/lit/ - Literature

>>21057382
I liked this book.

>Winner of the first Paul A. Baran—Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award for an original monograph concerned with the political economy of imperialism, John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century is a seminal examination of the relationship between the core capitalist countries and the rest of the world in the age of neoliberal globalization. Deploying a sophisticated Marxist methodology, Smith begins by tracing the production of certain iconic commodities—the T-shirt, the cup of coffee, and the iPhone—and demonstrates how these generate enormous outflows of money from the countries of the Global South to transnational corporations headquartered in the core capitalist nations of the Global North. From there, Smith draws on his empirical findings to powerfully theorize the current shape of imperialism. He argues that the core capitalist countries need no longer rely on military force and colonialism (although these still occur) but increasingly are able to extract profits from workers in the Global South through market mechanisms and, by aggressively favoring places with lower wages, the phenomenon of labor arbitrage.

...

>"Analysis of contemporary imperialism must proceed from, and attempt to explain, a fact of transcendental importance: the systematic international divergence in the rate of exploitation between nations. Wage arbitrage-driven globalization of production corresponds neither to absolute surplus-value—long hours are endemic in low-wage countries, but the length of the working day is not the outsourcing firm’s main attraction—nor to relative surplus-value: necessary labor is not reduced through the application of new technology. Indeed, outsourcing is an alternative to investment in new technology. Raising surplus-value through expanding the exploitation of Southern low-wage labor therefore cannot be reduced to the two forms of surplus-value extraction analyzed in Capital—absolute and relative surplus-value. Global labor arbitrage-driven outsourcing is driven by lust for cheaper labor, and corresponds most directly to the 'reduction of wages below their value.' In other words, global labor arbitrage, the driver of the global shift of production to low-wage nations, is the third form of surplus value recognized by Marx as a most important factor, yet excluded, as we have seen, from his theory of value" (p.238).

>>20817069
Imperialism in the 21st Century

>The globalization of production and its shift to low-wage countries is the most significant and dynamic transformation of the neoliberal era. Its fundamental driving force is what some economists call “global labor arbitrage”: the efforts by firms in Europe, North America, and Japan to cut costs and boost profits by replacing higher-waged domestic labor with cheaper foreign labor, achieved either through emigration of production (“outsourcing,” as used here) or through immigration of workers. Reduction in tariffs and removal of barriers to capital flows have spurred the migration of production to low-wage countries, but militarization of borders and rising xenophobia have had the opposite effect on the migration of workers from these countries—not stopping it altogether, but inhibiting its flow and reinforcing migrants’ vulnerable, second-class status. As a result, factories freely cross the U.S.-Mexican border and pass with ease through the walls of Fortress Europe, as do the commodities produced in them and the capitalists who own them, but the human beings who work in them have no right of passage. This is a travesty of globalization—a world without borders to everything and everyone except for working people.

>Global wage differentials, in large measure resulting from suppression of the free movement of labor, provide a distorted reflection of global differences in the rate of exploitation (simply, the difference between the value generated by workers and what they are paid). The southwards shift of production signifies that the profits of firms headquartered in Europe, North America, and Japan, the value of all manner of financial assets derived from these profits, and the living standards of the citizens of these nations have become highly dependent on the higher rates of exploitation of workers in so-called “emerging nations.” Neoliberal globalization must therefore be recognized as a new, imperialist stage of capitalist development, where “imperialism” is defined by its economic essence: the exploitation of southern living labor by northern capitalists.
https://monthlyreview.org/2015/07/01/imperialism-in-the-twenty-first-century/

>>13376668
>non-internationalist forms of Marxism
That's a contradiction in terms.

>I'd like to see left-wing critiques of neoliberal open borders immigration policies
You can look into pic related, but that probably won't be the kind of critique that you're looking for. You're not looking for anything Marxist, but for social-democratic ideas that go contrary to communism.
Low-skilled workers are admitted depending on where in the business cycle we are. Once the crisis hits you'll have your Obama 2.0 wave of deportations.

>which are clearly just a means of diluting labor politics and creating lumpenproletariats
You won't abolish the necessity for a surplus army of labour by decree, by "closing the borders" or whatever. For that, capitalism needs to go, and that can't be limited to a single country.

>>13376722
GOOD ONE YANG