Well finally started a draft on labor

[nadinbrzezinski]

first off, there are certain constants that all of you should be aware off. This penchant for cheap labor, or what seems to be cheap labor. Yes, early in our history there were people who organized to maintain the wage scales in the Early Colonies. They had competition though. These were Indentured Servants, and White and African American slaves. (Yes we were an earlier version of Botany Bay and many a political prisoner was sold into slavery in Barbados AND Massachusetts Bay) So our early industrial workers had to work to keep wage scales vis a vis that.

You think things have changed? These days factories go to the cheapest area of work... why if we are to win this battle, and it is a war, you and I need to realize organizing has to be INTERNATIONAL now. They want NAFTA< fine, we need to organize as a block and do it across BORDERS.

Oh and Smith was a damn socialist I tell you. He was all for minimum wage and progressive taxation... but hey he hated Mercantilism, which is what our political economy is starting to remind me more and more as I look under the hood. A new form of it, relying on you and me buying crapola, but hey, what can I say? Slaves are real today... as well as cheap labor, they are very real... look at China and other places East.

[jotsy]

1. I rec'd this thread, it remained a goose egg.

I have been contending for some time now, (without much feedback) that the corporatocracy views the world and its working publics as one of two things, labor markets and consumer bases. My question has been what happens to us when neither of those apply.

I've been following your progress with this project in the writers forum, a sizable task you have taken on.

[Ozymanithrax]

2. Certainly, Smith would be a socialist in the eyes of modern Capitalists...

But Smith and Marx would balk at the Comparison. The problem we face is that thought words have real meanings, those meanings evolve with the langauge and culture.

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. Of course they do

The Capitalist of Smith's era was the small business person... or the small investor. His critique was against the mercantile system and the Aristocracy of his age.

For Marx the Capitalism of his age would probably be (I have to re-read Das Kapital), the large factory owner, who mostly didn't exist in Smith's time.

And of course we have the little problem of a mercantilistic society..., which in some ways we are going back to... 'xept this is reverse mercantilism. It is not the metropolitan power (us) exporting finished goods... but rather we are importing them, since it is cheaper for the monopoly to produce in the periphery. (And that is probably another book, one that would have to be far more "academic" than this one. I'm actually trying to keep this at 8th grade English)