Este livro é mais importante do que você pode imaginar. John
Smith fornece uma análise contundente e plausível das mudanças globais
na produção que marcaram a fase neoliberal do capitalismo. Ao
fazer isso, ele explode os mitos sobre os salários serem baseados na
produtividade, para fornecer novos insights sobre as verdadeiras causas
dos diferenciais salariais internacionais e do declínio da participação
nos rendimentos salariais em todo o mundo. Sua análise é essencial para a compreensão do capitalismo contemporâneo.
—Jayati Ghosh, professor de economia da Universidade Jawaharlal Nehru, Nova Delhi
Imperialismo no Século XXI
é uma obra magistral sobre economia política global, a avaliação mais
sistemática disponível do significado permanente do imperialismo no
sistema capitalista mundial de hoje. O
relato rigoroso de John Smith sobre os fundamentos econômicos do
sistema global de produção e troca revela a dependência do capital da
exploração de centenas de milhões de trabalhadores empobrecidos no Sul
Global. Este livro
altamente acessível é uma leitura essencial para uma compreensão dos
fundamentos do sistema global do capitalismo hoje.
—Immanuel Ness, City University of New York
Meticulosamente pesquisado e argumentado com vigor, Imperialismo no Século XXI é uma importante contribuição para a teorização e crítica do capitalismo global.
—Willis M. Buhle, Crítica Literária do Meio-Oeste
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By John Smith
When David Harvey says “the historical
draining of wealth from East to West for more than two centuries has
largely been reversed over the last thirty years,” his readers will
reasonably assume that he refers to a defining feature of imperialism,
namely the plunder of living labour and natural wealth in colonies and
semi-colonies by rising capitalist powers in Europe and North America.
Indeed, he leaves no doubt about this, since he prefaced these words
with reference to “the old categories of imperialism.” But here we
encounter the first of his many obfuscations. For more than two
centuries, imperialist Europe and North America have also been draining
wealth from Latin America and Africa, as well as from all parts of Asia…
except from Japan, which itself emerged as an imperial power during the
19th century. ‘East-West’ is therefore an imperfect substitute for ‘North-South’, and this is why I dared to adjust the points of Harvey’s compass, drawing a petulant response.
As David Harvey knows full well, all
sides in the debate on imperialism, modernisation and capitalist
development acknowledge a primary distinction between what are variously
termed ‘developed and developing’, ‘imperialist and oppressed’, ‘core
and periphery’ etc. countries, even if there is no agreement about how
this primary division is evolving. Furthermore, the criteria for
determining membership of these groups of nations can validly include
politics, economics, history, culture and much else, but NOT
geographical location—‘North-South’ is nothing more than descriptive
shorthand for other criteria, as is indicated by the fact that ‘North’
is generally acknowledged to include Australia and New Zealand. Yet, in
his reply to my critique, Harvey elevates geography above all else,
lumping China, whose per capita GDP in 2017 was situated between
Thailand and the Dominican Republic, along with South Korea, Taiwan and
imperialist Japan into a distinct East Asian “power block [sic] in the
global economy.” Given the moribund state of the Japanese economy, whose
GDP has grown by an average of less than 1% per annum since 1990, and
cognizant of Japan’s explosive economic, political and military rivalry
with China, to ask whether this ‘bloc’ is now draining wealth from
capitalist Europe and North America is to ask the wrong question.
To judge Harvey’s claim that flows of
wealth associated with imperialism have gone into reverse we should ask a
more pertinent question: are the developed capitalist nations of
Europe, North America and Japan continuing to drain wealth from China
and other ‘emerging nations’ in Asia, Africa and Latin America?
Unless Harvey believes that flows of wealth from Africa and Latin
America to the ‘West’ are large enough to cancel the alleged flow from
the West to the ‘East Asian bloc’, his answer must be no, this is no longer the case.
Some realities on the ground
In 2015, researchers based in Brazil, India, Nigeria, Norway and the USA published Financial flows and tax havens: combining to limit the lives of billions of people,
which they fairly claim to be “the most comprehensive analysis of
global financial flows impacting developing countries compiled to date.”
Their report calculates ‘net resource transfers’ (NRT) between
developed and developing countries, combining licit and illicit inflows
and outflows—from development aid and remittances of wages to net trade
receipts, debt servicing, new loans, FDI and portfolio investment and
repatriated profits, along with capital flight and other forms of
financial chicanery and outright theft. They found that in 2012, the
most recent year for which they could obtain data, what they call
‘developing and emerging countries’ (which of course includes China)
lost $2.0 trillion in net transfers to rich countries, equivalent to 8%
of emerging nations’ GDP in that year—four times larger than the average
of $504 billion in NRT transferred annually from poor to rich countries
during the first half of the 2000s. When informed estimates are
included of under-invoicing and other forms of rip-off and criminality
that leave no statistical trace, NRT from poor countries to imperialist
countries in 2012 exceeded $3 trillion, around 12% of poor nations’ GDP.
More generally, they report that “both
recorded and unrecorded transfers of licit and illicit funds from
developing countries have tended to increase over the period 1980-2011”.
As for Sub-Saharan Africa, they report that NRT from this continent to
imperialist countries (or tax havens licensed by them) between 1980 to
2012 totalled $792bn, that illicit transfers from Africa to imperialist
countries as a proportion of GDP are higher than from any other region,
and that capital flight from Sub-Saharan Africa is growing by more than
20 percent per annum, faster than anywhere else in the world.
In what they called “an ironic twist to
the development narrative” the researchers concluded that “since the
early 1980s, NRT for all developing countries have been mostly large and
negative, indicating sustained and significant outflows from the
developing world… resulting in a chronic net drain of resources from the
developing world over extended periods of time”.
Where does China fit into this broader
picture? Using sophisticated methodologies and on the basis of
conservative assumptions, the researchers calculate that China accounts
for no less than two thirds of the total recorded resource transfer
deficit of all ‘emerging nations’ between 1980 and 2012, $1.9 trillion
in all; the explanation for this high proportion being “China’s large
current account surpluses and associated capital and reserve asset
outflows,” and it accounted for 21%, or $2.8 trillion, of the total of
$13.4 trillion in capital flight drained from all ‘emerging countries’
to rich nations during these three decades.
More realities on the ground
These facts are already enough to
refute Harvey’s claim that China and its neighbours are now draining
wealth from ‘former’ imperialist nations in Europe and North America.
David Harvey should provide some data to back up his assertions—or
withdraw them. But the case against his denial of imperialism goes far
beyond what’s revealed by statistics on trade, debt servicing, profit
repatriation and capital flight.
In the first place, the ‘net resource
transfer’ methodology implemented in the research cited above means that
South-North flows of repatriated profits are cancelled by new
North-South flows of FDI. Yet these flows are different in kind.
Repatriated profits unambiguously increase the wealth of transnational
corporations (TNCs); FDI unambiguously increases the portion of the host
economy they own and control. These flows may be in opposite
directions, but each of them reinforces imperialist domination over the
host economies, a fact which is ignored when they are simplistically
cancelled out; and similar considerations apply to other flows, e.g.
debt servicing vs. new loans.
Much more importantly, Marx’s theory of
value teaches us that data on trade and financial flows provide only a
highly distorted and much-diminished picture of the underlying flows of
value and surplus value. For example, the only flows of wealth from
China and other low-wage countries to non-financial TNCs headquartered
in Japan, Europe and North America that show up in statistical data are
repatriated profits from direct investments. In contrast, not a single
cent of H&M’s, Apple’s or General Motors’ profits can be traced back
to the super-exploited Bangladeshi, Chinese and Mexican workers who
toil for these TNCs’ independent suppliers, and it is this ‘arm’s
length’ relationship which increasingly prevails in the global value
chains that connect TNCs and citizens in imperialist countries to the
low-wage workers who produce more and more of their intermediate inputs
and consumption goods.
The central conclusion I draw from this, as I stated in the blogpost David Harvey denies imperialism, is that:
The vast scale of
production outsourcing to low-wage countries, whether via foreign direct
investment or via indirect, arm’s length relationships, signifies
greatly expanded exploitation of southern labor by U.S., European, and
Japanese TNCs, legions of workers who are moreover subject to a higher
rate of exploitation… [and this] implies new and greatly increased flows
of value and surplus value to U.S., European, and Japanese TNCs… and
reason to believe that this transformation marks a new stage in the
development of imperialism.
David Harvey, in his response to my critique, treats this defining feature of the neoliberal era rather differently:
From the 1970s onwards some
(but by no means all) capital went to where the labour forces were
cheapest. But globalization could not work without reducing barriers to
commodity exchange and money flows and the latter meant opening a
Pandora’s box for finance capital that had long been frustrated by
national regulation. The long-term effect was to reduce the power and
privilege of working class movements in the global north precisely by
putting them into competitive range of a global labour force that could
be had at almost any price.
Here, Harvey completely ignores the
increased dependence of US, European and Japanese TNCs on surplus value
from low-wage countries, and he attempts to shift attention to the
important but secondary phenomenon of financialization. The only effect
of the global shift of production to low-wage countries that he thinks
worth mentioning is its stifling effect on “working class movements in
the global North.” And this effect is greatly exaggerated—the reduction
of the latter’s power and privilege, Harvey would have us believe, has
been on such a scale that they now compete with their sisters and
brothers in the global South on more-or-less equal terms.
In my original critique I quoted his 17 Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (p. 170), where he said: “disparities in the global distribution of wealth and income between countries
have been much reduced with rising per capita incomes in many
developing parts of the world;” and I countered that this “greatly
exaggerates global convergence: once China is removed from the picture,
and once account is made of greatly increased income inequality in many
southern nations, no real progress has been made in overcoming the huge
gap in real wages and living standards between the “West” and the rest.”
Harvey’s response: “I stand by the claim that the working classes
within the global structure of contemporary capitalism are far more
competitive with each other now than they were in the 1960s.”
It is true that ultra-low wages in
southern nations are being used as a club against workers in imperialist
nations, but it is preposterous to suggest that the North-South gulf in
wages and living standards has been substantially eroded. David Harvey
should provide some data to back up his claims—or withdraw them. He
could consult ‘Global wage trends in the neoliberal era’, chapter 5 of
my Imperialism in the Twenty-first Century,
along with its discussion of the growth of the ‘planet of slums’ (so
much for Harvey’s claim that I “ignore urbanisation”!) and other
evidence supporting a rather different conclusion to the mainstream
convergence hypothesis endorsed by Harvey of (p. 104):
the imperialist division of
the world… has shaped the global working class, central to which is the
violent suppression of international labor mobility. Just as the
infamous pass-laws epitomized apartheid in South Africa, so do
immigration controls form the lynchpin of an apartheid-like global
economic system that systematically denies citizenship and basic human
rights to the workers of the South and which, as in apartheid-era South
Africa, is a necessary condition for their super-exploitation.
Why does Harvey refuse to acknowledge
the enormously-expanded exploitation of Southern labour by Northern
capital? Why does he deny the prevalence of super-exploitation in the
low-wage rungs of global value 221? Why does he claim that the split in
the international working class that so preoccupied Lenin and the
communist movement when it was communist is now history? It’s
simple—realism on any of these points would result in the collapse of
his argument.
Harvey’s idealism
“Marx taught us that the historical
materialist method does not start with concepts and then imposes them on
reality, but with the realities on the ground in order to discover the
abstract concepts adequate to their situation. To start with concepts,
as does John Smith, is to engage in rank idealism.” Harvey offers sound
advice—but he should practice what he preaches. His criticism of my
analytical method as ‘rank idealism’ applies without exaggeration to his
own approach, as we shall see.
It is indeed of the utmost importance to start with facts, as I stressed in my article Imperialism in the Twenty-first Century:
“Communism is not a doctrine but a movement; it proceeds not from principles but from facts,”
said Frederick Engels. Wide international differences in the rate of
exploitation, the huge global shift of production to where this rate is
highest, and the tremendous southwards shift in the centre of gravity of
the industrial working class are the new, big facts from which we must
proceed. These are the defining transformations of the neoliberal era,
and they are key to understanding the nature and dynamics of the global
crisis… Instead of using Marx’s comments on nineteenth-century
production to deny the reality of twenty-first-century
super-exploitation (and of the imperialist order resting on it), we must
test Marx’s theory against these new facts, and use and critically
develop his theory in order to understand this latest stage of
capitalism’s imperialist development.
Harvey accuses me of espousing a
“fixed, rigid theory of imperialism.” He obviously hasn’t read my book.
Fair enough; I’m sure he is very busy. But were he to do so, he would
see that, by proceeding from the most significant, transformative fact
about the neoliberal era, namely the shift of production to low-wage
countries driven by imperialist hunger for super-exploitable labour, I
am led not only to argue the need for a radical extension of Lenin’s
theory:
… Just as Karl Marx could not have written Capital before
capitalism’s mature, fully evolved form had come into existence with
the rise of industrial capitalism in England, so it is unreasonable to
expect to find, in the writings of Lenin and others writing at the time
of its birth, a theory of imperialism that is able to explain its fully
evolved modern form (Imperialism in the Twenty-first Century, the book, p. 225)…
… but also to contend that the
necessary starting point for a theory of contemporary imperialism is
precisely what Marx excluded from consideration in Capital; e.g. in the MR article cited above I argue:
In the third volume of Capital,
while discussing “counteracting factors” inhibiting the tendency of the
rate of profit to fall, Marx makes another brief reference to… the
“Reduction of Wages Below their Value,” [which] is dealt with in just
two short sentences: “like many other things that might be brought in,
it has nothing to do with the general analysis of capital, but has its
place in an account of competition, which is not dealt with in this
work. It is nonetheless one of the most important factors in stemming
the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.”
Not only did Marx leave to one side the
reduction of wages below their value, he made a further abstraction
that, while necessary for his “general analysis of capital,” must also
be relaxed if we are to analyze capitalism’s current stage of
development: “The distinction between rates of surplus value in
different countries and hence between different national levels of
exploitation of labour are completely outside the scope of our present
investigation.” Yet it is precisely this that must form the
starting-point for a theory of contemporary imperialism.
Harvey reprimands me for claiming that his Limits to Capital
contains “just one brief, desultory mention of imperialism.” I
apologise for this imprecision. His book does contain many fleeting,
historical references to imperialism, and two somewhat more substantial
discussions, one discussing Lenin’s theory, the other forms part of the
book’s conclusion. The truth that I intended to convey is that only once
(pp. 441-2) does Harvey mention that the essence of imperialism is “the
reality of exploitation of the peoples in one region by those in
another… the geographical production of surplus-value [can] diverge from
its geographical distribution.” I overlooked another brief mention:
“each nation-state strives to protect its monetary base [by] enhancing
value and surplus value production within its borders or appropriating
values produced elsewhere (colonial or imperialist adventures)” (p.
387). And that’s it! On all other occasions—even when reporting Lenin’s
theory!—‘imperialism’ is discussed in relation to inter-state rivalry,
to finance capital and to the rise of monopoly, but exploitation of
subject peoples is entirely expunged, both from Harvey’s own concept and
his presentation of the views of others.
In his reply to my critique, Harvey
makes a similarly vague acknowledgement of this all-important
phenomenon, asserting that he doesn’t “deny that value produced in one
place ends up being appropriated somewhere else and there is a degree of
viciousness in all of this that is appalling.” Okay, he doesn’t deny
this, but he doesn’t dwell on it, either. He just wants to say as little
as possible about it, and at all costs to avoid acknowledging that
value produced in places like China, Bangladesh and Mexico ends up being appropriated in countries like USA, UK and Japan.
What little he does say, however, is
very revealing—not about the world, but about the quality (in all the
meanings of the word) of his argument. In his reply to my criticism, for
example, he says, “When we read accounts of awful super-exploitative
conditions in manufacturing in the global South it often transpires that
it is Taiwanese or South Korean firms that are involved even as the
final product finds its way to Europe or the United States.” The
substantive issue in this was addressed by Judy Whitehead in the comment
she posted on Harvey’s reply: “While it’s true that many local
companies, e.g. Foxconn, run the factories that produce goods for the
West, in China and a few other locations, Smith shows in his book that a
large majority of the profits accrue to the multinationals they are
contracting for, e.g. Apple.”
Two other things can be said about
Harvey’s statement. First, on those rare occasions when Harvey mentions
super-exploitation, he only ever uses it as a descriptive term, never as
an analytical category. Second, whenever he does acknowledge its
actuality—as in the above passage—he goes to great pains to deflect
attention from its beneficial effect on the profits of TNCs
headquartered in North America, Europe and Japan.
I conclude this discussion of Harvey’s
treatment of inconvenient facts by examining another of his revealing
statements. In his reply to my criticism, he stated that, “As Marx long
ago pointed out, geographical transfers of wealth from one part of the
world to another do not benefit a whole country; they are invariably
concentrated in the hands of privileged classes.”
Invariably?? Can’t Harvey think of any
instances where the imperialists have used part of the proceeds of
super-exploitation to bribe and corrupt their own workers? Was Frederick
Engels deluded when, in an 1882 letter to Kautsky
(when the latter was still a Marxist), he said, “You ask me what the
English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as
they think about politics in general: the same as the bourgeoisie think.
There is no workers party here… and the workers are cheerfully
consuming their share of England’s monopoly of the world market and the
colonies”?
When Ernest Bevin, Labour’s Foreign Secretary in the Britain’s post World War 2 government, declared to the House of Commons
in 1946 that “I am not prepared to sacrifice the British Empire because
I know that if the British Empire fell…it would mean the standard of
living of our constituents would fall considerably,” was he making it
up?
And when in 2018 the British state
collects, in VAT and other taxes, up to half the final sale price of a
shirt made in Bangladesh (while the woman who made the shirt is paid a
tiny fraction of this amount) and uses these tax receipts to finance the
National Health Service and workers’ pensions (neither of which are
available to our Bangladeshi sisters, nor to the 260 million migrant
workers from China’s countryside who toil in that country’s
export-oriented factories), is it acceptable for Marxists to ignore such
inconvenient ‘realities on the ground’?
In Imperialism and the Split in Socialism Lenin said (and he repeated the same idea in countless other articles and speeches), “The capitalists can devote a part (and not a small one, at that!) of the super-profits [arising from “England’s colonial monopoly,” Lenin’s emphasis, here and throughout] to bribe their own workers, to create something like an alliance . . . between the workers of the given nation and their capitalists against the
other countries;” and he continued, “This, in fact, is the economic and
political essence of imperialism, the profound contradictions of which
Kautsky glosses over instead of exposing.” Substitute Harvey for
Kautsky, and these words are as true today as when they were spoken a
century ago. And when David Harvey responds to this criticism, as I
sincerely hope he will, perhaps he can explain why he omitted any
mention of this “economic and political essence of imperialism” in his
discussion of Lenin’s views in Limits to Capital, in The New Imperialism, or anywhere else.
Harvey’s use of Capital to deny contemporary imperialism
So far, we have examined how Harvey
deals with facts that contradict his denial of imperialism. Now we will
look at how he uses and abuses theoretical concepts drawn from Marx to
the same end.
Harvey says he “acknowledges the
significance of Marx’s theory of relative surplus value which makes it
possible for the physical standard of living of labour to rise
significantly even as the rate of exploitation increases to dramatic
levels impossible to achieve through the absolute surplus value gained
in the more impoverished arenas of capital accumulation that often
dominate in the global South.”
Here Harvey echoes the standard
argument used by many Marxists in imperialist countries (whom I
sometimes refer to as ‘euro-Marxists’) to deny the prevalence of higher
rates of exploitation in China, Bangladesh etc. In doing so, he provides
an excellent example of ‘imposing concepts upon reality’. To use Marx’s
theory of absolute surplus value to explain the abysmally low levels of
consumption endured by garment workers in Bangladesh and workers on
automobile assembly lines in Mexico is glib and false. That so many
others do so is no excuse; to the contrary, it increases the onus on
Harvey to apply his deep knowledge of Marxism to critically develop this
theory in order to answer real-world questions that have remained
unanswered for far too long.
As with all commodities, the value of
labour power is determined by the quantity of labour required for its
production, and is synonymous with ‘necessary labour time’, i.e. the
time during which the s/he replaces the values consumed by her/his
family. Marx’s concept of absolute surplus value refers to the extension
of the working day beyond necessary labour time; the amount by which it
does so he called surplus labour time, and the ratio between the two is
the rate of surplus value, a.k.a. the rate of exploitation (the
difference between these two terms becomes important when we take
account of the distinction between production and non-production labour,
but it is not relevant here). Absolute surplus value, Marx argued, may
be increased by further extending the working day beyond necessary
labour time. This is entirely distinct from the reduction of necessary labour time through the suppression of workers’ consumption levels. As Marx explained in many places in Vols. I and III of Capital,
“pushing the wage of the worker down below the value of his
labour-power” is “excluded from consider[ation] by our assumption that
all commodities, including labour-power, are bought and sold at their
full value.”
On the other hand, Marx’s concept of relative surplus value explains that improvements in the productivity of workers directly or indirectly employed in the production of consumption goods
reduces necessary labour time without any corresponding reduction in
workers’ consumption levels, and that such productivity advances can
allow workers’ consumption levels to rise without increasing necessary
labour time and reducing the rate of surplus value.
Neither of these concepts, taken
separately or used in combination, are sufficient to explain the value
relations in contemporary globalised production networks. First,
Harvey’s argument is contradicted by facts—the shift in the production
of so many consumer goods to low-wage countries means that the wages and
productivity of workers in low-wage countries have become major
determinants of relative surplus value in imperialist countries. What’s
new about ‘new imperialism’ is the vast scale of this
phenomena; the exceptional importance of Ruy Mauro Marini’s contribution
to the dependency and imperialism debate that raged in the decades
before 1980 lies, in part, in his argument that, during Karl Marx’s own lifetime
super-exploitation in Britain’s colonies and neo-colonies increased
relative surplus value within Britain itself (cheaper food etc. imports
reduced necessary labour time without reducing consumption levels). In
his Dialéctica de la Dependencia (1973), Marini argued (my translation):
The concept of
super-exploitation is not identical to that of absolute surplus-value
since it also includes a type of production of relative
surplus-value—that which corresponds to an increase in the intensity of
labour. On the other hand, the conversion of part of the wages fund into
a source of capital accumulation does not strictly represent a form of
absolute surplus-value production, since it simultaneously affects both
parts of the working day, not only of surplus labour-time as is the case
with absolute surplus-value. Above all, super-exploitation is defined
most of all by greater exploitation of the worker’s physical capacity,
in contrast to the exploitation resulting from an increase in her/his
productivity, and tends normally to express itself in the fact that
labour power is remunerated below its actual value.
Second, and even more seriously,
Harvey’s abuse of the concept of absolute surplus value makes the
elementary mistake of confusing the productivity of workers producing
consumption goods with the productivity of workers who consume these
goods. As I explain in Imperialism in the Twenty-first Century (the book, pp. 242-3),
Not only is the relation
between the productivity of labor and the exchange-value created by it
not direct, as asserted by mainstream economic theory and echoed by
euro-Marxists, they are wholly independent of each other, as Marx
emphasized (vol. I, p.137):
By
productivity, of course, we always mean the productivity of concrete
useful labor… Useful labor becomes… a more or less abundant source of
products in direct proportion as its productivity rises or falls. As
against this, however, variations in productivity have no impact
whatever on the labor itself represented in value. As productivity is an
attribute of labor in its concrete useful form, it naturally ceases to
have any bearing on that labor as soon as we abstract from its concrete
useful form. The same labor, therefore, performed for the same length of
time, always yields the same amount of value, independently of any
variations in productivity. But it provides different quantities of
use-values during equal periods of time.
Belief in a direct relation between
wages and productivity is therefore founded on a confusion of use-value
with exchange-value, a confusion that wrecks the very foundation of
Marx’s theory and in fact responds to the semblance of the relations of
production in the mind of the capitalist. In other words, the orthodox
Marxists are in fact promoting bourgeois economics dressed in Marxist
terminology.
If Marx’s concepts of absolute and
relative surplus value are insufficient to explain the realities of
contemporary global production networks, what else do we need? The short
answer: a theoretical concept of super-exploitation. As stated
above, Marx repeatedly, explicitly excluded both international
variations in the rate of surplus value and the suppression of wages
below the value of labour power from his ‘general theory’ of capital.
Reduction in the value of labour power by suppressing consumption levels
(or what amounts to the same thing, reduction of wages below the value
of labour power) is a distinct, third way to increase surplus value, and
it has attained incredible importance during the neoliberal era, being
the fundamental driving force behind global labour arbitrage and the
massive shift of production to low-wage countries.
The rediscovery of this third form of
surplus-value is the breakthrough that provides the key to unleashing
the dynamic concepts contained in Capital, and it was made by Andy Higginbottom in a 2009 conference paper entitled The Third Form of Surplus Value Increase, building
on the above-mentioned work of Ruy Mauro Marini and since developed
further in a series of ground-breaking papers and articles (see here, here and here).
In his 2009 paper he said, “Marx discusses three distinct ways that
capital can increase surplus-value, but he names only two of these as
absolute surplus-value and relative surplus-value. The third mechanism,
reducing wages below the value of labour-power, Marx consigns to the
sphere of the competition and outside his analysis.”
As I said in my book (p. 238),
“Wage arbitrage-driven
globalization of production corresponds neither to absolute
surplus-value—long hours are endemic in low-wage countries, but the
length of the working day is not the outsourcing firm’s main
attraction—nor to relative surplus-value: necessary labor is not reduced
through the application of new technology. Indeed, outsourcing is an alternative
to investment in new technology. Raising surplus-value through
expanding the exploitation of Southern low-wage labor therefore cannot
be reduced to the two forms of surplus-value extraction analyzed in Capital—absolute
and relative surplus-value. Global labor arbitrage-driven outsourcing
is driven by lust for cheaper labor, and corresponds most directly to
the “reduction of wages below their value.” In other words, global labor
arbitrage, the driver of the global shift of production to low-wage
nations, is the third form of surplus value recognized by Marx as a most
important factor, yet excluded, as we have seen, from his theory of
value.
The China question
Harvey asks “Is China the new
imperialist power?” This is a fair and very large question to which I
cannot possibly do justice in the context of this reply. China is much
more than merely a very large, fast-growing ‘emerging nation’. It is a
country which was transformed by a massive socialist revolution (more
precisely, the 1949 revolution established necessary conditions for
advance towards socialism—imperialist domination was ended, landlords
and capitalists were expropriated, their state was overthrown—but
further progress was stymied by the sectarian and reactionary policies
of its Stalinist leaders) and which is now attempting a transition back
to capitalism. Despite widespread views to the contrary, this
transition is far from complete and its completion is far from certain.
Imperialism is inscribed in the DNA of capitalism, and if China has
embarked on the capitalist road, then it has also embarked on the
imperialist road.
Seven years ago, I wrote,
I don’t believe that the sum total of transformations that have taken place in China over the past three decades yet
equal in significance those resulting from China’s socialist
revolution, namely the expropriation of the capitalists and landlords
and the establishment of a workers’ state (albeit horribly deformed from
the outset by its Stalinist leadership). There are many capitalists in
China, and their number and wealth is rapidly increasing, and there is
indeed a great deal of capitalist accumulation taking place in China
today, but most of this capital is being accumulated by Japanese, US etc TNCs—both
those whose foreign subsidiaries today produce around 55% of Chinese
exports, and also by ‘lead firms’ like Wal-Mart and Dell indulging in
arm’s-length exploitation of workers by independent suppliers…
Capitalist development in China is still characterised by dependence on
exports of low value-added goods to the imperialist economies (or, in
the case of China’s high-tech exports, low value-added assembly of
imported inputs), and by reliance on FDI from TNCs based in those
economies….
Is China’s rise a threat to imperialist
domination of Asia and the world? Yes, I believe it is. What sort of
threat? That China’s rulers—whether we consider them to be a capitalist
class or a Stalinist bureaucracy—will refuse to accept the subordinate,
oppressed, submissive status reserved for the so-called emerging
nations, that they will challenge US hegemony over Asia and develop a
counterweight to the US-Japanese military alliance that rules its
coastal waters, that they will wield the potential economic power
reflected in their possession of trillions of dollars of US treasury
bonds and other financial assets, that their emergent TNCs will muscle
in on mineral resources and markets hitherto the exclusive preserve of
the imperialist nations. They are already marching down this road, a road that leads to war,
and the USA is responding in the way we would expect the imperial
hegemon to respond: the invasion of Iraq was aimed at least as much at
intimidating China as at securing US/UK control over Middle Eastern oil.
Much has changed in the last seven
years. Chinese state capitalism (for want of a better term) shows signs
of developing a strategic challenge to Japanese, European and North
American dominance in key industries, from robotics, information
technology and artificial intelligence to renewable energy, aerospace
and nuclear power generation. These developments, along with sharply
increasing military tensions in China’s coastal waters (which have been
an American lake since the end of World War II), and the phoney proxy
war taking place on and around the Korean peninsula, reinforce the
verdict I reached seven years ago—the combination of spreading global
capitalist depression and China’s growing challenge to imperialist
domination means that we no longer live in a post-World War II world, we
live in a pre-World War III world. Class-conscious workers must
maintain independence from both sides in this looming conflict and
prepare for the revolutionary openings which capitalism’s deepest-ever
crisis is certain to produce. Right now, that means denouncing US
aggression against Korea and demanding the withdrawal of its military
forces and bases from the west Pacific, opposing Japan’s nuclear
rearmament, and also opposing Chinese capitalist expansion and the
Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to forge an alliance with reactionary
capitalist regimes in Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and other countries
in the path of its ‘One Belt, One Road’.
* * *
Finally, Harvey expresses his
displeasure with “the kind of polemic that Smith engages in as a
substitute for reasoned critique;” in particular that I dared to mock
his advocacy of a “benevolent, New Deal imperialism, preferably arrived
at through the sort of coalition of capitalist powers that Kautsky long
ago envisaged” (The New Imperialism, pp. 209–211). I would just point out that, so keen was I to accurately summarise his views, no less than 40 percent of David Harvey denies imperialism consists of extended quotes from his works.
Harvey defends his call for a
“benevolent imperialism” on the grounds that “it would have been better
for the left to support a Keynesian alternative.” But there was, and is, no Keynesian alternative;
this is nothing else than a social-democratic fantasy, just as was
Kautsky’s dream, shared by Harvey, of an end to inter-imperialist
rivalries. And as Lenin explained, social democracy is a nothing else than a euphemism for social imperialism.
John Smith received his PhD
from the University of Sheffield and is currently self-employed as a
researcher and writer. He was an oil rig worker, bus driver, and
telecommunications engineer, and is a long-time activist in the anti-war
and Latin American solidarity movements. Winner of the first Paul A.
Baran–Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award for an original monograph concerned
with the political economy of imperialism, John’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century is
a seminal examination of the relationship between the core capitalist
countries and the rest of the world in the age of neoliberal
globalization. He can be contacted at johncsmith@btinternet.com.
Featured Photograph: Asian Social Forum, 2003
