Abstract
While crises of overproduction may indeed be periodic, quasi-Malthusian, cyclical fluctuations, nevertheless capitalism’s long-term trajectory has been upward. This was previously explained by colonialization. The exploiting of cheap foreign resources or/and labor, enabling capitalists to remain competitively productive or efficient even while keeping the wages of their consequently embourgeoised domestic workforce sufficiently high to ensure buoyant demand. A function later fulfilled by economic neo-colonialization. Yet even when free market competition among developed nations for the underdeveloped nations’ resource and/or labor may drive the costs thereof sufficiently high to enable previously underdeveloped supplier nations to accrue enough capital to begin to aspire to the status of developing nations, competition between them will ultimately put downward pressure on resource and labor costs, and environmental and safety standards.
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Notes
- 1.
That is to say that the ability of the capitalist enterprises to remain competitive even while paying relatively robust wages to their domestic “proletariat,” being dependent upon the exploitation of cheap colonial resources and labor, therefore entails the domestic workforce being, though not direct recipients, nevertheless beneficiaries, of the profits derived from such exploitation, therefore diminishing their purely proletarian status.
- 2.
For instance the overthrow of the democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh by the US backed, so-called, Shah of Iran (Mohammad Pahlavi), and of democratically elected Salvador Allende of Chile by the fascist military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the support of the regime of Hosni Mubarak, and subsequently of the military dictatorship of Abdel el-Sisi, who overthrew the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, not to mention the US’s previous support for any number of other dictatorships in South and Central America, and continuing support for similarly ones in the Middle East and Africa.
- 3.
Thus the advent and development of the roadside bomb, not to mention the possibility of making a nuclear bomb with 5 of the several hundred Kilograms of Plutonium per year produced by even a single 1000 Megawatt nuclear reactor—a bomb which, even without a detonator could nevertheless destroy a few blocks of, say New York, and make the whole city uninhabitable for approximately 250,000 years (i.e. approximately 10 time the Half Life of Plutonium)—enables those with even primitive technologies of their own to contest, albeit asymmetrically, military domination by those with more advanced weapons technologies, just as low wages and health and safety standards, and laxer environmental standards and labor laws, as well, perhaps, as easier access to resources, similarly makes it possible for those with less productive or efficient technologies to contest the economic domination of those with more productive or efficient technologies.
- 4.
Thus the US Joint Combined Exchange Program (JCEP) has programs in 110 countries where they train foreign militaries in advanced sniper, close combat, urban military and other foreign defense and domestic security operations, and like the former School of the Americas, and Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Operations which succeeded it, has, in conjunction with US Special Forces, often supported foreign regimes which cooperate in the co-option of their economies by US economic interests, and been instrumental in overthrowing those that opposed such US hegemony.
- 5.
The Bhopal explosion immediately resulted in 3787 deaths (considerably more than 9/11) and 3900 severe permanent injuries, followed by 8000 more deaths within two weeks, and in excess of a further 8000 gas-related deaths thereafter, while the collapse of the Rana Plaza facility, where major international corporations were producing clothes for export to the advanced economies, resulted in 1134 deaths and approximately 2500 injuries. Foreign events not entirely unlike domestic, similarly capitalist profit driven, events, such as the collapse of The Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia (which as an extraction operation of domestic resources could not be outsourced)—resulting from a “conspiracy to willfully violate safety standards” (the mine received 2 safety citations the day before the explosion, 600 in the preceding 18 months, and 1342 in the preceding five years)—in which 29 miners died. An accident for which, perhaps unsurprisingly given already explicated corporate capture of the political process, and consequent influence over both law, and, more indirectly, judicial appointments, Massy Energy’s CEO Don Blankenship received nothing more than a 1-year prison sentence!
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Glynn, S. (2020). The Counter Narrative of the Long-Term Upward Trajectory of Capitalism, and Its Costs Critically Explicated: From Colonialism to Economic Neo-Colonialization. In: The Economic Logic of Late Capitalism and the Inevitable Triumph of Socialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52667-2_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52667-2_11
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