----- Original Message -----
From: "Rakesh Bhandari" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >What you need to show is that, at an exchange rate that permits
> >balanced trade,
> >there is not a set of voluntary trades (willingly entered into by
> >the owners of
> >the respective commodities) that would produce a potential pareto
improvement
> >in at least one country with no potential pareto loss in the other.
>
> What I want to show, Peter, is that the national specialization and
> the concommitant international trade that would reduce social labor
> time not only in each nation but in that giant ant colony as a whole
> may not be undertaken as a result of exploitation.
=================
Reification. Where/what are the
firms-enterprises-technologies-ecologies? Too Westphalian, Rakesh.
Play with the institutional boundaries, don't accept them.
Exploitation --all too real-- aside, while firms want to reduce
labor-time vis a vis competitors, nation states don't--in the
aggregate.
>
> >In pure production models (without relations of production), the
implicit
> >exchange rate is 1:1 in labor hours. As soon as you distinguish
between hours
> >of work and commodity price (due to variable rates of
exploitation), you need
> >to specify the exchange rate explicitly.
>
>
> I don't think so. In my example, there is barter between countries
> and monetization only within England. In this case it wold not make
> any sense for English capitalists to barter one piece of cloth for a
> bottle of Portuguese wine. While Portuguese workers understand that
> specialization in wine and trade would allow them to reduce their
> collective labor time, the English capitalists don't save any money
> by producing two units of cloth. They end up with one unit of cloth
> and one unit of wine for the same invested monetary sum that
> expresses 150 hours whether they produce each good by themselves or
> produce two units of cloth while trading one for a bottle of wine.
>
> The English capitalists have no incentive to go for trade while the
> English workers and Portuguese workers do. But the English
> capitalists are in a position to block trade that would allow for
the
> reduction of labor time in each nation and in the intl system as a
> whole.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> >Incidentally, it is not necessarily
> >the capitalists who trade. The capitalists may sell their output
to trading
> >houses which then engage in trade (as was the Japanese case). If
> >your model is
> >properly specified, this should not make any difference.
>
> Can't see the need for anything as complex as traders.
>
> Ricardo defended international trade as a labor saving mechanism
> ('the facility of production' was for him the key question, as Meek
> quotes him in Smith, Marx and After). The question I am putting is
to
> what extent do capitalist relations of exploitation militate against
> the use of this specific and other mechanisms (e.g, mechanization)
> for the reduction of social labor time.
>
> Ricardo is confident that given the opportunity for specialization
> and intl trade, i.e., without state interference, the intl division
> of labor will develop to become a giant labor saving device. But
> there could be other barriers to the saving of labor than
> protectionism and state interference in general.
>
> Rakesh
=============
State non-interference is an impossibility in a Ricardian or any other
model with regards to current conditions of PE. While each *firm*
wants to reduce unit labor costs, national polities want to minimize
the social unrest from unemployment and the slippery slope towards
immiseration.
Thus net labor-time per worker must remain constant or increase under
present conditions while total labor-time cum productivity must
increase [more workers, even greater output per worker] under current
conditions of international capital accumulation constrained by
commodity portfolios/technological choice and Kaleckian constraints on
possibilities for sustained national-global full employment and final
demand.
To substantially reduce net labor-time per worker while increasing
output per worker ratios would entail not only social, but
technological revolution[s]. :-). Ecological well being another issue
to seriously consider. Counterfactually, imagine the North at 20-30%
unemployment in 2019 and the South at the same level of unemployment
*as now* due to population increase, with the global top 3% half
again as rich as they are now, due to free trade, financial
crises/technological unemployment and weird weather.
See why people danced-marched in Seattle etc.?
Ian
