#robert biel

[nihilhumani-blog]

Robert Biel on eurocentric marxism in Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement

[johananderslif]

Since mass production is no longer the basis of the physical accumulation system, consumption need not necessarily suffer if full employment is abandoned. A narrower, more segmented market can still consume the goods. This is consistent with the marginalisation of a fairly substantial section of the population, squeezed between the decline of free services and the anti-inflation policies which benefit only those with incomes. With marginalisation, capitalism has to pay the apparently heavy financial cost of providing welfare, but this is offset by two hidden advantages: first, the financial problem can itself be used as justification for further reductions in the benefit system overall, with the excuse of targeting the most needy; second, and more important, the more marginalized actually provide a vital service to capitalism (well worth the cost of maintaining their bare subsistence) by hovering as a threat over the rest of the population, persuading many of them accept any job going. With this are created the essential conditions for a cheap-labour, flexible economy in the North, which spans the marginalised (who are forced to work under the worst conditions in a semi-legal way to eke out benefits) and many of those employed in insecure conditions in the formal economy. It is important to the North to have this kind of economy within its frontiers, for it means that the South cannot extract monopoly rents for its cheap labour and bad working conditions.

Robert Biel, The New Imperialism (2000), pp 178-179