2-26-07, 9:21 am
The unspoken goal of the present system of global corporatism is the 'Bangladeshization'of the global centers of the old colonial system (ie in particular the US homeland). Perhaps this is just in time for the deluge of the the rising ocean / global warming phenemenon which will inundate the old Bangladesh. The same environmental offspring of a profit at all costs method of organizing production will give rise to a new industrial 'plantation state'--an updated confederacy --if you will. The prospect of a massive, but integrated third world economy for the north american continent is almost a certainty given the dominance and trance-like reverence for the 'supply side' or free enterprise/ free trade ideology prevalent in global center universities. As the old 'lesser' Bangladesh with its global corpation-run sweat shops, poison water, soil and air sinks beneath the waves...a new 'greater' Bangladesh arises on the North American continent. The proof that America's most esteemed universities have dumbed down curicula by characterizing global short-term corporate profit maximization as 'rational' production ...is apparent when their most successful graduates including Bush and nearly the entire neo-con power structure seem to be completely unaware that there in any economic or environmental crisis at all.
The history of the free enterprise system is one of anything but free enterprise. Like the monopolistic mercantilistic system of the late middle ages in Europe, the idea of wealth has once again become centered on the accumulation of circulating capital (ie form of money, specie then, petro-dollars now). In the early modern period, when the old medieval monopolies were being replaced by 'modern' enterprises based on on the efficiency of the market rather than political connections and birthright...it seemed that free enterprise was the wave of the future. Adam Smith was the best theoretician of the period, noting not only what was in fact occuring in England and Northern Europe at the time...but systematizing its essential elements. He rightly noted the benefits of a free enterprise system in dissolving a predetermined monolithic sytem of production, commerce and trade. His crucible was productive forces...whatever increased the total product produced was functional. If a greater product was produced with fewer imputs of labor, resouces and capital...free enterprise produced an efficiency or economy. On the other hand the mercantilists in Southern Europe took wealth from their new empires in the Americas in the form of specie--which led to mere inflation and not industrial developement. The free enterprisers of Northern Europe started producing, capitalizing and exporting a surplus. On the other hand Spain and Portugal witnessed a an orgy of spending by the entrenched imperialist elite while consumption among their laboring classes actually decreased. A..hum....sound familiar?
Historically, these intermittent periods of 'free enterprise' were of short duration and always manipulated by the local monied elites to transform the economy into its opposite-- ie monopoly. This Hegelian- Marxist construct is obvious to anyone who ever played the popular board game MONOPOLY. What I am saying is that successful competition inevitably leads to monopoly. Smith recognized this and defined monopoly as a CONSPIRACY against the common weal and economic efficiency. The normal organization of enterprises and the economy is one of partial(oligopoly) if not outright monoply. The freedom to buy and sell shares of the corporate manipulators does not fundamentally change this phenomenom but merely gives a democratic charade to corporate control of the economy and allimportant social institutions--assuming that there is a middle class with the means to engage in this form of gambling.
What upsets the usual monopolistic condition of modern society is the inderdiction and injection of successive eras of technological innovations --which has characterized the entire modern era. This is precisely what the religious jihaddists of our own country (ie moral majority, et.al the al caidas of the Middle East) rail against. Successive waves of technological innovation like the present information age destroy monopoly temporarily, only so that it may revive and intensify afterwards. 'Modern' free enterprise ideolgues(ie monopolists) like Schumpeter from one of those universities which first established worship rituals and ivory tower temples around the free market/ trade ideology... have for the last 50 years advocated 'creative detruction' of the entrenched economy as necessary from time to time--like Jefferson advocated constitutional renewal through periodic revolution. Predatory financial alchemists and other corporate raiders like Michael Milkin use this ideology as a cover when they raid and loot target corporate shells screwing shareholders, bondholders and especially pension funds. A version of this Schumpeterian 'creative chaos' theory has even been used to justify the stiring up of ethnic strife in Iraq and other neo-con target areas as an old-fashioned divide and conquer colonial tactic. Increasingly it seems that management of strife by black ops death squads (ie the 'El Salvadorean Option') in such target areas as Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon and the nation-state Georgia--to name a few has been even less successful than the Schumpeterian version for the economy.
Meanwhile the supply side driven 'old' bosses (as contrasted with the new bosses of the early factory period or the early days of the information age(70's /80's/90's ) have found it more profitable to dismantle domestic capital investment,rather than invest in domestic production....sending capital to the colonial periphery. Like the British Empire in the early years of WWII who relied on the Royal Marines, Imperial Navy and ultimately Roosevelt (ie lend-lease) to guarantee transport of product to the colonial center. Little more than the paper pound sterling was left to export--a serious problem for an empire without any colonies. Likewise now the US has gone down this trail to hell to the extent where we export not much more than paper petrodolars, military threats and supply side propaganda to the 3rd world perpherial colonies in exchange for goods of every sort.
Having absolutely no shame at all the bushreich has even privatized the marines (ie the sons and daughter to the umemployed or soon to be disemployed working strata). The black hole of these Cheney santioned contractors will soon bankrupt the reich alone (even apart from the other contradictions of the Empire) ...much like Afghanistan bankrupted the USSR.
The dynamic spread of free enterprise first charted and molded into a theoretical construct by Adam Smith was already largely already displaced in a mere generation by the gathering monopolistic concerns when monopolist traders such as the East India Company monopolized production of goods at the imperialist centers, and then trade through governmental concession in the colonial periphery. Competition was kept in the colonial periphery where and when it was functional in producing maximum profit.The goal of keeping industrial commodities like cotton from the Americas and India cheap was periodically disrupted by technological and industrial developements or even revolutions like that in North America...or later the civil war.
These periodic infusions of new ideas and technology were always unpredictable but brought forth competition only temporarily until old monopoly capital realized there was/is a new game in town not under their control...and brought forth the strategems to incorporate the new. Nowadays the latest strategy is to use ones own debt and that of the new upstart firm as a means of financing its own demise and consumption--a purely illusory paper meal by old money foisted on new as a buy-out.
Most of the free enterprise propagandists /ideologues of the period immediately succeeding Adam Smith were actually employees of monopoly joint stock companies in the colonial centers. Ricardo, Malthus and Bentham are from those companies' propaganda stables. A primary monoply scam of the era [which they all dismissed as a mere deviation from free market/ trade ideology] was the centers' subsidization of the export of consumer commodities (always uprooting production of foodstuffs, clothing and other necessaries in the colonies). But these actions were, in actuality not a deviation from trade policy but fundamental to company operations. In practice the only free competition these monopolies supported was in the labor markets at both home and in the colonies and lastly, in the pheripherial commodity markets. Taxes were taken from the colonials, and the domestic laboring and middle classes and tranferred to the monopoly joint stock companies. A form of reverse communism did then as it does now prevail. Nonsense about 'free' enterprise was a mere cover for this corporate program of reverse communism. Patents, copyrights and the very concept of limited liability for corporate groupings in exclusion of all middle class sole proprietorships or partnerships, much less woany working class associations is not conducive to competition nor democratic polity. That lawyers sanctified corporate charters by selling shares of these economically dysfunctional entities called corporations to the country club leisure class merely spread the illusion of ownership to a part of the middling class--giving a wider political basis for support to these very fluid, liquid entities called corporations Another scam was monopolizing the production of additive consumables like tobacco and opium, and then legitimzing and then forcing 'free' importation of these products into all the other colonial possessions by the colonial centers. The subsidization of global corporations by the laboring and middling classes was further entrenched when corporations were granted immunity from liability for almost all forms of mismanagement, that is to say the usual corporate plundering and of ravishing of resources, water, the soil, the air, and the health and longevity of labor. The Bush regime's unabashed disregard of the moderated neo-colonial forms and methods, and its embrace of old-fashioned plundering in the world OutBackand continues to produce the very terrorists that its war on 'terror' is supposed to combat. The reich's wholesale dismantling of all constitutional protections, as well as an almost complete rejection of the whole tradition of English common law since the days of the Magna Carta is symptomatic of 17th or18th century plantation mentality. The neo-con moves to criminalize working class bankruptcy is symptomatic of this old-fashioned 17th century mindset. This mindset once looked out on a planet where where 3/4 of the world's workers were de jure slaves of one sort or the other. The corporate ideologue/ preacher Malthus indeed sanctimoniously propounded to country club set at the universities that the natural wage of labor should, or ought to be equivalent to the subsistence of plantation serfs, etc. He noted that wages could fall beneath subsistence (as in Ireland where potato famines and landlord rapaciousness led to mass extinction and exodus)--but in the long run Malthus felt that labor's natural wage was slavery. More recently, Bushreich policies have created 20 million jobs ,according to Fox News brain compressors (at burger stands presumably?) since 9-1-1. Adam Smith recognized the shortcomings of competion. To him natural monopolies like utilities should be regulated for the benefit of the common weal. Only then could local businesses compete in the national and international markets. Regulation with an emphasis on efficiency (ie establishing shadow prices for monopolies, running them as if the were competitive by fiat) is the opposite of the Bushreich privatization moves on water, energy, communicationa and other essential infrastructure commodities/ services-- the present global corporate agenda. It is clear that any competitive enterprise is increasingly becoming more and more impossible under this corporate/country club system of subsidies and reverse communism. A new boss entrepreneur is much more likely to be seen in the nominally communist Beijing rather than a Cleveland or a San Diego. Taken as a whole, the pervasive influence of monopolies throughout the infrastructure make it increasingly unlikely that any competitive business other than burger stands can compete in regional or international markets as well.
The old Bangladesh had quite a lot of competition but the new US version of the 3rd world increasingly more resembles the feudal estates of 'old Europe'--to use an old Bushism. --D. B. Mays
