capitalism, market, redistribution

On Sun, 5 Dec 1999, Andrew Wayne Austin wrote:

|is no longer the central dynamic of global development? I thought that
|with the fall of state socialisms that the world was even more capitalist
|than before.

Hm. I have never realized capitalism was a quantitative variable.

As for the participatino of the state socialist bloc in the world economy,
well, the record has been ambiguous. The essence of their problem was that
the failure of a global post-capitalist transformation forced an essentially
nationalist policy on them, and that failed. (It always does).

Re: markets, I submit to you that at least since Max Weber, Schumpeter,
Polanyi, Sahlins, etc. we have known that there have been many, many
different kinds of market*s*. Markets far predate capitalism and could 
easily
survive its collapse. Markets can be administered, informal, localized, etc.
At least since the labor theory of value (predating Marx!) we know that
capitalism (the system in which appropriation of the surplus labor of others
is based on private ownership of the means of production) has nothing to do
with this generic notion of markets per se, except for the current
pro-status-quo ideology that promotes capitalism with the notion of "the
market". This is not to defend markets: I loathe them as much as the next
person. ;-) Give me a better, more humane, more just method of distributing
value and I accept it.

What we are talking about today is a problem much more specific than the
generic notions of "capitalism" and "the market" indicate per se. We are
talking about an increasingly *globalized* capitalism (i.e., a process in
which the appropriation of the surplus labor takes place across increasing
distances, i.e., the social proximity of exploitation is contradicted by the
physical distance between exploiter and exploited, making resistance to it 
on
a local level basically impossible) and an increasingly singularized world
market, raising enormous potentialities of disequilibrium and violence. The
expansive tendencies of capitalism have been there ever since its birth. 
What
is new today is the scale: the fact that it is impossible to escape its
direct grip by moving around even partly, even in a contradictory fashion.

Plus we have the expansion of trade into new realms (genes, ecosystems, body
organs etc.). Plus the ongoing transformations of statehood, sovereignty and
legitimacy and the decoupling of statehood from even "bourgeois" forms of
democratic representative procedures.

BTW, WTO is not the only suprastate actor asserting quasi-state rights to
itself without representation. For sake of the argument, I would even 
venture
to say that the actions of some others, especially of supranational actors 
of
the military kind, may be as, or even more, consequential than those of WTO,
especially in the latter's current state of confusion.

Now, to the implications. I thought it might help to think a bit about what 
a
global redistributive system would imply. I have two points. First, like
markets, redistribution also requires an underlying mechanism of public 
power. That is why a world government is a very important question.

Second, it is revealing what global redistribution would mean. Presumably
first and foremost the reduction of the staggering world inequality. For
reference, let me point out that, according to the Human Development Report
1998, the last version I have of the annual publication of the UN 
Development
Program, the mean world per capita GDP (estimated at purchasing power 
parity) 
was just below $6000 ($5990 to be precise). In the impossible situation that
a magic redistributive system reallocated global incomes, that means the
world would be making roughly the same as the average for the following
countries (I am listing those between $5.K5 and $6.5K): 

Costa Rica
Dominica
Fiji
Panama
Grenada
Poland
Colombia
Sanit Vincent
Brazil
Belize
Libya
Turkey
Algeria
Botswana

In terms of the more substantive Education Index (a combination of the adult
literacy rate and the combined first-, second- and third-level gross
enlrolment rate, a standardized figure of .71), the global mean is occupied
by the following countries (those between .69 and .73):

Kuwait
Belize
Botswana
Mongolia
Cape Verde
Honduras
Sao Tome and Principe
Viet Nam
Vanuatu
Nicaragua
Myanmar
Zambia

In other words, I think there'd better be something else, not *just*
redistribution. We need redistribution *and* a system which compels humans 
to
increase their production in qualitative and quantitative terms, to 
reproduce
themselves at a lower pace, and to transform their wealth into meaningful
things like knowledge etc. in a more intense way than under the current
capitalist world market.

Jozsef Borocz