crepeface posted:

is there a good summary of the discussion/rebuttal of the nordics? i don't just mean socdems in the abstract but also specifically about it in those countries

V. Illych L. posted:

https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5630/2528 for one, by the guy who was chief economist and architect of post-war nordic socialism

basically the rebuttal is that there's no clear view to socialism from where the nordics are right now and it doesn't look as though there is one under the present paradigm at all. this has also pretty much killed the hegemony of the social democratic parties in those countries

uno.mannschaft posted:

This one seems interesting
https://kersplebedeb.com/posts/new-book-by-torkil-lauesen-riding-the-wave-swedens-integration-into-the-imperialist-world-system/

tokin opposition posted:

Yeah cool free will or whatever. What's the Marxist position on eating rear end

tokin opposition posted:

Yeah cool free will or whatever. What's the Marxist position on eating rear end

MeatwadIsGod posted:

He who does not work (out), neither shall he eat (rear end)

MSDOS KAPITAL posted:

quote:

New Delhi: When renowned economist Utsa Patnaik began to sift through old tracts of British economic history in order to understand the nature of fiscal relations between London and colonial India, the fate of the Kohinoor wasn’t much in the news; Shashi Tharoor hadn’t yet spoken in favour of reparations at Oxford University—a speech which went viral; and not many books had been written about the thousands of Indian soldiers who fought under the British flag in the empire’s many wars overseas.

While the past few years have shed additional light on the colonial experience, there is much that we still do not know. For example, how much money was really taken out of India? In a collection of essays published recently by Columbia University Press, Patnaik attempts to make a comprehensive estimate. Over roughly 200 years, the East India Company and the British Raj siphoned out at least £9.2 trillion (or $44.6 trillion; since the exchange rate was $4.8 per pound sterling during much of the colonial period).

To put that sum in context, Britain’s 2018 GDP estimate—a measure of annual economic output—is about $3 trillion. In the colonial era, most of India’s sizeable foreign exchange earnings went straight to London—severely hampering the country’s ability to import machinery and technology in order to embark on a modernisation path similar to what Japan did in the 1870s. The scars of colonialism still remain, Patnaik says. And yet, in an India where historical slights are endlessly litigated and towns are arbitrarily renamed, an adequate accounting of the enduring burden of colonialism is perhaps yet to be undertaken. Excerpts from an interview:

In a recent paper, you suggest Britain drained out nearly $45 trillion of wealth from India. Could you put that quantum of money in perspective and what difference it would have made to the Indian economy?

Between 1765 and 1938, the drain amounted to £9.2 trillion (equal to $45 trillion), taking India’s export surplus earnings as the measure, and compounding it at a 5% rate of interest. Indians were never credited with their own gold and forex earnings. Instead, the local producers here were ‘paid’ the rupee equivalent out of the budget—something you’d never find in any independent country. The ‘drain’ varied between 26-36% of the central government budget. It would obviously have made an enormous difference if India’s huge international earnings had been retained within the country. India would have been far more developed, with much better health and social welfare indicators. There was virtually no increase in per capita income between 1900 and 1946, even though India registered the second largest export surplus earnings in the world for three decades before 1929.

Since all the earnings were taken by Britain, such stagnation is not surprising. Ordinary people died like flies owing to under-nutrition and disease. It is shocking that Indian expectation of life at birth was just 22 years in 1911. The most telling index, however, is food grain availability. Because the purchasing power of ordinary Indians was being squeezed by high taxes, the per capita annual consumption of food grains went down from 200kg in 1900 to 157kg on the eve of World War II, and further plummeted to 137kg by 1946. No country in the world today, not even the least developed, is anywhere near the position India was in 1946.

What was the system in place to orchestrate this drain of wealth? Why wasn’t there any large-scale local opposition to it?

All the colonising powers put in place tax collection systems. The very name for the district administrator was ‘Collector’. When the Company first got revenue collecting rights in Bengal in 1765, its employees went completely mad with avarice. R.C. Dutt, a civil service officer in the British Raj, documented that between 1765 and 1770, the Company trebled the tax revenue in Bengal, compared to the erstwhile Nawab’s regime. You know what that means for a peasant who is already quite poor? The Nawab was collecting sufficiently high taxes, so when the Company took over and forcibly trebled collections over five years, people were driven into starvation. There was a massive famine in Bengal in 1770. Out of a population of 30 million, the British themselves estimated that 10 million died.

From 1765 up to the takeover by the Crown, the Company was using a quarter to a third of net revenue collections to purchase export goods from the peasants. This was an abnormal use of taxes and the peasants themselves did not know they were getting diddled. If the same Company agent who collected the producer’s tax had at the same time bought his goods out of that tax, then the producer himself would have said: dal mein kuch to kala hai (something fishy is going on here). But the Company agent who bought produce out of the tax money was a different person and did so at a different time from the Company agent who collected the tax. So, the producers did not connect the two.

The market is an amazing thing: it obscures real relationships. A large part of the producer’s own tax payment simply got converted into export goods, so the Company got these goods completely free. The later mechanism after the Crown took over was a further development using bills of exchange. The only Indian beneficiaries of this clever, unfair system of linking trade with taxes were the intermediaries or dalals. Some of modern India’s well-known business houses made their early profits doing dalali for the British. Income tax on businesses and professionals was virtually non-existent until WWII.

What happened to the money that was drained out of India? What was it used for?

The modern capitalist world would not exist without colonialism and the drain. During Britain’s industrial transition, 1780 to 1820, the drain from Asia and the West Indies combined was about 6 percent of Britain’s GDP, nearly the same as its own savings rate. After the mid-19th century, Britain was running current account deficits with Continental Europe and North America, and at the same time, it was investing massively in these regions, which meant running capital account deficits too. The two deficits summed to large and rising balance of payments (BoP) deficits with these regions.

How was it possible for Britain to export so much capital—which went into building railways, roads and factories in the U.S. and continental Europe? Its BoP deficits with these regions were being settled by appropriating the financial gold and forex earned by the colonies, especially India. Every unusual expense like war was also put on the Indian budget, and whatever India was not able to meet through its annual exchange earnings was shown as its indebtedness, on which interest accumulated.

As under the Company, under the Crown too, a third of India’s budgetary revenues was not spent domestically but was set aside as ‘expenditure abroad’. The secretary of state (SoS) for India, based in London, invited foreign importers to deposit with him the payment (in gold and sterling) for their net imports from India, which disappeared into the SoS’s account in the Bank of England. Against these Indian earnings he issued bills, termed Council bills (CBs), to an equivalent rupee value—which was paid out of the budget, from the part called ‘expenditure abroad’. So, Britain had complete command over all the international purchasing power that Indian producers had earned. Even if a part of it had been credited to India, we could have imported modern technology and started industrializing long before Japan did under the Meiji restoration in the 1870s.

The world has changed considerably since the 19th century and China’s recent foray into Africa is sometimes referred to as new age imperialism…

It would be quite incorrect to call either Chinese or for that matter Indian entrepreneurs in Africa as modern imperialists. This is a ploy that the North uses to deflect attention from the crimes that they committed against our people, after getting forcible political control. Britain and other countries taxed the colonized, took their foreign earnings, and drove them into hunger.

Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs in Africa are merely trying to do business in agreement with independent governments. We can never hope to replicate the development path that Northern countries followed. They dealt with rural displacement and rising unemployment through massive, permanent out-migration, mainly to the Americas. That option is not open to labour-surplus India or China. We need to develop an industrialization strategy that preserves employment and livelihoods.

As trade barriers are once again going up, which is reminiscent of the British empire’s policy on Indian cloth imports, are there any lessons India can learn on this front from the colonial experience?

The lesson we have to learn is to disengage. I am not unhappy at the idea of protectionism in the West. Because, frankly, we have to turn our eyes inward. We have an enormous domestic market and its purchasing capacity needs to be raised. We must trade more with other developing countries. And trade on terms which are not exploitative—essentially what is called fair trade. The developing world must start thinking in terms of cooperative solutions. Some barriers to trade with the Northern countries is also essential, because the dogma of ‘free trade’ was promoted by them to serve their own interests at our expense.

Transnational companies are trying to change our cropping patterns towards export crops, as they did during the colonial period. They want free access to our agriculture, because they cannot ever produce the crops we can, particularly in winter. The new globalisation is all about the North accessing fresh fruits and flowers from the South in the middle of winter. Tropical countries should be banding together in order to use the year-round productivity of their lands as a bargaining chip to obtain better terms of trade for their farmers. Today’s advanced world population, to this day, is highly dependent on the ex-colonial world for its standard of living. Nearly 70% of the 12,000 items sold in a modern supermarket in the West has a tropical import content.

The terms of trade are still not fair. Yet, many still adhere to the belief that the advanced countries became advanced because they are terribly innovative and entrepreneurial. Very little of real history is taught to either Indian or British students. In the Cambridge Economic History of India, for example, there is not a single word on the stringent protectionist policy against Asian textiles that Britain maintained from 1700 to 1846. Nor is there a single word on Britain’s appropriation of India’s entire export surplus earnings for 180 long years from 1765 to 1945.

While independent India maintains cordial relations with Britain, there has been much political tumult of late with regard to Mughal history. Both the Raj and the Mughals are regarded as outsiders. How do they compare?

The Mughals did come from outside, but then, waves of migration have always come from outside. What the Mughals did was exactly what the Rajasthan princes also did. They taxed the people, but in moderation, and spent all taxes within the country. They settled here and did not retain any permanent ties with their places of origin. Clearly, the Mughals can in no way be equated with the British because there was no export drive, no cheating of local producers, and no tax-financed annual drain out of the sub-continent.

As an economist interested in history, what is your view on the idea of reparations? Should Britain return the large sums of money that you suggest it drained out of India?

Not only Britain, but the whole of today’s advanced capitalist world flourished on the drain from India and other colonies. Britain was too small to absorb the entire drain from colonial India. So it became the world’s largest capital exporter, which aided the industrial development of Continental Europe, the U.S., and even Russia. The infrastructure boom in these countries would not have been possible otherwise.

Colonial drain helped to create the modern capitalist world, from North America to Australia—all regions where European populations had settled. The advanced capitalist world should set aside a portion of its GDP for unqualified annual transfers to developing countries, especially to the poorest amongst them. Britain, in particular, morally owes reparations for the 3 million civilians who died in the Bengal famine because it was an engineered famine.

AnimeIsTrash posted:

https://twitter.com/BlakkBile/status/1489307592392331266?cxt=HHwWhMCy3arXiqspAAAA

snippet from article posted:

...

Parasitic and Autogenous Development in the Core

Parasitic development is certainly not new. Colonialism in all its forms, from the mercantilist settler-colonialism of the early American colonies, to the more advanced imperialist colonisation of Africa, has involved a parasitic relationship of some sort. However, I would suggest that until relatively recently, all forms of parasitic development were matched by a degree of autogenous development in the core. In the colonial and early imperialist stages, these two forms of development were relatively co-dependent, as parasitic development relied on autogenously-produced military and economic power to maintain a hold over the colonies, while autogenous development relied on parasitic expansion in the colonies to overcome European imperialist stalemates and “export the contradictions” (overproduced goods, surplus labour, etc.) produced by domestic crises.

These are more-or-less historical truisms, but the process deserves elaboration. The settler-colony of New Zealand serves as a good example as it has undergone four identifiable processes which illustrate different aspects of parasitic and autogenous development, both as a core nation in the present day, and as a semi-peripheral colony in its early history:

It has relied on autogenous development in Britain:
The New Zealand state’s early history was marked by repeated appeals to Britain for settlers, investment, and military support. The industrial expansion occurring in Britain, itself the product of both intensified exploitation of British workers and imperial profits from the creation of forced markets in India and China, created the conditions for a British military, economic, and population growth that far outstripped any autogenous potential in the colony. An enormous imperial force was required to defeat the Māori Kīngitanga (itself often militarily superior, but economically inferior)[67] in the 1860s,[68] which was maintained largely at the insistence of the Pākeha colonists. In the 1870s, the colony expanded through a series of massive loans from British banks, while encouraging British immigration.[69] It is deeply unlikely that the New Zealand colony would have established itself without considerable British aid.

It has been hindered by parasitic development in Britain:
Early in the colony’s history, British capitalists conspired to create more favourable conditions for investment through interfering in the colonial land market and raising land prices,[70] immiserating early settlers as part of a conscious effort to escape domestic “over-capitalisation and revolutionary tensions.”[71]

It has benefited from its own autogenous development:
After considerable foreign capital investment, the New Zealand economy became largely self-sufficient from the 1900s to the 1970s, dominating the world’s wool and refrigerated shipping markets and creating the world’s highest standard of living for the majority Pākeha population.[72] This was dependent upon, but never less than equal to, concomitant parasitic development.

It has benefited from its own parasitic development in the Pacific:
Since the Seddon Prime Ministership New Zealand played the role of “junior imperialist” in the Pacific, subjugating island nations. These island economies, as well as the pre-1950s semi-independent Māori economy, served as vast reserve armies of labour, creating a racialised wage hierarchy that enriched Pākeha workers and “plugged gaps” in the main economy.[73]

At this point it is worth pointing out that none of this is to suggest the co-dependence of autogenous and parasitic development in the colonial and early imperialist eras constituted some sort of “interdependent” development with relatively equal trade-offs. At each stage there were winners reaping the benefits of development, and losers who remained underdeveloped, usually Māori and Pacific peoples. Nonetheless, we can see from the New Zealand example that autogenous development was usually matched by some degree of parasitism, and vice-versa. Even if autogenous development was unlikely to succeed without some degree of parasitism, most development which took place in this era was the result of the intra-national exploitation of workers from the majority national group (Pākeha), whereas parasitic development existed in a supporting role to increase industrial outputs (eg. through Pacific phosphate increasing farming output), ensure a labour supply, or act as a “market of last resort” for New Zealand industry (in the case of the Pacific, by providing a market for huge quantities of low-quality corned beef ).

This was to change. On 26 July 1984 the neoliberal revolution began in New Zealand. Bruce Jesson captured the mood of the year in Only Their Purpose is Mad over a decade later:

“[T]he economy was controlled by producers[74]; these days the economy is run by financiers. A new èlite has evolved globally, and the country is now run for the benefit of rentiers, not producers. Within New Zealand, there has been a phenomenal growth in that strata of society that identifies with finance, a growth not just in numbers but in political and social impact. This strata represents internally the external appearance of financial markets on a massive scale. Finance has its own culture and, through a process of osmosis, this culture has spread throughout New Zealand society. It is the spread of this finance culture that has underwritten the New Zealand transformation.”[75]

...

quote:

'The others lied a lot, never did their jobs, we eat bones while they eat the meat, they're potbellied cause of the money they robbed us'
'The youth are supporting Booker, he understands our issues, 22 we'll vote him, he can't run from our problems, dont worry we'll have jobs...'

Buck Turgidson posted:

how is that book?

PhilippAchtel posted:

https://twitter.com/Fiorella_im/status/1491759098374897668

I'm gonna lose my mind. But this trucker situation is doing a fantastic job of proving who values the spectacle of protest over its substance.

PhilippAchtel posted:

https://twitter.com/Fiorella_im/status/1491759098374897668

I'm gonna lose my mind. But this trucker situation is doing a fantastic job of proving who values the spectacle of protest over its substance.

Halloween Jack posted:

I've been thinking about Graeber's concept of "bullshit jobs." I work in administration and I've certainly seen a lot of inefficiency over the years. I'm not sure why the profit motive doesn't continue cutting costs to the bone and eliminating unnecessary white collar jobs, if they're truly unnecessary.

I understand that if e.g. 10 million American white collar workers lost their jobs over a decade, that would become an existential threat to American capitalism itself. But part of the critique of capitalism is that individual capitalists and firms can't act in the interests of capital generally, since it's a noncompetitive move. So what explains this?

Halloween Jack posted:

A bunch of truckers tried (and failed miserably) to shut down DC, and I don't remember any ostensible leftists being dumb enough to see some kind of left revolution in it.

Hefty Leftist posted:

it's (imperialism in the 21st century) a great analysis of trans-national corporations and the global distribution and outsourcing of labor in neoliberalism. i'm finding it particularly hard to digest tho because it's an incredibly in-depth economic analysis so if that's your thing go hog wild

gradenko_2000 posted:

my basic take is that it's a "bullshit job" on the level of productivity or added-value to society, but there's a utility in maintaining the capitalist order

like, lots of middle-management is unnecessary as far as enhancing or adding to the productivity of the line worker (as far as I know), but you need it to keep the line workers in line and stop them from getting too uppity - it's either you pay them so little and treat them so badly that you need overseers just to get anything done, or they'd probably do a better job without the micromanagement, but then they'd also probably develop class consciousness in the process, and you don't want that either

The Voice of Labor posted:

pi variant just needed to roll out a few months sooner

PhilippAchtel posted:

Precisely. Police are another bullshit job from the standpoint of production, except when you consider their role in maintaining the social order

Halloween Jack posted:

I understand that if e.g. 10 million American white collar workers lost their jobs over a decade, that would become an existential threat to American capitalism itself. But part of the critique of capitalism is that individual capitalists and firms can't act in the interests of capital generally, since it's a noncompetitive move. So what explains this?

AnimeIsTrash posted:

Halloween Jack posted:

I understand that if e.g. 10 million American white collar workers lost their jobs over a decade, that would become an existential threat to American capitalism itself. But part of the critique of capitalism is that individual capitalists and firms can't act in the interests of capital generally, since it's a noncompetitive move. So what explains this?

GalacticAcid posted:

People are giving thoughtful answers and I don’t want to detract from that but I don’t think any of the above posts do a good job answering this particular question in concrete terms. The answers boil down to “western capitalism is defending itself by creating this cadre of white collar labor aristocrats.” but it’s not like there’s a central Ministry of Capitalism mandating these roles.

I suppose one could argue it’s a conspiracy of wealthy capitalists, but i don’t think that would hold water for many Marxists. (obviously me included and I imagine most of this thread’s readers).

I don’t have a great answer in my back pocket either, but I do think a more precise answer is needed and possible

R. Guyovich posted:

the role of the capitalist state is not only to more easily facilitate the extraction of surplus value from the working class, it also serves to discipline the bourgeois into acting in its own interests as a class, much like the socialist state serves to discipline the proletariat in a similar fashion. we're seeing that state mechanism break down, but we're not at the point yet where it's so dysfunctional it lets the bourgeois commit suicide.

Centrist Committee posted:

bourgeois class suicide I think would be actual war with russia or china

GalacticAcid posted:

People are giving thoughtful answers and I don’t want to detract from that but I don’t think any of the above posts do a good job answering this particular question in concrete terms. The answers boil down to “western capitalism is defending itself by creating this cadre of white collar labor aristocrats.” but it’s not like there’s a central Ministry of Capitalism mandating these roles.