To Table of Contents                                           To Ch. 4
 
 

Three

The Marxian Analytical Core

l. Profit and the accumulation drive¹

I have noted that capitalism and economics came into the world hand in hand--or perhaps hand in glove would be more accurate, with economics serving to conceal capitalism's dirty hands.

From its very beginnings, economists have given pride of place to capitalists' drive for profits--as did Marx. But there the similarity ends, both as regards methodology, explanation, and expected consequences--and not only because Marx saw capitalists as rational misers (when he is not seeing them as the Messrs. Moneybags). We take those differences up by beginning with the position of mainstream economics.

This best of all possible worlds A quick summary of mainstream economists' way of treating the area of profits and accumulation is to understand (1) that their analysis is static, taking as given just about everything--time, technology, socioeconomic structures and relations, private property, factor prices (i.e., wages, interest rates, and rents)--which (2) allows profits to be seen as a residual. Thus, if in the short run, profits are excessive (that is, as Ricardo put it, unearned), in the long run, they will be competed away in freely competitive markets, brought down to a normal rate of return (= the natural rate of interest). The result is thus to the betterment of all (if not now, some time later). In any case, everyone is getting just what he or she deserves.

To say that the model that produces such a view is static is to say much else. Because there is no history, there is no explanation of why there is private property, held by a tiny percentage of the population (of any nation and of the globe),² or why such property has been, is being, and will be used to the advantage of those few who own and control production (among other sectors) to the very grave disadvantage of almost everyone else. In addition to all else left out of the mainstream model, there is no accounting whatsoever for the State (and its judicial system) that not only allows but facilitates the conditions under which so many live so badly while so few (fifteen percent, at the maximum) live so very well. And, one is tempted to add [and one gives in to the temptation], that tiny privileged minority usually disport themselves as though they were spoiled brats (indeed, they usually are).

Marx's view Profit maximization is also the key for Marx; indeed, the drive for profits and continuous capital accumulation he sees as the life force of capitalism. Unlike for the mainliners (oops! mainstreamers) and quite apart from their idealization of a brutal system, for Marx, capitalism is not a rational, but a wildly irrational system--uncontrolled and uncontrollable, a social monstrosity.

In our classes, I have suggested that a first reading of Capital is best begun not on p. 1, Part I, but in Part VIII. The latter is Marx's historical summing up of the beginnings of capitalism, in the era of what he calls primitive accumulation.³ Here is a sampling of what he means by that term:

The discovery of gold and silver in [Latin] America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.⁴

When the stage had been set for full-fledged capitalism to take hold, as it was by the close of the eighteenth century in Britain,⁵the system moved toward realizing the following characteristics: (1) dependence upon maximal exploitation of workers and of nature, (2) an endless extension of its economic, political, and social power at home and abroad to assure ongoing profitability and accumulation, and (3) continuous pressure for always more advantageous technologies and the creation, maintenance, or return of a powerless workforce.

At work within these processes was and is, of course competition between firms in the same (and increasingly different) industries, both despite and because of the ultimate dominance of giants. But it is neither the competition Adam Smith had in mind nor that which is exalted by contemporary economics. Increases in productive efficiency have of course been great throughout capitalism's history, and increases in the real income of significant segments of the working class (in the rich countries) have of course taken place (and are now being taken away). But competition--better seen as rivalry--between corporate giants (whether in autos, appliances, sportswear, computers, or whatever) has done more to increase inefficiency for the whole economy than it has to increase productive efficiency at the plant level, whether the reference is to the costs of packaging, marketing, or deliberate obsolescence (saying nothing yet about the social and political and environmental costs of consumerism).

In our day, what Marx called the accumulation drive has been translated into the iconic role of economic growth. That is, not only for capitalists, but for the entire society--everywhere--accumulation is all: "Growth! . . . is Moses and the Prophets." And the costs of capitalism--never acknowledged by capitalists--are now seen as remediable only by more and more growth, no matter what. Or else they are not seen as costs at all. Thus, the imperatives of capitalism have become internalized as normal and acceptable throughout most of the world.

2. Technological change as a system imperative

We have noted constant change as intrinsic to capitalism. Within that process, technological change was spectacular from the beginnings of industrial production, and has become always more so over time. More specifically, the earliest technological advances as modern industry began were made in the area of production, and the marvel of marvels in those years was the steam engine--first developed to be used in coal mining, then applied to the textile industry, to railroads and ships, and in agriculture. The next big leap took place in the electrical and chemical industries and resulted in a new definition of industrialization. But in our world, technological change has broken through the confines of industry to transform all of life--from entertainment to education to health care to . . . everything.

No significant technological change can occur without significant social change. Thus it is that with the speeding up of the processes of technological change, the processes of social change have accelerated at least as much. Because human beings cannot change their ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving as rapidly as (wanted or unwanted) innovations are implemented in machines (and in all manner of electronics), one consequence of all these changes taken together--and accelerating--has been a social process that is increasingly hectic, verging toward chaos.

Marx had begun to see this as early 1848, when he and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto. For prescience, this is hard to match; it could have been written tomorrow:

The bourgeoisie [i.e., capitalists] cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society . . . . Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, ever-lasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

"Man is at last compelled . . ." But among the technologies that swim through all the nooks and crannies of our lives are, of course, those of the media--one of the biggest businesses of all. Marx could not foresee that the very processes that compel us "to face with sober senses" our real conditions of life have spawned the most crucial weapons used by the giant corporations to lead us, instead, to look at our TV and shop (and borrow) until we drop.

Marx could not have foreseen the specific technologies that now dominate us so, but he did understand very well by whom the process of technological change is energized--by whom and for whom:

[W]ithin the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labor are brought about at the cost of the individual laborer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers, they mutilate . . .⁶

This is not to overlook the role of science and engineering in technological development. They are essential for the processes of invention; but it is innovation (the adoption and use of an invention) that gives that set of changes their fuel, their energy--their financing. In the deep past, that was often so. In our day and age, almost always, the money comes first, the inventions follow.

And of course it is true that along with industrialization, the possibilities of further progress not only increase, but multiply. It was this that caused Veblen to remark that, true though it is that "necessity is the mother of invention," even more so it is that "invention is the mother of necessity."

Be all that as it may, the technological process always increases the power(s) of some capitalists and always increases the powerlessness of some workers. Over the long run it has very much increased the power of capital and very much reduced the power of labor--both within national economies and, especially now, in its abilities to spread over the globe with ease, with dire consequences for the labor movement all over the globe.

In the same processes, and saying something of the same thing, the deskilling of labor has placed a steady downward pressure on the ability of individual or organized labor to defend itself, let alone to gain in strength. Whatever the self-awareness of labor in this respect, it may be assumed that capital is very much aware of how technology enhances its powers--directly and indirectly.⁷

Those who raise their voices against particular kinds of technological change are derided as Luddites. The reference is to the machine-breakers of the early industrial revolution. But they were not fighting against progress, nor are most of their counterparts today; the fight then and is against the control and use of technological progress for the narrow (and destructive) ends of business and the hell with everyone else. For the Luddites of the past, and for us in the present, there were and are good alternatives.

Before and since the Luddites, the processes of technological change have always increased the power(s) of some capitalists and have always increased the powerlessness of some workers; and over the long run very much more so--until today, as noted, when the ability to ship whole factories and the latest technology across the globe, unique to our age, has come to be perhaps the most dire threat to workers of all time. But the search for good alternatives is not the business of those who have power.

Albert Einstein put it in a nutshell, already in 1917:

Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.⁸

3. The reserve army mechanism

The reserve army is that of unemployed workers. Quoting Herman to begin with, "Marx put great weight on capital's desire and need for slack labor markets. Technological change and cyclical downturns were the key mechanisms whereby this was accomplished in his time." And, adding in globalization (#4 below), the same is true today. Slack labor markets mean increased powerlessness for workers, as they are forced to compete with each other in order to hold or get a job.

In Marx's time both of those keys were being used, as they are today. But today has many differences, as well. Among the most important are that monetary and fiscal policies are used deliberately to keep labor markets slack, as in the USA with the so-called Volcker recession. Paul Volcker (of Wall Street and international finance), appointed head of the Fed by President Carter and continuing under Reagan, in 1980 and then again in 1981-82 deliberately used governmental policy to create unemployment, and thus to keep wages from rising and to hold prices down. Not long after, assisted by the weakness of the labor market, Reagan began his successful antiunion drive, from which organized labor has yet to recover.⁹ And privatization of formerly public activities assists in the same direction, since government workers are usually better protected (re: benefits, security, etc.) than those in the private sector. All this is much aided and abetted by the processes to be considered next.

4. Globalization

"Capital must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere." Marx again, and again from the Manifesto, written in his first years of thinking about capitalism. Not a bad beginning. But what he could see as true in his time was much intensified in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in the forms of imperialism. As those processes were spreading throughout the world, hand in hand with capitalism, industrialism, and nationalism, they created a set of horrors that made prior developments--from Attila the Hun through the Spanish Conquest and into the Westward Expansion of the United States--seem, not mild (for they were anything but mild), but limited by comparison. And among their consequences was World War I--and its consequences, which still rumble around the earth like a social tidal wave.

All that was prelude to our globalization. Marx had it right (as exemplified even in the quote concerning primitive accumulation). What he did not and could not foresee was how the politics and, even more, the technology of the late twentieth century would enable and empower capital to penetrate every usable acre of every corner of the earth, and pulling peoples from their prior lives into a process destructive to hundreds of millions of human beings--but very profitable for capital, especially the capital personified in the giant transnational corporations.

Among the many differences between the imperialist period and today's globalization are that (1) the once invaded and occupied countries of the imperialist world are now "independent," and (2) the overlapping technologies of communications, transportation, and production now allow the TNCs to establish themselves as easily (or more easily) in the weaker countries than in the imperialist world. As a result, those same countries have been made not only more dependent economically than ever before but also put under the dominion of companies, not countries and--for the benefit of those companies, not the weaker countries--under the indirect rule of high finance (whether speculators and/or the IMF).

All that would be tragic enough for the peoples of the weaker countries (a good eighty percent of the world's peoples, note); but along with those processes has gone the destruction of the earlier economies of those same peoples.

Those earlier economies were generally those of subsistence agricultural production, often joined with small-scale industry. With the green revolution and the penetration of the TNCs, hundreds of millions of people have been forced off the land (as in the enclosure movement in Britain centuries ago). These people have nowhere to go--except either (as often as not, with their children) into the plants of the TNCs or someplace far away. They may choose to flee, to become immigrants to the richer countries, often as not, illegal and, in any case, powerless and discriminated against. Either way, the long run for those people will come well after their deaths, as it will for almost all their children.

Once more: all that would be bad enough. In the same processes and for closely connected reasons, there has also been a set of negative-to-devastating effects for workers in almost all the richer countries: those (and their families) who have taken the direct hit of downsizing and outsourcing, who have gone from good jobs with good benefits to lousy jobs with no benefits, and who have lost also what is seldom noted but always important--their dignity, their self-respect. As is so often true in such matters, not only are they blamed, but all too often they blame themselves.

I have mentioned that after this year it may be a good idea for us to have an introductory econ class together, using the new book by Hugh Stretton. As I now quote from him on globalization, you'll see why:

It is a program to create private corporate rights to trade, invest, lend or borrow money and buy and own property anywhere in the world without much hindrance by national governments. It would bar governments from most of the common methods of helping or protecting their national industries and employment. It is a winners' program promoted chiefly by some business interests, governments and neoclassical economists in Europe and the United States. One of its purposes is to intensify international competition for jobs. Together with other Right policies it is likely to maintain some unemployment in the rich countries and reduce the wage rates of their lower-paid workers, and reduce the proportions of secure employment. (pp. 179-180)

To which, I add some of what Ed Herman has to say in his section on globalization:

In Marxian terms, the reserve army of labor is being globalized, with firms able to tap pools of cheap labor in Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines, and China, and bargain for terms friendly to investors across national borders as they have long done among cities and states within countries.

It is obvious that this cross-border extension of the reserve army fits the Marxian model distressingly well, with capital finding a new bargaining advantage and threatening steady downward pressure on wages and working conditions in the high wage countries. The organizational challenge to labor is immense.

The threat to labor is exacerbated by the political/economic effects of globalization, with the nation state, like labor, pressured and threatened by the mobility of finance as well as industrial capital. Policies not helpful to capital will be punished by market movements that raise interest rates, lower exchange rates, and shift investment abroad. The welfare state is placed under permanent siege in favor of the de facto 'corporate welfare state.'

As if that were not far more and away too much, the global toughs called TNCs are playing the deadly games called (by William Greider) labor arbitrage, tax arbitrage, and political arbitrage. These refer to the manner in which the TNCs, contaminating and corrupting all governments (including their own), get the cheapest labor working under the worst conditions, along with tax benefits, no unions, and freedom from environmental constraints: all this lauded and hustled by their street shills, otherwise known as economists.¹⁰

All this gets worse by the day, everywhere. When taken together with what has been said above and what will follow below, the appropriate response is not to mourn, but to repeat what Joe Hill said just before they executed him: "Organize!"

5. Instability and crises

Like generals fighting the previous war, economists and politicians think of instability and crises in terms of some previous period--usually one idealized and thus misunderstood. With generals, it's some war their side won; for economists (like the business system they serve) it's when the system, as they saw it, was working just dandy. This time around in the United States, the idealized previous period is the much-vaunted prosperity decade of the 1920s. That the 1920s ended with the beginnings of an economic catastrophe and that its "prosperity" was limited to at best twenty-five percent of the population is ignored, or (for younger economists) not even known.¹¹ Nor would they know--or care?--that in the years 1921-1929, wages were flat, while profits rose by sixty-five percent and Wall Street went bananas. Sound familiar?

And what was the then-prevailing view of U.S. (among other) economists as to macroeconomics--that is, what determines economic expansions and contractions, and thus, among other matters, unemployment?

(1) The economy moves through time in a cyclical process--expanding, reaching a peak, and then contracting. And then? Expansion to a peak, then--a cycle, like the rhythm of the seasons: Spring becomes Summer becomes Fall becomes Winter, becomes Spring, becomes . . .

(2) There should be no interference whatsoever in the economy--none at all--except for monetary policy. And what is monetary policy? It is the manipulation of the supply of money and the interest rate. That was done in Britain (until the 1930s) by the Bank of England, an entirely privately owned and controlled bank. In the United States, it was done through the Federal Reserve System, an entirely privately owned system, with the government having the power only to appoint its governors and their chief. Today's Fed, with Alan Greenspan its chief--he who was once (and may still be) a devoted follower of Ayn Rand, crackpot novelist and lover of Kapitalism. (Rand was an émigré from the Soviet Union; that's why the K.)

(3) There's unemployment. Even when it was like that of the 1930s when (officially, which is always an understatement) it was twenty-five percent, and was still more than ten percent in 1941, what was the explanation for it? Why, wouldn't you know it, it was because workers were demanding excessively high wages. There's economics for you in the past.

Today economists are copying their 1920s brethren always more closely (after an interval of about twenty-five years after World War II). But it isn't just monetarism that once more reigns, it is also that deregulation and privatization sit on the same throne, and from which the death of Keynesian fiscal policy and associated social policies was decreed--while these same economists also find some companies too big to fail. (No worker is ever too big to fail.)

Among those too big to fail recently was Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), a giant derivatives speculator, advised by two Nobel Economics winners a while back--winners for their great ideas on speculation in derivatives. (Mr. Nobel, who invented dynamite, would have been proud.) When the sirens went off announcing that LTCM was about to lose $3-to-4 billion and would drag down many big banks who were playing their game, the Fed intervened, in effect, by ordering the banks to give LTCM a very large line of credit.

In the same years in which the movement toward monetarism and deregulation and privatization were taking hold, first in Thatcher's Britain then in Reagan's USA, the IMF--understood by all to be servant mostly to finance, and mostly to U.S. finance--was assuming the role held by the Bank of England in the nineteenth century. Not just by lending, but by withholding loans and/or refusing to support a threatened currency (as during the Asian crisis of 1987), the IMF is able to dictate the entire process of economic development of a large number of countries--and dictate it so that the countries will function to the liking of TNCs and finance.

Time to quote Ed Herman directly again. After noting that instability and crises were very much contained into the 1970s, he adds, regarding the present:

Nevertheless, the immense global credit structure, pervasive speculation and innovating forms of risk-taking, privatization and the shrinkage of the role and power of governments, global interdependence, and the absence of a global lender of last resort, make the system vulnerable as never before. [My emphasis]

The current [1997-98] South-Asian crisis has for the first time combined credit and speculative excesses with an environmental crisis, in which the smoke pall from uncontrolled Indonesian fires has curtailed economic activity and frightened foreign investors over a wide area. The dynamic, exploitative and unplanned nature of global capitalism make further unpleasant combinations and surprises highly likely . . .

Especially is this so when one adds to business and governmental recklessness that which is not only encouraged but is required to keep consumption at necessary (which means rising) levels--consumer debt (including borrowing on home equities to plunge in the stock market). This has reached such heights (or depths) that it was a featured article in Business Week (November 1999) under the headline "Is the United States Building a Debt Bomb?" And their answer was yes.

Was Marx on target when he saw that the anarchic nature of capitalism and its permanent tendency toward structural imbalance and speculative excess combine to make capitalism's macroeconomic behavior dangerously unstable? You better believe it--especially now that the State is more in bed with capital than ever before, which is saying a lot.

6. Control of the State

When Marx wrote, the State was of course vital, but nothing like it has been in this century. In nineteenth century Britain, capital's needs were satisfied by laissez-faire capitalism's minimal State, whose functions were to (1) keep down worker unrest, and (2) pave the way for capital abroad. While the State still serves capital for those basic needs, in the past century the State's functions for capital became increasing ubiquitous. Already in 1912, as Woodrow Wilson remarked when he was campaigning for the presidency, "When government becomes important, it becomes important to control the government." He might as well have said "to buy the government." And it has been bought and paid for throughout the twentieth century--with some beneficial deviations for two decades or so after World War II. The main difference between 1912 and the end of the twentieth century is that now almost everyone in the government, and almost everything done by or in the government is bought and paid for--through lobbying, political advertising, and the hard and soft moneys of election campaigns.

The two intervals interrupting that always increasing tendency (in the United States) were first in the 1930s, when the economy had totally collapsed (taking considerable business prestige and power down with it), and later in the 1950s and 1960s, when organized labor, aided and abetted by political activities outside of (or working with) labor, placed significant pressure on all levels of politics and politicians.

With the 1970s all that began to fade or be crushed, through the combination of stagflation and the corporate counterattack--much assisted by the always more effective mind management of the general public through the media (including all too many workers, through cultivated racism and tax resentments focused blaming the poor). All of this was facilitated by the ongoing Cold War and McCarthyism, which, whatever else they meant (e.g., wars in Asia and elsewhere), spelled decimation of left voices in unions, education, entertainment, and politics.

Even one as mildly liberal as J. K. Galbraith was frightened. He observed that we have a democracy, but a democracy of the contented: the best-off twenty percent of the population. They are sufficient to dominate the electoral process, most amenable to the messages of big business and other elements of the Right, and are very protective of their own narrow interests while indifferent (or hostile) to all else.

Among the many fearsome-to-obscene consequences of that condition is that the only direction the State receives is shared by the business community (and, increasingly, its financial sector) and rightwingers. America the beautiful, in a phrase.

7. Domination of the superstructure of law and ideology

"The ruling ideas of any era are the ideas of its ruling class," said Marx. Like virtually all of his good ideas, that one has been much mocked by those in power and, of course, by their conscious or unconscious sycophants--partially confirming Marx's point. 'Twas ever thus. But, once more, what Marx saw in his time has become considerably more so in our time.

For most of the nineteenth century (and earlier, of course), the bulk of the population was not considered to have ideas; or, when the rabble clearly had them, they could be ignored (or killed). As noted earlier, there was not even formal democracy anywhere in the world in Marx's time--except for the severely limited democracy of the United States--and only a small fraction of the world's populations had access to any formal education.

Nowadays, the combination of formal and informal education (from the media and at work, for example) could pose a meaningful threat to those who rule. Fortunately for the latter, the usual submissive attitudes and behavior of the courts, schools, and media are actually or effectively intimidated by and/or for sale to the highest bidder. Capital has most of the money and, directly and indirectly, the power already in hand.

All this is much assisted by the ways and means of consumerism, a tendency now coming to mesmerize virtually everyone, everywhere. The infantile and selfish individualism promoted by consumerism dominates our behavior, our ideas and attitudes, our politics; it is now the reality in every nook and cranny of social existence.

The Marxian epigram by itself explains much of our contemporary political illness. When in future classes, we add to his insights those of Veblen, of Gramsci, of Brady, and (among others) of Baran and Sweezy and other recent works on corporate power and activities--when, that is, we seek to identify the elements of what might be seen as the political sociology of contemporary capitalism-- we'll see that the epigram extended to more recent analyses is more ominous than what was indicated by Marx, which was ominous enough. In short, we have an even larger problem on our hands--where we means the world's people and the planet itself, made more demanding by what we turn to now.

In the century just ended, almost all ordinary people have capitulated all too much to capital's (and its State's) ruling ideas, and that century has witnessed more damage and destruction to human beings, society, and the planet than all the rest of history. Of course, capitalism by itself cannot take the credit for all of that; but when we allow industrialism, nationalism, and imperialism, capitalism's blood brothers, into the analysis and recognize their normal and always rising subservience to capital, we have come effectively close to reality.

Beginning in the 1920s, the most consciously and actively political giant corporation in the United States, perhaps in the world, was General Electric,¹² its motto "Progress is our most important product."

We can't survive much more of such progress.
 
 

Notes

1. Throughout the discussion of the seven, much of what will be said is my formulation, and much of it I am borrowing from Ed Herman's essay (don't tell him!) which, I remind you (and if you can find it), you can read in full in New Politics (Winter, 1998). Return

2. The world's 225 richest individuals (sixty of whom are in the USA) have a combined wealth of $1 trillion plus. That is equal to almost half of the annual income of the entire world's population. In the USA, the top one percent have more wealth than the bottom ninety-five percent. In 1983 for the bottom twenty percent, their net worth (what you have, less what you owe) was minus $3,000; with the good times rolling since Clinton took office, in 1997 the minus had risen to $5,600.

The first set of figures is from the UN Development Report of 1998, as reported in the New York Times, September 17, 1998; the second figures are from Boston-based United for a Fair Economy, as found in their excellent pamphlet Shifting Fortunes: The Perils of the Growing American Wealth Gap (1999).  Return

3. Primitive as distinct from capital accumulation. The latter takes hold as industrial capitalism takes hold; for it to do so, there must be a propertyless wage-earning class--propertyless not because it was born that way, but because of history. The particular history Marx has in mind for Britain, which is his focus in Capital, was the enclosure movement. That movement had its beginnings as a rivulet in the late medieval period; by the seventeenth century it was a stream becoming a river; as Adam Smith was writing (1776) it had become a flood: a flood that wiped out the landholding (not owning) yeoman farm families in the hundreds of thousands, leaving them unable to survive except by being exploited. Which allowed capital accumulation.  Return

4. Capital, Vol. I, p. 751.  Return

5. A marvelous book for understanding this is Paul Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century. Nor would you be sorry were you to read an equally marvelous book on the domestic brutalities comprising the foundations of capitalism, as put forth in R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in 16th Century England.  Return

6. Capital, I (p. 645).  Return

7. See Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Labor in the Twentieth Century.  Return

8. In a letter to a friend, reproduced in Albert Folsing, Albert Einstein: A Biography (1997). Whether Einstein knew or it not, it is pertinent that Marx saw "civilization" as having begun (in Egypt) as the then state of technological progress allowed an economic surplus to be produced and, along with it, class society.  Return

9. Not only has union membership gone down from over one-third to about one-tenth of the private labor force, but unions since then have been increasingly timid about pressing for anything. Return

10. Greider has all this and more to say in his excellent book One World: Ready or Not--in my view the best book for understanding globalization. Arbitrage is an old speculative technique, most recently used (apart from the foregoing) by the speculators in the $90 trillion per year derivatives markets--whose aims and consequences make those called scum of the earth seem like peanut venders by comparison. Return

11. As for prosperity, consider this: the following percentages of families were at or below the povery income level for the years indicated (in 1962 dollars):
 

Year	1929	1947	1962
Income Level Under $3,000	51%	30%	21%

The official (and understated) figure in 1964 for the income below which a family was considered as poor was $3,000. Note that for the 1920s that places half of the population in poverty. The source for the figures is Herman P. Miller, Rich Man, Poor Man (New York: Crowell, 1971). Miller was with the U.S. Census for thirty years before writing that book. Return

12. And, after World War II, in its very popular TV program "The General Electric Theater," the man who served as its host and all-round public relations performer for this most ideological of companies was Ronald Reagan. Of such stuff is history made.  Return
 

Aug 8, 2000