Brad DeLong: >Does this mean that unfreedom at the periphery is functional for >capitalism at the core? I would say clearly not. The OECD gains >enormously more from trade with high-wage Taiwan than with low-wage >Vietnam, even though the rate of surplus-value is much higher in the >latter (with all of the apparatus of the Communist Party of Vietnam >to act as proxy gang boss). This is just Orwellian. The whole purpose of US foreign policy has been to prop up dictatorships that jail, murder or torture trade unionists so wages will remain low. Every single country in Latin America is involved in sending export crops to the US, from bananas to coffee. The entire history of the past 100 years has been one of the marines, or the CIA or gorillas we fund and organize, going in and breaking heads for United Fruit Company et al. All this is fresh in my mind because I have been reading about Colombia. Coffee became a major commodity in the US following the civil war and reached a high point in the 1920s, when it began to ebb off due to a saturated market. This put powerful American companies such as A&P on a collision course with the suppliers of coffee. The urgent need was to reduce wages, since under conditions of a saturated market this was the only way to increase profits. (Later on, public relations and advertising firms created an enhanced need for caffeine, to increase market demand.) The governments of country after country from El Salvador to Brazil massacred tens of thousands of plantations hands and peasants who refused to become even more impoverished than they already were. Under capitalism, there are winners and losers. Many more losers than winners based on the UN's latest development statistics. The early history of core-periphery relations that Brad alluded to never came to an end. When Americans and Brits stop in at a Starbucks, there is a class relation embodied in that transaction. Starbuck shareholders do well, while people in Brazil, Colombia and Uganda get treated like dirt. When they protest, they get a bullet in the head, courtesy of Anglo-American imperialism. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
