Re: [OPE-L] American state racism

From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Sun Apr 29 2007 - 22:07:22 EDT


A related and controversial point: in Malthus' time there was not enough
capacity to produce means of production to equip the violently displaced
proletariat. Hence overpopulation.
Today the accumulation of capital can create more demand for labor than is
newly
becoming available through population growth once racist immigration
controls are
tightened. There may result a shortage of labor vis a vis that required to
valorize
what would be the newly accumulated capital. But then capital will not be
accumulated in the home nation state. It will be exported and the
industialization abroad may well be impetuous. A shortage of workers in
the advanced capitalist then becomes an oversupply of workers.
Overpopulation follows from causes opposite to those in Malthus' time of
the early stages of capital accumulation.

Unemployment is no longer cyclical as hidden as it may be in the prisons
andstatistical trickery. But the problem of  the intractability of large
scale unemployment is in fact recognized in the radically pessimistic,
putatively realistic ideologies coloring the outlook of society as a
whole.

Rakesh


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