(np) some nice general opinioning

[Michael Bailey]

some interesting economic opinion

basically, the keystone here is primitive accumulation.
What Jay Gould or Henry Clay Frick would call smart dealing (coming
out waaaay ahead in a trade), and what I would call being a
rat-bastard.
Glad there's yet another term for it...keeps things interesting...


http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/imperialism.html

excerpt (everything from here is a quote):

Capital, except in “free market” fantasy, never exists without a state
and without the “special body of armed men” who, when necessary,
collect debts for the state.

......

Contemporary skeptics and willful amnesiacs throw Rosa Luxemburg's
Accumulation of Capital into the same historical dustbin as Lenin's
Imperialism. Whatever her minor flaws (to be discussed momentarily),
she was absolutely right about the permanence of primitive
accumulation—what much of imperialism is about--in capitalism.
Primitive accumulation means accumulation that violates the capitalist
“law of value” i.e. non-exchange of equivalents, beginning with the
emptying of the English countryside in early modern history (16th to
19th centuries) by what would today be called “economic reforms”.

....


Much of the Marxist “economics” (an oxymoron for the Marxist critique
of political economy, an undertaking having a different “object of
study” than any “economics”) of the 1970’s and even some authors today
focus on the mathematical formulas in the first part of vol. III of
Capital to adequately describe the root cause of capitalist crisis.
And as important as these chapters on the rate of profit are, they
make the big assumption that the concrete processes of social
reproduction to which they refer are in fact being reproduced. (Social
reproduction, in a nutshell, means at replacing if not expanding used
up machinery, materials and infrastructure, on one hand, and
permitting today’s working population to raise a future generation of
people capable of working with contemporary technology.)

Luxemburg, in her Anti-Kritik rebuttal to critics of her 1913
masterpiece (and on this I follow her 100%) argued that the issue here
is not a matter of mathematics, but one of concrete analysis of real
processes. When Western capital sucks Third World labor power, whose
costs of reproduction it did not pay for, into the world division of
labor, whether in Indonesia or in Los Angeles, that's primitive
accumulation. When capital loots the natural environment and does not
pay the replacement costs for that damage, that's primitive
accumulation. When capital runs capital plant and infrastructure into
the ground (the story of much of the U.S. and the U.K. economies since
the 1960's) that's primitive accumulation. When capital pays workers
non-reproductive wages, (wages too low to produce a new generation of
workers) that's primitive accumulation too. Lenin never discussed
these things (if I recall, he never once mentioned social
reproduction) but Rosa Luxemburg wrote a whole book about it. To
critics who want to dismiss these “old” ideas with a complacent wave
of the hand, I can only say that it’s their loss.

....

I'll say again that when capital interacts with nature and petty
producers outside the wage-labor relationship, and when it pushes
wages and capital expenditure below reproductive costs inside that
relationship, it is violating the "exchange of equivalents" which Marx
saw as the "heuristic" framework for separating capitalist profits and
accumulation from swindle, monopoly, selling goods above their value,
and other wrong-headed explanations of profit. And if we don't want to
call that NON-REPRODUCTION “primitive accumulation”, fine, but let's
first admit that such phenomena exist, and (since the 1970's) are
increasingly important, and moreover indispensable to the system.