GLOBALISATION - NOTES - NIKE

The situation is far from straightforward. The Asian employee can be exploited irrespective of the number of dollars she takes home. In addition, it is possible that her $5 day is a fair exchange for the cost of producing the labour power that she sells to Nike.

Wages are the price that a capitalist has to pay for the capacities of another human being to add value to other commodities. 

• “has to pay”
• “add value”
• “other commodities”

What is a fair rate for that exchange? Two seemingly contradictory answers apply. First, there can never be anything fair about such an exchange. Secondly, the fair rate of pay is however much is necessary to cover the socially necessary costs of reproducing the labour power that the worker sells.

Of course, a boss may seek to swindle his workers out of that “fair wage”.
Possible where there is an oversupply of labour.

In such a situation, if a worker gets too weak from not being able to afford to reproduce their capacity to add value then she can easily be replaced.

Also for so long as there is a reserve army of labour there is no need for the state, as the collective mind of “social capital”, to worry about providing for the birth and nurturing of the next generation. In the cases where the next generation has to be produced, the state might enforce higher wages or use tax incomes to supplement the wage by the provision of maternity benefits, education or health.

Some of that will come directly out of the wages earned, and all of it ultimately from the that portion of the workers involved in the provision of surplus value.

The reserve army of labour can be in the same travel zone, or in another place, perhaps just across the border.
The reserve can be supplied either from immigration to the factory area or emigration of the capital to where other suitable labour is to be found.
Suitable involves more than cheaper.

Socially necessary costs of reproducing labour power is a fluid sum.
Made up of the needs induced by capital to absorb the surplus that its oligopolising competitiveness has over-produced
Strength of the contending classes in every sense – industrial and ideological.

Give examples
Take the case of a worker in Cambodia

Tuck Phearom in Cambodia has worked for four years sewing sweaters and she is paid A$120 a month. Her earnings have helped her family to build a house and to extend their arable land to 4.5 hectares. How do we evaluate her situation? Is she exploited because her daily wage is less than the hour minimum in Australia? Or is she on the way to making her family into small proprietors, prosperous property owners who can employ labourers to work on the extra farming land?

That family plot is a key to understanding her economic situation. Because she lives at home, she is freed from several expenditures that would other require cash. For instance, she will not be paying market rents. Principally, most of her food will be produced outside the cash economy, or bartered within her family’s community. Those outlays would push up the wages that she would need to cover the reproduction of her labour power.

Her job is now threatened by firms in China, the Dominican Republic and Bangladesh
Business Week, 15 December 2003, p. 54

Her employer has first to purchase her labour power. If her family were totally self-sufficient, she may never have offered her capacities for sale. Hence, one precondition for wage labour is that there be a body of people who do not have access to the means of production and so must sell their capacities to someone who does, in this case, the Nike sub-contractor. This relationship can come about by any one of a number of means. The potential worker can be unlucky enough to lose their production resources at the gaming tables, in a war or in a natural disaster. Just as wars produce natural disasters, the natural disasters (so-called) are increasingly the result of the plundering of nature by capital. In economies during the transition to capital, these causes are not always enough to provide all the “free” labour needed for capital to expand. Hence, other pressures come into play. A regular means is for the government to impose a household, or head tax which has to be paid in cash. To earn that money, one or more members of the family will have to offer their labour on the market. They can do this by performing outwork at home or by attending a factory.  A few will be able to earn the tax from the sale of their own produce, whether agricultural or handicraft. That minority is sheltered from the labour market but are drawn into the circuits of capital through the need to sell more than to barter. If the family does not pay the tax, the state will send one or more of its members to work as a punishment. Either way, a poll tax forces otherwise self-sufficient farmers or fisherfolk into a wage-labour, money relationship.

Other pressures come from the marketing of goods such as Coke.

In the worst cases, the labourers become bonded to the company store so that the family remains permanently in debt to their first employer.
Here the worker is swindled out of her earnings by being over-charged for her food and other provisions.

But getting someone to sell their labour power is only the first step for the capitalist. That contract is worse than useless if the employee does not add value to the capital goods on hand. By way of illustration, let’s take the extreme case of a boy who gets a job punching out eyelets in shoes. Instead of doing that task, he nicks off around the back for a game of cards and a smoke. The boss has paid for his labour time but is getting nothing back. The worker has swindled the boss. Now, we all know that such things do happen. We also know that such absenteeism has to be exceptional otherwise the whole system would grind to a halt. So, the capitalist has to employ overseers to make sure that the money that the firm spends on wages is not being thrown away. This task has two aspects. First, the workers have to be kept at their benches or desks. But once there, workers can be inordinately inventive about getting out of the tasks they are supposed to perform. Recently, office workers have taken advantage of computers and email to do their own business or personal life while appearing to be hard at work. Some download porn. The phenomenon has been called “present-eeism”. The body is present but the value-adding capacity is not. These methods are less obvious than lingering over a tea break or chatting on the blower. But managers are coming up with all sorts of new controls to make sure that the time at work belongs to its lawful owner, the boss.

The second aspect of keeping the workers at it concerns the rate at which they perform their work. Here we can pick up again the discussion about the level of money wages necessary to meet the socially necessary costs of reproducing labour power. Let’s say that an unmarried girl in Cambodia can meet all her expenses for 100 units of money per week. Let’s further assume that her boss is a good Buddhist who pays her exactly that amount. 

But suppose for a minute that she has a hard-hearted boss, or one who is being squeezed by bigger more cost effective corporations, or by banks or gangsters in police uniforms. He either will not or cannot afford to pay the 100 units. So her wage is below the costs of reproducing the labour power that she has sold. In such a case, she must find extra work, perhaps as a sex-worker. Alternatively, she wears out her health by not eating properly and so renders herself less and less appealing as a process worker some years sooner than would happen if she had the average nutrition of her class and gender in that culture. Another possibility is that she can make up the difference between her wages and the costs of reproducing her capacity to add value by relying on her family for free board and domestic services such as cooking and washing. In that case, the domestic economy is transferring some of its labour power to the capitalist without entering into a direct cash connection. The exchange happens indirectly through the labour of the one family member who gets paid.

Another way of containing the socially necessary costs of labour power is to supply dormitory accommodation with meals provided. In those situations, the price of accommodation and food will be deducted from the cash wage. Either the scheduled wage will be lower, or the amounts reduced. Easier to achieve these where the range of capital-induced needs are still limited.

How does the situation differ when she has an honorable boss? He may not have gambling debts, but he has invested in the biggest lottery of all, the global circuits of capital expansion.

In a closed village, the big man could be content to get back no more than he has put out on wages, or at least only a marginal increase. Such miracles have been known. However, in a global market place for Nike shoes, Tuck’s employer cannot follow his conscience. If he does, he will sooner or later be forced out of business by less scrupulous competitors or by the conditions that Nike demands of its sub-contractors.

In short, if the sub-contractor is to benefit from buying Tuck’s value-adding capacities, he must make sure that she produces sweaters worth more than 100 units of currency. In fact, she will have to produce more than 100 to meet the costs of her employment because her labour will use electricity, water, depreciate any machinery, rent on the factory and interest charges. Add those costs in and she needs to add value of say 120 units to cover the costs of paying her wage. If she works slower than that, she will take home more than she contributes. Up to this point, no exploitation needs to have occurred. Tuck has been paid enough for her to eat, live, save a little for medical expenses and for her retirement. In short, she has received enough to cover the socially necessary costs of reproducing her capacity to sell her capacities. The only “unfair” aspect is that she has to enter into this exchange relationship in the first place.

One solution is to pay piece rates. No added value, no money wages.

The production of 120 units worth of sweaters has taken Tuck three days work. But what happens next? Why can’t she go home to play Mahjong, drink tea or fish?

The realities behind the term “exploitation” can now be set down. In a technical sense, exploitation is the extraction of surplus value. The rate of that exploitation need not be an inverse proportion to the conditions of employment, or the pay scales. Indeed, skilled workers on high wages in ideal surroundings can be more exploited technically than an illiterate laborer in a hazardous environment and subject to beatings or sexual harrassment.

The foreman’s demand for sexual favors in return for a job is of a different order than the expropriation of the surplus that such an abused employee then contributes to their employer. The sexual harassment of female operatives is a non-monetary benefit for the overseers and local owners. It could be reduced by giving overseers an allowance for prostitutes.

The beatings and bullying can be part of maintaining quality control.
Any pleasure that managers extract from sexual harassment of the workforce does not relieve foreign investors of their desire for dividends and capital growth.

The degree of exploitation can be increased by extending the working day for no extra reward. Alternatively, exploitation can be increased through mechanization or the intensification of the operating procedures. Labour sweating

Keener application can be achieved by piece rates resulting in higher take-home pay.

Anti-globalizers criticise the payment of a training wages for the first three months. Such amounts are often below the legal minimum and well below the rate needed to meet the socially necessary costs or reproducing one’s capacity to work, let alone contribute to one’s medium-term future. Nonetheless, the employer’s argument may be sound. A beginner may well not be able to add as much value as an experienced operative. In that case, a full wage may equal or exceed the value added by an inexperienced junior and so result in no surplus value for the firm to expropriate.

To reduce this possibility, the employer will organize the work processes in ways that allow the new comer to contribute surplus value from her first day. Break the operation down into simple steps. Give the newcomer the least skilled tasks. Then get the other workers to train the novice on the job.

see:
Maidens, Meal and Money by Claude Mellaisoux????
For movements of labour and of capital in post-war decades
In relations to the domestic mode of reproduction

If the notion of kinship has pervaded the field of anthropology it is because it refers to a widespread institution, which regulates a function common to all societies, the reproduction of human beings, both as productive agents and as reproducers and (mostly in the domestic economy) social reproduction at large.

Yet, through kinship, classical anthropology has only grasped the institutionalized expression of reproduction without investigating its basic function.
Meillassoux,  p. xi

There is no such thing as ‘demographic causes’. The growth of population is governed by constraints other than the fertility of women. In all societies the biological capacity for procreation is far above the birth rate. Poverty, illness, starvation, rites, beliefs, or in our societies, ‘well-being’, have always set the rate of reproduction below that of fertility.
Meillassoux, p. xii

To reintroduce the process of reproduction of labour-power into the model requires only a readjustment of the argument, not a reassessment. The reasoning applied to the equalisation of the rate of profit can be applied equally to the phenomenon.
Meillassoux   xii

[Is this a good idea? To do so reduces the specificity of capital while seeming to universalize its method]

CAPITAL
Researchers around the International Labour Organisation have challenged the belief that Direct Foreign Investment (DFI) is involved in “a race to the bottom”.[1]

As we have seen, the expansion of capital cannot take place without its expropriation of the value that labour produces in excess of the cost of its own reproduction. An opportunity to exploit labour is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for capitalists to invest.

But capitalists can not benefit simply by driving their employees. The distinguishing feature of capitalism, as against slavery or feudalism, is its interlocked circuitry of exchanges. The surplus value is worth appropriating only if the commodities in which it is embodied can be sold. And not just sold, but sold at a price at least equal to the costs of their bringing to market, that is, the production and distribution costs. Nor is it enough for the produce to be sold at such a price. Money from that sale has to get back to the capitalist. And not some money, but more than the costs. If less than that is received, the company faces insolvency. If no more than the costs is returned, then the business stagnates and will be outgunned by its competitors who will use some of the surplus value that they have got back to afford more efficient machinery. The logic of capital is to garner as much of the surplus value as possible. When the capitalist does that, the business can expand. Only if it expands, can it afford to ward off rivals.

In extreme cases, the wholesaler might go bankrupt or abscond. As a result, the capitalist gets no benefit from the production of value, or from their sale. Indeed, the firm would have been better off if it had kept its money capital under the bed. The failure to gather in the returns from the sale of the commodities is a cost on the business, which may drive it out of business. Such things do happen regularly, but they have to remain exceptional. Otherwise, the system would seize up.

What is inevitable are tussles between the capitalist who has employed the value-adding labour and another kinds of capitalists who enter the circuitry of exchanges only after the first capitalist has appropriated the surplus value. In every such transaction, the battle is on for slices of the total surplus value. Seen in its worst light, capitalists set about swindling each other.

Marx’s term for the production capitalist getting back their share of the surplus value is “realisation”.
The realisation involves the circuits of money, production and commodities.

That expanded reproduction of capitals operates in qualitatively different ways from the simple reproduction by a single firm. Competition alters the rules that govern their exploitation of labour.

Oligopolisation intensifies them.

Hence, a decision to invest will be taken for a combination of reasons.[2] The majority of investment decisions follow attempts to justify a rate of return. A corporation may invest in its own or in another nation-market-state to acquire an asset which will assist its expansion through those circuits. It may purchase a research laboratory, a financial institution or a supplier.[3] A study of the 500 largest US firms showed that a previous experience with overseas investment encouraged earlier entry, especially if it could be arranged without direct investment and would pre-empt a competitor.[4] In the tire industry, a significant factor was the need to ward off another oligopoly.[5]

Hubris had been significant in foreign takeovers of US brand names.[6]
A 1997 survey of managers produced thirteen criteria for their deciding whether to invest in a foreign market. Out of a possible top score of 5, the growth and size of the local market shared the top spot, each with a score just above four. Profit perspectives came third and were perhaps another way of putting the previous pair of preferences. Quality of labour was fifth with a score of three. Political and social stability, the legal environment, the state of infrastructure and the provision of services rated higher than labour costs. Indeed, the cost of labour appeared ninth with a rating of 2.4. Access to financial resources or raw materials shared bottom place, scoring two out of five.[7]

These results confirm what every management course teaches and what every Marxist argues about the expansion of capital: lowering the wages bill will not of itself maintain the rate of profit. Indeed, cheap labour in the production process cannot guarantee any profit at all. Profits can be realized only by getting the products to market, selling them at a price above the costs of their production and distribution, and then getting those earnings back to the firm’s bank account. Starvation wages are no use if the commodities are too shoddy to sell or the warehouse is burnt down during a strike. A predicable value of the local currency is also vital. A fall in the exchange-rate will help sell more items abroad but can wipe out the value of any funds in the country and make the costs of importing essential raw materials or half-finished goods prohibitive.

Direct Foreign Investment is only part of the story. Firms contract their production to local capitalists.

1.         A ‘race to the bottom” can take place inside the most advanced economies. The US began the twentieth century with European immigrants as a cheap labour force in New York and Chicago, followed by the move of black labour north in the 1920s, and then a shift of industries to the un-unionized South, and now across the border into Mexico.

2.         The surplus value that the forced laborers add in a Chinese factory is wasted if their employer cannot get the products to market or repatriate the resultant profit. Inadequate transport and communications will wipe out the profits from wages below the costs of reproducing the labour power that they buy. Mobile phones leapt over the blockage of a poor landline system in Thailand. It is still much harder to get a crate from the factory to Bangkok airport.

3.         financial flows. Realization of the surplus takes place mostly in first world markets. Not necessary to take profits out at the point of production if overseas-based corporations can get the products out. The surplus value embodied in a sweater made in Cambodia and sold in France can be realized finally as profit in Florida, via a Cayman Islands tax haven.

4.         A corrupt legal or political system is no disincentive to investment. “China, Brazil, Thailand and Mexico attract large flows of FDI despite their perceived high corruption”.[8] Bribes are a small price to pay in the absence of a legal order. Authoritarianism kept flexible by corruption offers an ideal climate for the exploitation of labour. However, not all corruption adds to efficiency. In the Russian Federation, the sloth of the system meant that by the time a project got going, a new cohort of officials had taken charge and needed to be paid off. Instability, not corruption, is the prime barrier. 

Despite the assumption that cronyism is a Third World disease, corruption is institutionalized in the U.S. plutocracy. Crony capitalism abounds throughout Europe,[9] as revealed by the dealings of Mitterand and Kohl, who ruled France and Germany for fourteen and ??? years respectively. Italy is notoriously corrupt because of the Camorra and now has Berlusconi as its prime minister. The Japanese political system has corruption in the ruling LDP through money politics with construction industry. Hence, the attractions of staying in stable, wealthy, well-educated societies are not diminished by their politics or corruption.

By dealing only with FDI, Kucera can avoid even asking why Nike continues to behave it does.

That Nike has rearranged its affairs to chase lower labour costs is a matter of fact. Yet its reasons for doing so are the result of a tangle of factors. In the 1960s, Nike began by importing from Japan. At the time, Japanese wage levels, the exchange rate and US trade regulations meant that the imports from there were cheaper than those from Europe or products made in the USA. As Japan’s advantages for Nike slipped away, the company contracted firms in South Korea and Taiwan to supply its products. Both countries were then military dictatorships, where independent labour organisations were treated as treasonous, helping to keep wages low. In addition, both countries benefited as developing economies from lower U.S. tariffs. When those conditions changed, Nike tried to enter Mainland China in alliance with state-run enterprises, but failed. The company then piggy-packed into China through partnerships with its Taiwan connections. A combination of labour unrest in Korea with the loss of trade preference to the U.S. market for both Korea and Taiwan made those two locations unattractive to Nike. The existing contractors in Taiwan and Korea in 1988 then opened operations in Indonesia, Thailand and more recently in Vietnam.

Nike claims that it cannot control its suppliers’ treatment of their workers but dares not apply this hands-off attitude towards the quality of its products. To that end it maintains representatives inside the plants. The same disparity applies to The Coca-Cola Company which has been pathological about the cleanliness of its franchised bottlers.  McDonalds built it reputation on cleanliness, sameness and speed. If corporations can attend to every switch, pour and grill in their distant partners, they cannot plead ignorance of the labour conditions that make these attributes possible. Indeed, the labour problems are often intensified by the standards that the parent companies demand of their franchise-holders or suppliers. If a firm can write its supply or distribution contracts to control product quality, they surely also have the levers for monitoring production. Hence, the reluctance to enforce minimum labour standards has nothing to do with the technical lines of management. The explanation has to be sought in the exploitative nature of the labour process.

Important to specify the linkages, which will operate differently in each case. The technical requirements for making a NIKE runner will require different controls than those for serving up a Big Mac. Materialist history must attend to those ?????

Columbian lawyers have filed suit in Miami, alleging that Coca-Cola and its affiliates were complicit in the murder of union activists by paramilitary groups. The list of charges includes yet another shooting of an activist, in June 2001. The recent attacks in Columbia follow decades of repression organized under the aegis of the U.S. security state, through Operation Condor which coordinated assassinations across the sub-continent.[10]

US labor unions are backing efforts to make The Coca-Cola Company take responsibility for the violence of its bottlers. Teamsters Union president, James P. Hoffa, dismissed the company’s code of behavior for its distributors as window-dressing until Atlana Head office follows through by cutting off syrup supplies to firms that violate labor standards and other human rights. “We’re demanding Coke take charge, or we will”.[11]

If corporations are union-busting in the U.K., the U.S. of A. and the E.U., then why not in even less democratic economies?[12] Special Economic Zones exempt 27 million workers from minimum standards, or in other words, they provide capital protection.

The costs exacted by the expansion of capital are not confined to the depressing of wage levels during average times. The 1997-98 downturn cut a tenth off the wages of South Koreans. The millions who lost their jobs elsewhere in Asia would have been lucky to have retained a tenth of their previous earnings. A rupture to regular weekly incomes has long-term effects by eating up any savings towards a house, health care or education. The loss of even a minimum wage can result in sending dependents into the black economy, prostitution, the drug trade or petty crime. A short sharp shock to an economy can have consequences for generations.

That cross-generational dimension is compounded where the raising of children is looked on as providing for one’s retirement. The loss of productive property has deprived families of the means by which ?????

The costs that flowed from de-regulation do not meant that the era of regulation had been cost-free to labour or nature. Nor did regulation reduce poverty or inequalities. Those costs need to be disaggregated and distinguished for both periods. State intervention benefited different sections of capital. India had a rentier stratum of import license-holders.[13] In Australia, tariffs protected the monopoly profits of U.S. auto manufacturers.

Driving down wages is only part of how corporations extract the maximum surplus from the labour-power they buy. The purchase of labour power is only a pre-condition for extracting surplus value. What matters is the discipline of labour time. Hence, managers seek to set all the rules to suit their production schedules. They are prepared to trade wages for stricter controls. Workers organize unions to reduce hours, improve conditions and safety, as well as to improve wages. The conflict between these sets of needs is the substance of the class struggle as everyday life in the capitalist world.

Race to the bottom
Kucera’s attempt to discredit the “conventional wisdom” about a “race to the bottom” is flawed because his evidence is confined to DFI. He makes no mention of any corporation or country but deals in aggregates. So, there is no trace of Nike, or Indonesia. Is failure by this ILO research even to mention this gap in the data an innocent oversight, or “bad faith”? One plea of mitigation at the personal level is that the dominant paradigm in economic analysis eschews actual behavior in favor of algebraic elegance.

Kucera is on firmer ground when he illustrates that wages are not the only consideration from the standpoint of profit-taking. A 1995 breakdown of the costs of producing and delivering a pair of Nike shoes to a retailer showed that production-labour accounted for $2.75 out of $29.00 in costs before profit. Materials cost the contractor $9, rent and equipment was $3 and government duties were $3. Sales, distribution and administration expenses at Nike itself were $5. Any management consultant would put the wages bill towards the end of the items to be cut back to get the profits up for the supplier, or for Nike.

Force down supply charges and government imposts. Exemption from government charges would be more beneficial to the employers than the elimination of labour charges.

Problems with ineffective states – need taxes for police and military
Also for other services for production – roads, airports etc etc

The $4 that Nike allocated to promotion and advertising cannot be touched because those outlays are aimed against the rival companies, and to penetrate new nation-market-states, or additional strata in established sales areas. Indeed, the marketing budgets may need to be increased even without a rise in other production and marketing costs. Hence, it is beside the point to complain that Andre Agassi got $US100m. to promote Nike products when their makers earn less than three dollars a week. The only way for Nike to avoid such largesse to sporting stars would be to takeover or merge with its rivals, Reebok and Addidas.[14]

SPACE
Capital moves
At no stage has Nike moved any productive capital across borders. Rather, the place-names on its supply contracts changed. The bulk of the costs of relocating were carried by the suppliers, who would have to recoup them from their workforce. Nike could appear weightless by externalizing the burden of adding value in the labour process.[15]

Critics of globalization must take care never to generalize from one product line to the entirety of capitalism. Work relations that can work for Nike in Thailand need not suit a IT chip manufacturer in Manila.

Just as weak labour protections can attract investment, so they can ease its exiting. Sweatshops do not face the redundancy payments that firms in the higher-wage economies incur when they close. Nike’s sub-contractors can walk away without those lay-off costs.   

Nonetheless, the worth of Nike’s suppliers is tied to the investments those sub-contractors have made in plant and machinery. To walk out on them before they have passed their use-by-dates would be to risk bankruptcy. Once the machinery is installed in Bangkok, the costs of moving lock, stock and barrel to Hanoi could have the same result. On the other hand, the supplier could follow Nike’s example and hire the machinery as well as renting the factory. Then that share of production capital passes to the rental company or the landlord.

Even so, moving to a new supply house is never easy, as Nike found when it first went into mainland China. Why?

It is easier for Nike to switch its orders around between rival producers once they are all up and running. The threat to place more orders in Burma is a way of spur on the suppliers elsewhere. Even if Nike does transfer it contracts, delays and disruptions will arise, incurring costs. The idea that production capital can slip across borders like a backpacker is believable if you have never run anything bigger than a photocopier.

Were wages to increase, the intensification of the labour process would rise to recoup that expense.

A related dispute is whether the poor have got poorer in the era of globalization. No simple or single answer is possible. The measures used by those who argue against a widening of inequalities produce some improbable results. One study claims that the gap is wider in Australia than in Indonesia.[16]

James Galbraith heads a research project ?????[17] CHASE ON INTERNET

Long-run comparisons????[18] Include

Hanging levels of poverty and inequality cannot be discerned from comparisons of income-levels. The loss of productive resources is absolute, not relative.

Inequality is measured by wages or income because those aspects are recorded  by official statistics. No less important is the level of ownership of or access to property, both for personal use and for production. Either familial or village proprietorship of resources in the land or the sea.[19] The loss of that resource reduces them to potential wage-laborers – installing a reserve army of the under-employed. In addition, separation from their capacity to grow their food supplies leaves them dependent on store goods, more expensive and less healthy. The costs of reproducing labour power increases, their health deteriorates.

Many of the poorest societies were self-sufficient until contact with capital.

The building of airports, dams and roads has deprived them of the natural resources on which they had lived. Examples include the clearing of forests for cattle-raising and the downstream pollution from mining in Papua New Guinea disrupted fisheries.

The return of Che Guevara as an icon among the No-Global movement should restore his insight that under-development is often over-development of one crop or sector to meet the demands of corporations for raw materials to supply metropolitan societies. Sugar, coffee and cocoa were four instances of what he called “distorted development”. Land for export crops which cannot be eaten when prices collapse.[20] They return low earnings, and are controlled by end users, for example, Nestle. The slide in world prices drives the locals towards over-production in the vain hope of retrieving through higher volumes what they have lost per ton. Such in brazil from 3 tons to  5

Governments will sell mineral resources at or below the costs of production to generate revenues to purchase weapons to maintain their dominance. The arms trade is another element in the impoverishment cycle. The massive trade in weapons of destruction enriches manufacturers in the UK and has the endorsement of the US because the guns are used to suppress resistance to exploitation,.as terrorism.

Generalities such as “space” and abstractions such as “time” are worse than useless in any analysis of monopolizing capitals (imperialism). Instead, we must ask “space for whose purposes?”, and “whose time for whose benefit?”.

The nation-market-state is a mechanism for controlling space for the access that certain capitals have to the resources, buyers and workers in its domain.

NO LINK???
A current instance of this plundering of space comes from the Indian village of Plachimada where Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Ltd operates on a 16-hectare site once used for irrigated crops. The factory draws underground water to make a million bottles of Coke beverages every day. This extraction has reduced the supply available for village agriculture. The remaining water is less drinkable because of concentrations of natural contaminants and the seepage of chemicals from the factory. The company pays nothing for this water.[21] Elsewhere, corporations are taking over state-owned water supply systems with the argument that imposing a market price on water is the best route to its conservation. Yet, once they are in charge, the corporates seek to increase usage rates to keep up their cash flows.[22]

The attempt to normalize the current phase of globalization by putting it into an historical context reveals the bankruptcy of bourgeois scholars. Some have joined the chorus to gain research grants by attaching their academic arcana to “the catchword of the 1990s”.[23] In the earliest phase of money and commodity capital, the trade from the Levant saw Venice and Amsterdam as the epicenters. The only point to be taken away from such globules of information is that there is no parallel, let alone any causal connection, between, say, the spread of Islam around Arab traders into South-East Asia and the onward march of capital there since 1980. The global reach since the fifteenth century initiated a new dynamic in world affairs that has swamped the previous networks. Today, the expansion of capital, aka globalisation, is experienced through the civilizations that have been re-constructed around the expansion of capital throughout the past six hundred years.

Globalisation is not merely the “rise of the West”, or a mask for the US-Americanization of our planet. Those geographic-cum-cultural aspects are secondary to the rule of capital. In every case, the drive to globalisation is in the growth of capital. The expansion of capital need not be a geographic one. It can expand by intensifying its existing penetration of its metropolitan nation-market-state. That penetration can drive into fresh social strata, or further into the psychology of the strata already reborn to shop.

Today’s globalisation cannot be understood without East Asia where Japan remains the powerhouse but where mainland China, South Korea and Taiwan are more than suzerain economies.

TIME
Whereas space is manifest in palpable factors such as land and water, time is insubstantial. Time can be neither produced, nor have value added to it, nor sold. At most, a firm can manufacture devices for its measurement or sell its more exact measurement. Hence, to lament the commodification of time is a nonsense.[24]

That our perceptions of time are affected by the reorganization of labour-time cannot alter the meaning of time for cosmologists. Instead of god-bothering about the structure of time, or duree,[25] our focus should be on how firms structure the labour-time of their employees. At the crux of capitalism is its commodification of labour. But labour itself cannot be bought. All that can be bought is a worker’s capacity to add value. That labour-power is measured by the length of time a worker takes to complete a task. The time taken by each operative is known as concrete labour time.

Having hired labour-power, the boss still has to apply its capacity to add value to raw materials or semi-finished goods. In short, the firm has to keep its workers at it. The firm can seek more value by demanding longer hours for no more pay, or by enforcing a faster output within the existing working-day.

Labour-time has two faces. The first face is the time that a worker takes to complete a task, known as concrete labour time. This interval will vary with each operator. The task of the overseer is to drive all of these concrete labour times towards the most efficient existing time, known as universal labour time. The next job for managers is to speed up that universal labour time in order to beat competitors. Over the centuries, the displacement of concrete labour times by ever accelerating universal labour-times has spread geographically. First, the ULT was established within a single factory, then around that factor’s locale, next across the whole industry in a national market. The difference under globalisation has been the drive to impose universal labour times around the globe. Capitalism is a perpetual acceleration machine. Its pursuit of speed dominates the most sophisticated factories in the most advanced economies as well as the most rudimentary plants in the poorest countries.

Marx sometimes wrote about universal labour time and abstract labour time as if they were interchangeable. They are connected in practice, but need to be distinguished for analytic purposes. 
Their relationship to ?????? 
Concrete labour time is always a multitude of actions with no abstract or conceptual equivalent. Universal labour-time is also a multitude of lengths of time but has a money equivalent.

The concept of abstract labour time is on a different level of analysis than an historical survey of the spread and acceleration of universal labour time. Abstract labour time is the universal equivalent in the way that money is for a complex system of commodity exchanges.

Lenin and labour-time
The closest Lenin got to discussing labour-time in his pamplet titled Imperialism was the aristocracy of labour. That privileged sector is possible only if there is an aristocracy of capital, that is, a stratum of firms which can achieve higher-than-average rates of profit, usually through monopolizing. Such aristocracies of labour and capital need not extract that surplus from colonized societies. The process can happen between sectors or firms within a nation-market-state such as the United Kingdom as well as between, say, the USA and Mexico.

In penning Imperialism, Lenin’s concern was with the political consequences of this newest stage of capitalism. He was desperate to understand why so many German Social Democrats – the hiers to Marx and Engels - were supporting German militarism. He concluded that monopoly capitalism (imperialism) had produced an aristocracy of labour which promoted opportunism and social chauvinism in the socialist movement. Lenin did not believe that the exploitation of the colonial possessions alone produced the super-profits that allowed for an aristocracy of labour. Those higher rates derived from monopolizing tendencies inside Germany more than from Tanganiyka or Prince ????  Land (New Guinea).

A connection between the latest round of globalising and a new aristocracy of labour is harder to identify today. Skilled workers have suffered a decline in their material well-being and social status. The economic circumstances are never simply reflected in political attitudes. The current decline in expectations can feed the politics of chauvinism just as a rise in material circumstances had done among certain German Social Democrats before 1914. The political task is to draw out the reasons for each response and not to blame the victims for their reactionary attitudes. Socialists want to change ideas, not install their own moral superiority. As a departure point, we need to explain how the migrations of capital remain more destructive than any immigration of labour.

THE ABOVE NOTES ARE OFFERED AS STARTING POINTS FOR DISCUSSION, AS A REMINDER THAT THERE CAN BE NO SUCH THING AS A FAIR DAY’S PAY IN CAPITALISM, NEITHER IN AUSTRALIA, NOR IN BURMA.

THE RESEARCH GREW OUT OF THE PUBLISHED ARTICLE   ‘WHAT HAPPENED IN GLOBALISATION’ AND SHOULD BE READ IN LIGHT OF THAT.

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