplus value:  the stagnation, to which overt and covert
protectionism is  a remedy that has dialectically prompted the
globalization of direct investment,   is in the final analysis an
indication of the disproportionality in all the imperialist countries
between the mass of surplus value and that required for accumulation, no
matter how high profit rates may seem (the appearance to which Doug is
holding fast) only because of the reorganization of the existing capital
structure through centralization and the explosion of fictitious capital
(perhaps through the simple mechanism of the flow of idle capital into the
stock market).

 Global joint ventures also suggest the growing insufficiency of surplus
value in the hands of even the most concentrated national industries.

And of course NIKE is only the most obvious example for Americans of the
desperate attempt to raise the rate of surplus value through "outsourcing".
But it is little commented that because the promise of real improvements in
the real wage and employment security has not materialized, women have
exercised their agency and sometimes refused such super-exploitation (see
Diane Elson, ed. Male Bias in Development).

While Paul Krugman, the shock-therapist Jeffrey Sachs and running dog Andy
Young prettify the global sweat shops as the first step in the first
worldization of the third world, they are in truth one of the last
desperate weapons of  a worldwide capitalist system on the brink of
breakdown, which will leave in its wake global chaos, unless a new society
is consciously fought for.

Rakesh




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