From: paul cockshott (clyder@GN.APC.ORG)
Date: Fri Mar 23 2007 - 05:40:53 EDT
I take your points Jurrian, but there is also in countries like Britain and the US a significant group of the population employed by the financial institutions a substantial fraction of whose income does depend on repatriated profits. This sector can be very influential politically, but it does not correspond to the old idea of a labour aristocracy. -------Original Message------- From: Jurriaan Bendien Date: 03/22/07 23:40:13 To: OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Subject: [OPE-L] debate on labor aristocracy Data on foreign investment and earnings are always tricky... to quote a bit from an article I wrote once, A Joint Committee on Taxation report discovered to everyone's consternation that Enron claimed a $2.3 billion in profits between 1996 and 1999 in reports to its investors, while reporting an astonishing $3 billion tax loss to the IRS. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. In a topical article in the Boston Globe (24 February 2004), from which I've shamelessly borrowed bits here, Stephen J. Glain takes the story further, and points out that nearly half of the estimated $233 billion in foreign earnings of all US corporations in 2001 was held in foreign tax havens, up from 38 percent in 1999 and 23 percent in 1988 (Department of Commerce data, December 2003). The DoC data in fact suggest that corporate earnings held in offshore tax havens like Luxembourg or the Cayman Islands have doubled over the last 15 years. Those two countries have tax rates of around 0.9 percent and 5.2 percent, respectively, compared with 28-35 percent in the United States. Martin A. Sullivan, an economist and columnist for TaxNotes, the daily journal on tax law and legal issues, concluded from his analysis of the Commerce Department data for 2001, that the US companies recorded 46 percent of their total overseas profits, i.e. nearly half, in these tax havens, even though these countries accounted for only 19 percent of the overseas economic activity of these companies, if measured by the value of their assets, sales, costs of equipment, and number of employees. (...) In 1998, the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit research institute, discovered that $154 billion (half the gap between "book value" and "tax-declared" income for that year), could not be reconciled using conventional accounting methods, and attributed at least part of the difference to deceptive accounting practices. http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/03/27/232230&mode=nested&tid (in that article I vastly underestimated the cost of the Iraq adventure). The main question really is whether you can infer anything about the political behaviour of workers from the size of their pay packet and assets, or to what extent the size of their paypackets shapes their behaviour - what useful generalisations could be made. I for one would be very reluctant to generalise about that, unless I had a good understanding of the total context of their lives, and the historical background. For example, yesterday I heard that horrible man John Bolton on BBC radio. He was waxing about America's "vital strategic interest" in Iraq, and argued the religious conflicts happening there could not be blamed on US intervention, because they had been there for thousands of years. Point is, how many US "labor aristocrats" would agree with him? The related question is, suppose that there is, or there isn't a labor aristocracy. What can you really conclude from that, politically, given that it is always possible to identify a privileged stratum of some sort? In a wiki I have listed some of the typical conceptual criticisms of the labor aristocracy idea: *The average rate of surplus-value is typically higher in rich countries, because of higher labor-productivity; *high-paid, skilled workers can be very militant and display class consciousness; *the differences in wages between rich and poor countries are far greater than the differences in wages within rich countries, so, if anything, the whole working class in rich countries is a "labor aristocracy" from a global point of view. *it is not clear that workers in the imperialist country directly share in repatriated profits from overseas dominions; *the actual amount of repatriated profit from overseas investments that could "trickle down" to the working class as salary income is not large enough to sustain a "labor aristocracy", if there is one. *Probably the main economic benefit that workers in rich countries obtain directly from poor countries is cheap consumer goods, but in fact the monetary value of these goods is statistically only a small part of their total budget. The "big ticket" foreign-made items in workingclass budgets are foreign computer hardware, foreign-made appliances and foreign cars (i.e. durable consumer goods). But out of that total expenditure, only a small fraction represents goods from poor countries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superprofit Jurriaan
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