I am curious about the stats you chose. I guessed that you were trying to show something like the rate of exploitation (ie. that wages were a lower fraction of assets than income). But there is no clear reason why income should be a higher fraction of assets than any given expense (like wages) measured in the aggregate. Marx developed the idea of the rate of exploitation on the level of the firm, where the rate of profit was assumed and prices and wages moved accordingly. The yearly national accounts measure total profits rather than firm profits--and some firms could be profitable without their being aggregate nat'l profits. And there are limits to the flexibility of wages and prices.
I think it would be more interesting in this context to see the ratio of debt to assets and the proportion of debt held by foreigners. Christian === Let me be as clear as I can. There was no way that I could derive any meaningful political or social analysis from the numbers available at: http://www.bea.gov/bea/di/di1usdop.htm. More to the point, to rely on such indicators without doing an in-depth analysis of particular countries is REDUCTIONIST. If people want to put those kinds of figures into a spreadsheet and play pundit with them, they should. Here is my approach: (http://www.mail-archive.com/marxism%40lists.panix.com/msg33040.html) The consumption/investment habits of the Argentine ruling class was typical of those of other Latin American economies dominated by the latifundia. Based mostly in Buenos Aires, the bourgeoisie received as much as 25 percent of Argentina's GDP through land rent. With this revenue, they spent a significant portion on goods manufactured in the USA or Europe. As Johns points out, "The elite's ardent desire to prove its cosmopolitan stature translated into a fetishism of foreign goods." No doubt such consumption habits shaped the cultural views of a sector of Argentine artists, who identified more with Europe than their own gaucho realities. With a diminished internal market, local industry had unfavorable conditions for growth. Also contributing to the structural weakness was the low incomes of the urban proletariat that earned about one-half the wages of workers in England and about one-fifth those in the USA. Finally, "high urban land rents further reduced the effective demand of urban wages, as did the unsystematic import tariffs, which afforded industry little protection but did finance the government at the cost of increasing the prices of imported goods." (Johns, 194) If class relations in the countryside were typified by sharecropping, seasonal labor and other forms of super-exploitation, the situation in the city was not much better. In fact, the urban proletariat was either unemployed for much of the year or was forced to work at pittance wages on the big estates of the pampas. In a study of the Buenos Aires proletariat, Juan Alsina wrote: "the workers in factories and workshops are usually day workers who, without any definite skills or job description, learn a job quickly. These are highly mobile workers earning minimum wages, able to perform several tasks and transfer to other jobs rapidly; they even leave their city jobs for five to six months to work in the countryside shearing wool or harvesting grain." (Johns, 196) Because manufacturers could rely on what amounted to a part-time force, it was under no particular pressure to introduce labor-saving machinery. Hiring or firing workers on a contingency basis ensured profits, but only at the expense of long-term productivity. They also made extensive use of the "putting out" system, which effectively reduced fixed costs. Enormous retail houses such as Gath y Chaves, which was the Macy's of Argentina, employed five times as many female homeworkers as their permanent staff. (Retailers typically manufactured their own goods.) In total, such retail houses and clothing factories employed 10,000 while at least 50,000 worked out of their homes. With manufacturing in such a primitive state, it is no surprise that Argentine goods were viewed as second-rate. The tanneries, for example, could not produce high-quality goods, which were in great demand overseas. Furniture shops also faced capital shortages and tended to employ artisans who turned out pieces one by one. It is also important to consider the nature of Argentine immigration, which despite being massive, tended to be far less permanent than that found in countries like Canada, the USA or Australia. Since much of the labor was based seasonally around agrarian enterprises, the work force found it necessary to return to Europe when work dried up. This prompted the nickname "golondrina", or swallow, after the birds that migrate annually. Because the Argentine economy was based in Buenos Aires and the nearby pampas, the immigrants tended to concentrate near the city and the adjoining coast. As Corradi points out, this led to over-urbanization in an agrarian society, a characteristic of all third world countries relying on agro-export. He writes: "The majority of the people in a predominantly agricultural country came to live in cities: over-urbanization in an agrarian society. Ecological disequilibrium resulted in a fan-shaped distribution of natural resources and population, with the hub of the fan located approximately at the city of Buenos Aires-an icon of outward growth and dependency. "Immigration provided a mass of laborers, some qualified personnel, and a small number of entrepreneurs. However, the characteristics of Argentine economic expansion, under British international control and under circumstances which left the basic agro-export structure unchanged, tended to channel entrepreneurial initiative away from industrial activity and into commercial and speculative ventures while increasing urbanization very fast. The upshot was a distorted social structure. Under the continued dominance of the landed bourgeoisie the social mobility of the newcomers ended up inflating a disproportionately large tertiary sector, characterized by a large number of unproductive activities. Immigration, therefore, furthered modernization but left intact the productive structure of society." Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
