From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Thu Feb 22 2007 - 16:33:38 EST
Well thanks Jerry, but wiki articles are not supposed to contain any original research. In fact I referred to some wiki's there are already, because I forgot some of the exact dates (it's a long time ago that I preoccupied myself with these issues). One way to approach the subject is to devise a concept of imperialism, and then fit the data to that. But this is not really a Marxian method - the idea is to derive adequate concepts out of a study of the empirical and historical material. There's a lot of work of "synthesis" to be done in New Zealand in that sense to grasp the overall meaning of things, i.e. there are a lot of detailed studies about various relevant topics which are usable in trying to arrive at the "big picture". Yet, the concepts of previous generations may not necessarily be so relevant to grasp the dynamics of what is really happening now. Generally this type of work is not often encouraged, and it can be difficult to find a situation in which you could actually do it. It might take great social conflicts or radical changes to make people interested in it again. The rather naive assumption a lot of policy makers had in New Zealand was that, if you open up the country completely for foreign investment, that then you would get an influx of foreign capital that would develop the country's productive base and create jobs. Well at most you could say that without the foreign investment there would have been somewhat less jobs, other things being equal, but it hasn't permanently created a lot of new jobs. A lot of the value-added in the country exits the country as profit income, interest and rents. A lot of the foreign investment has been simply take-over or purely speculative or property investment, and the state still ends up supporting a large "underclass" from taxes. But to make valid generalisations about it, I'd have to study the data carefully, and I don't have those available here. Jurriaan
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