MIM Notes No. 197	 December 1, 1999

Plagiarize Marx, win a Nobel prize: Bourgeois economist wins for 
discovery of international capital flow

Robert Mundell of Columbia University in New York has been awarded the 
prestigious Nobel Prize in Economic Science for discovering in the early 
1960s that "the international flow of capital could affect an individual 
country's ability to manage its own economy."(1) Young students of 
sociology who have read such founding documents of Marxism as The 
Communist Manifesto may be shocked to see the bourgeois academy awarding 
grand prizes for discovering the basic principles of capitalist 
economics 100 years after Marx. But MIM Notes reminds our readers that 
this is only another demonstration of the infancy of capitalist economic 
science, a confirmation of the necessity of socialist transformation for 
moving international history and cooperation forward.

An economist at nearby Princeton University has defended the Nobel award 
decision: "he was way ahead of his time in recognizing that capital 
mobility had profound effects on the functioning of a country's 
economy."(1) But how can this be? asks the young Marxist. How can such 
an internationally respected intellectual organization as the Royal 
Swedish Academy of Sciences acknowledge as "ahead of his time" an 
economist who only copied what Marx said, and what Lenin expanded upon 
in great detail, with considerably less depth and more than 100 years 
later?

MIM refers to the infancy of capitalist economic science relative to 
socialist science because at this stage capitalism is no longer a 
progressive force in the world. The theoreticians of imperialism are a 
part of the superstructure whose place is to justify the survival of 
this dying system. A third bourgeois economist -- rationalizing his own 
place in the world and Professor Mundell's -- said of Mundell's theories 
that when Mundell started talking about the importance of international 
finance for a single country's economy "you could actually teach about 
closed economic models [but] today it would be ludicrous to do so."(1) 
But as we can see even from a brief study of Marxist science, even in 
1960 it was ludicrous for the capitalists to talk about single-country 
economics as if a single capitalist state were not dependent on so many 
others.

In 1848, Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto of the 
internationalization of all industries under capitalism: "The 
bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a 
cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. 
To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet 
of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established 
national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. 
They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life 
and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no 
longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the 
remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at 
home, but in every quarter of the globe."(2)

Bourgeois economists like to talk about capitalist countries as having 
closed economies because this disguises the extent to which the 
imperialist nations live at the expense of the rest of the world's 
people.  But already in 1916, Lenin wrote in Imperialism: The Highest 
Stage of Capitalism: "The export of capital, one of the most essential 
economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the 
rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole 
country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas 
countries and colonies."(3)

The goal of the bourgeoisie's economic mythmaking is to suppress the 
revolutionary fervor of the proletariat by obscuring the true extent to 
which the sustenance of capital relies on oppression of the exploited 
classes. Again this was clear to the Communists in 1920, when M.N. Roy 
(a founder of the Mexican and Indian Communist Parties and an alternate 
member of the COMINTERN executive committee while Lenin was alive) 
reiterated Lenin's comments on the very necessity of "capital mobility" 
to capitalism in the imperialist countries: "Superprofits gained in the 
colonies are the mainstay of modern capitalism."(4)

And in Volume Two of his Selected Works (written in the period of the 
war of resistance against Japanese imperialism, i.e., before 1945), Mao 
wrote of the inextricable links between internal Chinese revolutionary 
politics and the will of the imperialist powers regarding China: "The 
comprador big bourgeoisie is a class which directly serves the 
capitalists of the imperialist countries and is nurtured by them; 
countless ties link it closely with the feudal forces in the 
countryside. ... However ... it becomes possible for the sections of the 
comprador class which serve other imperialist groupings to join the 
current anti-imperialist front to a certain extent and for a certain 
period. But they will turn against the Chinese revolution the moment 
their masters do."(5)

In scientific terms, it has been absurd to speak of any self-sufficiency 
or self-contained economic structure of the capitalist countries since 
Marx and Engels's time. In the years since then, the bourgeoisie's 
denials of its dependence on the proletariat has only become more 
shameful. MIM has done the math and will happily share it with any who 
doubt that imperialism owes a huge debt to the peoples of the Third 
World. Check it out, Nobel or not Mundell's theories are not hot 
property now and were not new when he claimed to have developed them. 
Communist writers have had more and better to offer for more than 100 
years.

Notes: 1. New York Times 14 October, 1999, p. C1. 2. Quoted from 
http://eserver.org/marx/ 1848-communist.manifesto/ cm1.txt 3. Quoted 
from MIM's Website Classics section 
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/classics/ classics.html V. I. Lenin 
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Peking: Foreign Language 
Press, 1973), p. 120. 4. Quoted from 
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/classics/classics.html July 26, 1920, 
Session 4, "Supplementary Theses on the National and Colonial 
Questions," John Riddell ed., The Communist International in Lenin's 
Time Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings and 
Documents of the Second Congress, 1920, vol. 1, (NY: Pathfinder Press), 
p. 219. 5. Quoted from http://www.etext.org/Politics/ MIM/classics/ 
Mao's Selected Works Vol. 2, 1975, p. 320.