#14

#14

The social, not beyond the dynamics of Kapital, controls the rational excess of surplus-value. The power to extract this through the commodity of labour is at the heart of the concept of production. Production is our reference for the mode of social production around which we can form a critique of political economy. Surplus-value is measurable. Social labour and its rational operation is distinctly assigned to value. Labour of every kind is generally equivalent to the law of value and the production of value depends on wealth and its natural distribution.¹ The law of value is desired vertiginously, Kapital is desired profoundly, and exchange bears the quality of a certain humanist morality. Kapital makes a profit from labour power which is traded off against productivity.²

Kapitalismo-sozjietie self-evidently contains the abstract quantity that forms the immanent system in which Kapital becomes embroiled in a flux of signs, where signs undo what has been done and social relations are rendered virtual - a reappropriation of the actualization of Kapital. Static, industrial Kapital is being transferred to the virtual.

Surplus-value is realized in the order of simulacra, united by a common feature, embodied by the concrete.³ We often remain unaware of the concrete ways that specifically affect our capacity to act due to the way that Kapital invests our desires, our impulses, and, the assemblages of our specific drives. It channels them into channels of simulation.

Surplus-value, that is, labour productivity, contributes to the immanent system that makes Kapitalismo-sozjietie unique.⁴ “{S}urplus value ... expresses the movement and contradictions of immanent relations of capitalist exploitation.”⁵ Surplus-value and its procurement stem from the immanent and incessant drives that come from the decoded flux of signs that are contained within social flows.⁶ Kapitalismo-sozjietie measures the quantity of the decoded flux of signs, their abstractions and their universal impositions, and surplus-value is generated with a constant necessity, without limitations, from the flow of social relations.⁷ Kapitalismo-sozjietie's virtual spheres of actuality contain the means of production from which labour and its division is associated with the exploitation and alienation of the immanent event expressed by the productivity of labour which generates surplus-value.⁸

Surplus-value within a socialist system, Kapital amassed by labour productivity, reappropriates material accumulation for redistribution to meet people's needs. We can view this through the lens of China's economic system in the immaediate wake of Chairman Mao's legacy preceding globalizations' hegemony.

Citizen Anonymous, writing for The Spokesman-Review in 1977, explains how “China called on its people ... to help raise 'enormous funds' to build a modern Socialist state ... 'entirely different' from capitalism.”⁹ In capitalist states, economic growth and prosperity can often be sacrificed for the sake of ideological purity, where the maintenance of the status quo would rather leadership remain static than be pragmatic. If the means of surplus-value is to increase accumulation for the state then its end is towards its redistribution amongst its citizens and not lining the pockets of its upper-echelon denizens.

The situation requires a radical divergence from all ideologies of leadership parties, a 'cultural revolution' of people and polities, and the installation of a new international economic order that can guarantee the interests of developing countries. Socialist ends can be met by the correct appropriation and remuneration of funds channeled into agriculture, industry, science, technology, and protectionism in trade relations. By the end of this century the continent of Africa shall be united by an economic union in its entirety. The creation of a new international economic order for developing nations can safeguard the labour of Africa from being expropriated from the worker and the manufacturer. It is the union of the union led by the chairperson and the delegation coalition.

The gains of enterprise under socialism differ essentially from capitalist profit. Citizen Anonymous tells us: “{t}he gains of a Socialist enterprise are a manifestation of the workers' conscious effort to create material wealth, provide funds for consumption and accumulate capital for building socialism.”¹⁰ A manifestation of cooperation, not a manifestation of prestation.

In our contemporary day, China manipulates economic accounting in enterprise to increase accumulation for socialism, but it does this, like any other outfit that is nominally socialist, by putting profit in command. Returning to our epoch of 1977, Citizen Anonymous writes that “Peking has experienced trouble within the economy because 'people became wary of finance and accounting.'”¹¹ The same rings true in our contemporary day. Suspicions have been raised, doubts have been confirmed, and the people and their polity under the prestation of capitalist hegemony are beginning to demand revisions to the decisions within our global economy.

1Baudrillard, J. (1993) Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: SAGE Publications Ltd; p.9.

2Ibid., p.47, n.21.

3Roberts, J. M. (2012) “Poststructuralism against poststructuralism: Actor-network theory, organizations and economic markets.” European Journal of Social Theory, Vol.15, No.1; p.48.

4Ibid., p.49.

5Ibid., p.37.

6Ibid., p.46.

7Ibid.

8Ibid., p.37.

9Citizen Anonymous (1977) “China calls for economic growth.” The Spokesman-Review, Aug. 28.

10Ibid.

11Ibid.

©Elijah Nathaniel James

A Liberal Economy Not Stifled by Aid Means a Way Forward for Africa

Developing nations appear to us as bound together by means of aid. Financial commitments made at the Monterrey Consensus in Mexico, 2002, and more recently at the Doha Declaration in Qatar, 2009, place an emphasis on the mutual accountability of donors and developing nations to each other. At the heart of the matter of the global development agenda, the Millennium Development Goals found agreement by the international community in September 2000. The Millennium Development Goals provide a focus for the outcomes that the developed world wishes to achieve by aid. By 2015, we trust that poverty and hunger will halve itself so that primary education then takes on a universal shape.

But the core problem of poverty in Africa lies within the poorest countries falling behind the countries of the developed world or even falling apart. The focus of the Millennium Development Goals misleads us if 80 per cent of the world’s poor live in countries making progress. The present global economy does not favour what economist Paul Collier of Oxford University calls “the bottom billion” people in the poorest countries of which they live. A state gets weaker and more nondemocratic and incompetent if it exhibits economic decline, dependent on primary commodity exports and exhibits a low per capita income unequal to its distribution.

Aid proves an unambiguous alternative preferable to trade in developing nations. The UK formed a committee to provide "Aid for Trade". In September 2006 Gordon Brown announced that the UK would increase aid for trade to £409 million by the end of this year. Zambian economist, Dambia Moyo, argues that this makes for “dead aid since Western assistance creates a dependency culture.”

Growth requires more than aid in developing nations. According to Andrew Masters, the Economic Advisor for the Department for International Development, a country’s level of development sustains its growth. “Many developing countries experience spurts of growth in the short-run, through net exports, but it also impacts on longer term productivity, through importing machinery and increased competition,” he says.

The Commission on Growth and Development produced a report which found that 13 African economies exhibited sustained growth in the post-war period. They fully integrate into the global trading system as economies that benefit from importing ideas, technology and know-how from the rest of the world and exploit global demand, which provided a deep, elastic market for their goods.

Export competitiveness reduces aid in African countries. Large sums of money can reduce a developing nation’s competitiveness if it leads to inflation. Known as 'Dutch Disease' inflation raises the costs of production that makes a country uncompetitive in relation to others. This problem can manage to find a solution if the right policies apply. The UK does not make aid conditional on any countries adopting specific economic policies. In some cases African countries may adopt poor policies in a place that hurts the value of exports.

According to leading economists, Christopher Adam and Stephen O’Connell, a dollar of donor resources transferred to an aid-recipient country via a donor’s own import liberalization serves as a better medium.

As the world financial crisis increases protectionist tendencies among rich countries it worsens Africa’s access to markets. By the removal of quotas from the imports to Africa, developing nations would not require any restrictions on the quantity they may sell, therefore increasing supply and demand. By the same token, if we exempt developing nations from export tariffs it means they can trade at no extra cost.

The principle objective of trade liberalisation equates to resource reallocation. When the Kenyan government attempted to institute trade liberalisations the resulting aid policy interfered with the exchange rate and compromised free trade. Exchange rate depreciation in the third world shunts up the price of importables. An economic model with no domestic consumption of exportables, no aid interference and the removal of import quotas lowers the price of the importables. In a Kenya-type economy exports capital proves sufficient to finance the demand for imported capital without quotas whereas a pre-reform Ghana-type economy does not possess sufficient funds for any category of import.

Africa desperately needs trade liberalisation to provide the developing world with sustained growth. To assess whether free trade supported by a programme of aid financing can work we must addressed the question: should we arrive at the negotiation of aid levels on purely economic grounds instead of the political and humanitarian grounds by which aid gets administered? The charity of the progressive governments, the targets of the Millennium Development Goals, and the myriad organisations set up to lift Africa out of its abject poverty, cannot provide the sustained growth that Africa requires. Only with a strong economy and state reform can we see the bottom billion begin to sustain themselves.

Eliyahu Nataniyel ben James.

SOURCES:

{1}. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/14/g20-summit-china-free-trade

{2}. http://info.worldbank.org/etools/wti/docs/Angola_brief.pdf