Whats the Marxist-Leninist view on the Global Market?

Whats the Marxist-Leninist view on the Global Market?

more or less WE. MUST. DESTROY.

I don't really think it's a Marxist-Leninist view so much as a left-wing in general view that capitalist globalization is a bad thing, leading to exploitation of the developing world by the first.

It's important to note though, this doesn't mean we're "anti-global". To quote Noam Chomsky (not exactly an ML, but this isn't exactly a solely ML thing):

"The term "globalization" has been appropriated by the powerful to refer to a specific form of international economic integration, one based on investor rights, with the interests of people incidental. That is why the business press, in its more honest moments, refers to the "free trade agreements" as "free investment agreements" (Wall St. Journal). Accordingly, advocates of other forms of globalization are described as "anti-globalization"; and some, unfortunately, even accept this term, though it is a term of propaganda that should be dismissed with ridicule. No sane person is opposed to globalization, that is, international integration. Surely not the left and the workers movements, which were founded on the principle of international solidarity—that is, globalization in a form that attends to the rights of people, not private power systems."

The global market can be summed up in one word right now, globalization. Globalization has been a two-sided sword to both working-class proletarian and the factory owning bourgeoisie.

In a sense globalization allows for the purchase of any commodity in any market. The net result is that the cheapest item in any market is usually bought regardless of the quality of work. This means that the bourgeoisie are able to purchase rock-bottom labor, while the same time being outsold by countries such as China. Which as you can see shows the upside and the downside for the bourgeoisie. They cut costs, while being undercut by the competition, which is usually a nation that they note as "communist".

It also means that more educated people are usually unemployed while more undereducated people are usually more employee, from a worldly perspective. This also shows the upside and downside for proletarians. The more of them that can read, the moral unemployed to become, why are those who are not from wealthy backgrounds have a better chance getting a job.

^What they said. It's kind of a generally held leftist view than a M-L view...

A view in Imarxman blog

http://imarxman.wordpress.com/2012/0...nomic-miracle/

^What they said. It's kind of a generally held leftist view than a M-L view...

I will try to come up with a more M-L view on the subject after I debate it with some people offline.

So-called “globalisation” doesn’t work. Even before this crisis, most of the world’s peoples were worse off than they were in 1989. But some things do work – self-reliance, controls on capital, protection, national liberation, workers’ nationalism and fighting for wages and jobs…

The acid test for any economy. What works? And what doesn’t work?

WORKERS, JUNE 2009 ISSUE

Looking at the shambles that is the world’s economy we need to apply a simple test to all its features which up to now have been taken as inevitable, permanent. What works? What doesn’t work?

So-called “globalisation” doesn’t work. Even before this crisis, most of the world’s peoples were worse off than they were in 1989. The solution of integrating into global capitalism turns out to be the cause of the problem. Half the world’s workers are poor, living on less than $2 a day. Over 190 million people worldwide are registered as unemployed, including 76 million young people.

The finance sector doesn’t work. It doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do: get capital into profitable enterprises. The City of London seizes the wealth we create – our savings, mortgages and pensions – and gambles it away. Successive governments, none more than Brown’s, have embraced this treachery in the City.

Free trade doesn’t work. World Bank economists admit, “During periods of trade liberalization...job destruction rates can be expected to proceed at a much faster pace than job creation. Globalization could therefore be associated with higher unemployment rates.” So Latin America lost more than 10 million jobs during the 1990s.

Capitalist crises have cost developing countries a quarter of their output since 1984. But the banks profit: NatWest boasts, “Currency and interest rate volatility provided significant trading opportunities.”

The International Monetary Fund still forces liberalisation on developing countries. Debt Relief Initiatives force countries into Structural Adjustment Programmes for decades, to get the debt cancellation promised as the swift solution to their urgent problems.

Thatcherism doesn’t work, even when it’s Thatcherism with a smiley face or now with a sour face. The problem is not “government failure” or “failed states” but a failed system, not toxic assets but a toxic system. The capitalist model is shattered. The crash is in every kind of financial asset – there are no firebreaks. Where can any rebound come from? Capitalism has wrecked industry, services, housing and pensions: it has run out of options. Which is not to rule out future flare-ups in the markets.

Two years ago, a Nobel Prize-winning economist said, “the central problem of depression-prevention has been solved.” He should give his prize back. Gordon Brown said there would be no more boom and bust. Inflated reputations, supply-side trickle-down economics, free market policies, are as bankrupt as the banks they serve.

Now Brown wants to restore faith in capitalism, which is Labour’s historic role. He spoke recently to “faith leaders”, fitting, since he leads the faith in the dead god of “free enterprise”. He said, “Most people … don’t understand … how some people have grown fabulously wealthy making failed bets with other people’s money.” But this is what capitalism does.

Labour doesn’t work

Labour doesn’t work – exactly 12 years on and what is it doing? Buy-ing worthless “troubled assets” for £1.3 trillion, sending good money after bad. The great economist Joseph Stiglitz said of President Obama’s similar scheme, “Quite frankly, this amounts to robbery of the American people. I don’t think it’s going to work.” Likewise, when Japan’s credit and property bubbles burst in 1990, its ruling class defended Japan’s finance capitalists – the result? A slump that has not yet ended.


The free market economics of the City make bankers rich – but fail the test of the real economy
The crisis proves that we cannot just live with capitalism, letting them get on with it so they will let us live in peace. It doesn’t work like that. The EU doesn’t work: 18.4 million people in the EU are unemployed. The EU admits that its free trade policy causes large-scale redundancies in Europe, a “decline [in] employment terms and conditions” and cuts in wages.

The old empires all banned industry in their colonies. Now the EU, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation do the same to us all. They lie – you don’t need industry, open up to imports of goods, capital, and cheap labour, make your labour markets flexible – and you’ll grow. The government says protection is the road to ruin, yet it supports the Common Agricultural Policy. The EU, led by Britain, tries to force poorer countries to open up their economies. The recent EU–India Free Trade Agreement would cut India’s revenues from import taxes by $6 billion and let the EU dump subsidised products into India.

The EU’s Global Europe strategy, pushed by Brown and Mandelson, is all about free trade. The EU itself predicts that its proposed Euro-Mediterranean Free Trade Area will destroy 3.4 million industrial jobs in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. Egypt alone is expected to lose 1.5 million jobs. Yet the ever-present Vince Cable says protecting jobs is “beggar-my-neighbour” politics. He also says, “Economic storms, like those in nature, come and go. They cannot be abolished.”

Britain’s hard-pressed MEPs are to get a £13,000 pay rise next month – a 32 per cent rise. They will also get a special EU tax rate of 15 per cent, halving their tax. In a recent poll for the BBC, 55 per cent said, “I want Britain to leave the EU.” 84 per cent said the British people must have a referendum before any more powers go to the EU. In the EU elections, the EU’s leaders are desperate for us to vote, so they can claim people support the EU.

Capitalism is proving that capitalism doesn’t work. The normal functioning of our economy leads to crises, unemployment and poverty. Absolute decline is built into the system, not caused by external shocks like wars or price rises.

So what does work?

Self-reliance works. In Britain during World War Two, arable acreage rose from 13 million to 19 million, wheat production rose 81 per cent and calorie output rose 90 per cent. Unproductive land can be made productive. We grow only 60 per cent of our food. We import foods like potatoes and apples. We must become broadly self-sufficient in food.

Industry works. Industry distinguishes rich countries from poor. Independent developing countries increase domestic demand, curb luxury consumption and have special purpose banks, like Housing Banks and Development Banks. We need to put Britain, and Britain’s industry, first, and employ all our people in making what we need.

Controls on capital work. The industrialised countries all used capital controls to protect their infant industries. European countries used them to rebuild after World War II, well before they created the free-market EEC. Japan and the “Asian tigers“ used them.

In the 1990s, Asia suffered because most of its states opened up their financial markets. India and China did not – so they coped far better. Capital controls promote investment and enhance democracy and sovereignty by stopping speculators running everything.

The great economist John Maynard Keynes wrote, “Loose funds may sweep around the world, disorganising all steady business. Nothing is more certain than that movement of capital funds must be regulated.” But if capitalism could do this, it wouldn’t be capitalism. There is no solution within capitalism to capitalism’s absolute decline. In each country, only the working class can build recovery.

Protection works. In the 18th century, the British government gave bounties to firms to increase production. We had the world’s highest tariffs on manufactured imports, and laws enforced the consumption of British-made goods, all to foster our industry. Now our class must impose its own import controls, as the Lindsey workers did to control the import of labour, protecting British jobs and wages.

Sovereignty works. Under colonial rule, most Asian countries’ income fell because they were forced to practise free trade. But after they won independence, they all grew.

National liberation works. The only good regime change comes from within, through class struggle. Occupation by outsiders produces only the sectarian chaos of feuding warlords and clans, as in pre-revolutionary China and now in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Workers’ nationalism (see p15) works. Obama accused Hugo Chavez of being “a force that has interrupted progress in the region”. Fidel Castro by contrast said, “Venezuela has the potential to become a model of socialist development with the resources formerly extracted by the multinationals from its rich nature and the efforts of its manual and intellectual workers. No foreign power shall determine its future. The people are the masters of their destiny and they march on to attain the highest levels of education, culture, health and full employment. It is an example to be pursued by other sister nations in this hemisphere and it does not give up: it does not wish to lag behind a plundering empire.”

Fighting for wages and jobs works, as the Lindsey workers proved. To accept wage cuts, or cuts in our hours, does not save jobs; it only helps to save capitalism. We need to plan to live with full employment, with decent wages and services, and that means without capitalism.

Put together all the policies that work and we have socialism. Socialism works. In the 1930s, only the Soviet Union made progress, turning a wreck into a superpower. Any progress after World War Two was due to the challenge from the Soviet Union, not to a “golden age” of benign capitalism. Socialist Cuba flourishes despite the longest, tightest blockade in history. Here in Britain we have all that we need to live decently – all but the right politics.

This article is adapted from a speech given at this year’s CPMBL May Day Rally in London. Further issues of Workers will carry articles based on other speeches at the rallies in London and Edinburgh.

This review is from: Globalization and Progressive Economic Policy (Paperback)
Reviewed by William Podmore

In this excellent collection, 37 contributors from around the world study the World Bank, the IMF, the multinational corporations, movements of capital, goods and labour, and the possibilities of national economic renewal. David Felix points out that the financial liberalisation of recent decades has led to slower growth of output, investment and productivity. Mehrene Larudee observes that Mexico, for instance, grew 6% a year with the industrialisation and protectionist policies of 1951-81; when it joined NAFTA, the economy, jobs and wages all shrank. Ha-joon Chang suggests that workers in multinational corporations have a far stronger bargaining position than employers make out. These firms often threaten to move, but rarely do. They have high sunk costs in physical plant, infrastructure, subcontracted production networks and services, skilled workers, local knowledge. Workers can take control of our workplaces, industries and countries. We can impose capital controls and reinvest the wealth we create in productive industry.

`Globalisation’, like the idea of God, is a ghost to frighten us. Eban Goodstein proves that protecting the environment does not destroy jobs, contrary to employer propaganda. Gregory DeFreitas argues against an open borders policy, while also opposing racial biases in immigration policy. He notes, “emigration represents a subsidy to the receiving country from the nation that trained them, as well as a loss of valuable talents to their homeland.”
Arthur McEwan sums up the book’s findings: “The neo-liberal regime that is being imposed on the world economy by the Bretton Woods institutions, the US government and other powerful public and private actors is doing a great deal of damage. It is a regime that harms people in all sorts of ways in the name of economic growth, but it does not even do very well at providing economic growth. The reign of neo-liberalism has not come about as some inevitable historical process, but has been actively constructed by the powerful actors that gain from its establishment.

Alternatives exist, and the alternatives tend to work better.”

Useful study of the great crash, March 19, 2012 Reviewed William Podmore

This review is from: The crisis and the crash: Soviet studies of the West (1917-1939) (Hardcover)

What causes economic crises? The anarchy of production under capitalism: production is social but appropriation is private. Capitalism drives capitalists to compete for higher rates of profit. But the falling rate of profit leads to a fall in investment, and to crisis.

Changes in the rates of profit in different enterprises lead to different rates of investment. This causes uneven development of enterprises and of branches of industry, leading to crises. It also causes uneven development of countries, leading to imperial wars for the redivision of possessions.

As long as we let capitalism survive, capitalists will attack the working class, at home and abroad, by destroying the working class by wars and mass unemployment, for it is still in absolute decline. The first great crisis, 1873-96, caused World War One, the second, the Great Depression of 1929-33, caused World War Two.

We can't survive by staying in the EU, as the parliamentary parties claim. We don't have to be in the EU to sell to it. We can't survive just by fighting for higher wages (the TUC approach) or by changing government policy (the Labour Party approach). The parliamentary parties are increasingly united but theirs is no government of national unity, but of anti-national division. Capitalism is still the problem.

Benito Mussolini said, “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” It’s that – rather than numbers of blackshirted thugs on the streets – that defined fascism then, and does so now...

The rise and rise of the corporate state: the bankers’ dream of eternal rule

WORKERS, JUNE 2011 ISSUE

BACK IN 2006 the CPBML spoke about the sheer breathtaking speed of decay in Britain, warning “The ruling class has a horrifying future in mind for us: abandonment of Britain as a nation, which means abandonment of this working class.” Only now are we beginning to see exactly what this future means.

As we move seamlessly from Blair to Brown to Cameron and Clegg, what if anything has changed politically? Cameron models himself on Blair, Gove tries to accelerate Blair’s policy of privatising schools by turning them into academies and Osborne steals Darling’s public sector cuts policy and cranks it up a bit.

Former Labour Cabinet ministers John Hutton, now mysteriously metamorphosed as Lord Hutton, and Frank Field reappear as pensions (how to cut them) and poverty (how to cut benefits) tsars for Cameron, with Hutton already producing a report telling the government how to attack public sector pensions, while Alan Milburn, former Blair health secretary, is Cameron’s “social mobility” tsar. They will be joined by billionaire Top Shop boss Sir Philip Green, advising Cameron on “efficiency savings” (cutting public expenditure). This is where politics in Britain is going – straight to the horse’s mouth.

But there’s more – what is changing in the media? The News of the World phone hacking scandal has let us have a glimpse of how British MPs live in fear of the Murdoch media empire in case one of his publications does a job on them. It is reckoned by those involved that at least 6,000 phones were hacked into, while Murdoch’s emissary and the man at the heart of the hacking scandal, Andy Coulson, was later employed as Cameron’s Director of Communications. This minor setback doesn’t detract from the fact that Murdoch wants total control of Sky TV and a slimmed-down, tame BBC. He wants control of Britain’s media to dictate what information we receive. So, an end to any semblance of independent news media looks increasingly likely.


The City of London: home to finance capital of all kinds – and the heart of reaction.
What of the future for trade unions? Organised workers are now about the only check on capitalism’s operations, if they choose to be. The CBI announced at the Tory conference in October its demands for more anti-union laws and was parroted by the Mayor of London. The CBI wants employers to be entitled to employ agency workers to break a strike and to be given 14 days’ notice to enable them to recruit agency scabs. It wants strikes to be illegal unless 40 per cent of the total of union members vote in favour. If they get their way, we will have an end to automatic union recognition, employers to determine who is a union member, steeper fines for unions and more power for the Certification Officer. The Cameron–Clegg Government act for the CBI and it will be impossible to have a legal strike. Why would they do this? It’s certainly not because capitalism has had a big strike problem recently. No, it is solely to screw down further our ability to organise as a class.

A pattern is emerging. No political parties which are even ostensibly different from each other, no free news media, no freedom to organise in trade unions.

Fascism

Finance capitalism brought many things to the 20th century but the worst by far was fascism.

Today, many find it difficult to define fascism, preferring to point to the British National Party rather than look at a developing structure throughout society, including Parliament. The early 20th- century Italians, who invented the word “fascism”, had a more descriptive term for the concept – “estato corporativo”, the corporate state.

Benito Mussolini said, “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” Communists defined fascism as “the dictatorship of finance capitalism”.

Of course the situation in the 1920s and 1930s was very different from today. In Italy there was the fascist march on Rome that effectively put Mussolini into power. And there was the revolutionary USSR. Terrified of this, and in the midst of the chaos and the widespread inspiration of revolutionary ideas following the First World War, finance capitalism would stop at nothing to control the working class. It had to lead to war.

Today, the ruling class tries to be much more sophisticated. But, try though it may, it cannot stop us seeing what is happening. We can see the coming together of corporate power and government, and we can see some of what they have in store for us. Having had the birth of trade unionism airbrushed out of the history syllabus, much of our history rewritten, academy schools run by businesses or religious institutions pushed on us, we can see how they want the young to become citizens with no knowledge of class struggle.

The National Minimum Wage will become the norm, especially those young people who can find work. Higher education is to be all but destroyed, except for the privileged few. The NHS, for which many of us have fought so hard, is to be privatised by the back door by means of GP Commissioning. Wages are now being depressed in real terms and occupational pension schemes may become a thing of the past in many areas. Benefits are to be cut to try to force people back to nonexistent work whilst potential parents are told not to have children unless they can afford them. Volunteers will take over from paid workers in our “communities” in the “Big Society” – or this is what we are told.

All of this is happening to pay for the bailout of the banking system with our money. In other words, the finance capitalists have such a powerful hold over government that it will pauperise the British working class so that they can continue with the reckless financial gambling that is at the heart of finance capitalism.

But as – or maybe more – significant is the European Union effect. The EU’s purpose has always been to slow down the absolute decline of capitalism by organising capitalism on a continental scale. The Commissioners are handpicked from those who will protect capitalism, brutally if needed.

The EU directives and laws, such as “free” movement of labour, are intended to prop up capitalism by providing rootless low paid workers with no allegiance to any national working class. The EU plans to gobble up the Balkan mini states next and has its eyes on Ukraine, Turkey and Georgia, giving it a vast pool of much lower paid workers to let loose on the rest of us, depressing wages further and at the same time getting control of the Black Sea and confronting Russia.

That marriage between the European Union and the forces of finance capital is the lifeblood for the dark heart of fascism, Hitler’s vision becoming a reality. It is in the boardrooms and stock exchanges – and, yes, parliaments – that our true enemy resides.

Yeah I also agree with previous posters, proletarian internationalism is a lot better of a solution and is preferable over having a Global Market.

Reviewed by William Podmore.

Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

In this book, Stiglitz examines the failures of globalisation and of free trade, the intellectual property rights regime that puts profit before people, the pillage of resources, climate change, the multinational corporations' impact, the debt burden, the reserve system, and the attacks on democracy and sovereignty. He claims the problem is not globalisation but the way it has been managed.

He notes of globalisation post-1990, "unchecked by competition to `win the hearts and minds' of those in the Third World, the advanced industrial countries actually created a global trade regime that helped their special corporate and financial interests, and hurt the poorest countries of the world."

He points out, "the pursuit of self-interest by CEOs, accountants, and investment banks did not lead to economic efficiency, but rather to a bubble accompanied by massive misallocation of resources. And the bubble, when it burst, led, as they almost always do, to recession." This contradicts his later, curiously formal, argument, for capitalism: "Markets are essential; markets help allocate resources, ensuring that they are well deployed." No, profitably, not well.

Third World countries have got deeper into debt. Apart from China, poverty in the developing world has increased since 1980: 40% of the world, 2.6 billion people, are poor. The number of Africans in extreme poverty has doubled. In 2001 the USA and the EU agreed to focus on developing countries' needs. But, as Stiglitz points out, they reneged. He needs to ask, why don't proposed reforms ever work?

He observes, "the European Central Bank pursues a monetary policy that, while it may do wonders for bond markets by keeping inflation low and bond prices high, has left Europe's growth and employment in shambles."

He points out that current economic policy serves the interests of the ruling class. "Wealth generates power, the power that enables the ruling class to maintain that wealth."

He exposes the class conflict at the centre of economic life. He asks, "Where will the people of the developed countries and their governments stand? In support of the few in those countries who own and run the rich corporations, or in support of the billions in the developing countries whose well-being, in some cases, whose very survival, is at stake?"

His analysis is brilliant, but his proposals amount to calling on the ruling classes of the world to act against their own interests: he is proposing reforms he knows won't be accepted.

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this point is trick: concentration of capital.