Saturday, March 27, 2010

CHARLIE STROSS ON CAPITAL, LABOR, AND IMMIGRATION












Maybe kinda serious for the weekend, but I found by accident and it really does contain some strong and essential points. (Including a clear insite into why racism is such an integral part of all rightwing scenarios.)

“By penning us (the labour) in, capital can maintain, for a while, the wage imbalances that maximize profit. (Take raw material. Process as cheaply as possible. Sell for as much as possible.) In the long term, it's unsustainable — labour in the high-cost developed world is taking a hammering due to being uncompetitive, and wages will be forced down until it is competitive, while labour costs in the developing world are skyrocketing. It'll end when American and EU wages meet in the middle with Chinese and Indian wages ... unless American, EU, Chinese, and Indian wage-earners are forced to recalibrate their expectations against the DRC or Somalia. If you don't think this affects you, if you don't think you're on the same side of the barricades as the sweatshop workers in Bangladesh and the marine biologists in Toronto, you're deluded; unless you've got a seven-digit trust fund to dine out on, the tidal flow of globalized capital is running against your class interests. Welcome to the future that globalized capitalism has bought for us (and see also the vital, pressing need for election funding reform in the USA, which is the pivot on which this whole mess revolves). I'm beginning to think that, regardless of his prescription, Karl Marx's diagnosis of the crisis of capitalism was spot on the money. And crap like this is going to keep happening as long as we're workers first and citizens last.” (Click here for all of it)

5 comments:

Your driver said...

I'm glad somebody noticed.

Anonymous said...

Knock knock

hcb said...

So Obama just gave the GOP and the anti-unionists a fantastic kick in the ass by appointing Craig Becker without Senate approval to head the National Labor Relations Board.

Your driver said...

Obama has appointed a bunch of great people to the NLRB, OSHA and Department of Labor. From Hilda Solis on down he's been appointing almost exactly the people that I would have picked. I hope somebody picks up on the facts that the boss is no longer the only God they'll ever know and they might not be left to die if they get sick. At the root of all the right wing crap of the last 35 years (or more) has been the clear threat: "If you dare stand up to us you will end up dying homeless on the street."
God knows I would have appreciated some grand gestures but the truth is Obama has done more to counter that threat than any president since Lyndon Johnson.

Who the fuck is there?

x_S said...

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/417499_strike28.html

WV = extiesse