>>2462085>>2462144>muh vibes"Clearly, these “benefits” accruing to the entire working class of the industrialized countries from imperialist investment are neither automatic nor evenly distributed. Rising profits and increased investment do not necessarily lead to higher wages for workers in the absence of effective working- class organization and struggle.
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Real wages for U.S. workers, both union and nonunion, have fallen to about 11% below their 1973 level, despite strong growth beginning in the late 1980s. (26) Higher than average profits have accrued, first and foremost, to capital, allowing increased investment; and to the professional-managerial middle class in the form of higher salaries.
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Whatever benefits all workers in the global North reap from imperialist investment in the global South are clearly outweighed by the deleterious effects of the expansion of capitalist production on a world scale. This is especially clear today, in the era of neoliberal “globalization.”
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"The empirical problems with the monopoly super profits argument – so central to contemporary theories of the labor aristocracy – are rooted in the very notions of “monopoly” and “oligopoly.” (34) The notion that the existence of a small number of large firms in an industry limits competition, allowing higher than average profits and wages, is derived from neo-classical (non-Marxian) economics’ vision of “perfect competition.”
For neoclassical economists, perfect competition – which allows instantaneous mobility of capital between branches of production, uniform technology, equal profit rates and wages – exists only when a large number of small firms exist in a market. Any deviation from this is “oligopoly” – a form of “imperfect competition” that creates obstacles to capital mobility, different techniques, and higher than average profits and wages.
The notions of perfect competition and oligopoly/monopoly are both conceptually and empirically flawed. Perfect competition is an ideological construction – an idealization of capitalist competition that makes the existing economic order appear efficient and just.
Real capitalist competition – from the birth of capitalism in English agriculture in the 16th century, through the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th century to the emergence of the transnational corporations in the 20th century – has never corresponded to the dream world of “perfect competition.” Capitalist competition is fought through what Marx called the “heavy artillery of fixed capital” – constant technological innovation, taking the form of the increasing mechanization of production.
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Put simply, competition – not its absence – explains the diversity of technical conditions of production and the resulting differentiations of profit and wage rates within and between industries throughout the history of capitalism. The higher wages that workers in unionized capital-intensive industries enjoy are not gained at the expense of lower paid workers, either at home or abroad. Instead, the lower unit costs of these industries make it possible for these capitals to pay higher than average wages. As we have seen over the last thirty years, however, only effective worker organization can secure and defend these higher than average wages."
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/atc/128.html>>2462134yea