It is difficult to hold a discussion with someone who constantly rely on dropping names of obscure third parties as arguments? How is a group of secondhand orthodox interpreters of Marxism going to mount a world revolution 150 years after the issuance of the Communist Manifesto? Revolutions do not occur because some academic Marxists claim they have figured out the self destructiveness of capitalism and sit around in capitalist supported campuses to wait for the inevitable while quoting each other with in-group self satisfaction as revolutionary truth. Who are Andrew Austin, Carrol Cox, Robert Brenner that the mere mention of their names appears suffice? Is one required to read their work before discussion can take place. Why does Rakesh not speak his own mind for a change and impress me with his own intelligence. Besides, that fact that I recently posted messages with the title Hybrid Marxism does not make me a Hybrid Marxist. I have explained more than once that I am not a Marxist which should neither re-inforce nor dilute my arguments. We talking about reason, not doctrinal fidelity. In spirit of your penchant for exegetic authenticity, I suggest that you read Zhou Yuming, Tangu, Han Yu, and Liu Zongyuan, in Chinese, if you wish to understand Chinese Communism and its relationship to Hybrid Marxism. With all due respect to your interpretation of the ABC of Leninism, imperialism did not collapse due to capitalism's internal inconsistencies, but rather to conscious, willful struggles by the uninformed oppressed.
Henry C.K. Liu (not Henry c K)
> Henry c K, have you ever discussed matters with Andrew Austin?
No. Neither have I communicated with God.
>
> As Carrol Cox once brilliantly noted, if the working class ever had
> sufficient power to impose such reforms, anybody trying to get the working
> class to ask for no more than that would only be wrecking the possibility
> of the working class actually carrying out the revolution.
>
Who is Carrol Cox? The working class has yet to carry out a successful revolution on its own anywhere in the world. Revolutions are carried out by professional revolutionaries who are bold enough to carry out armed struggle rather than waiting quietly for the internal conflicts in capitalism to destroy itself. The fact is if I, who is hopelessly over-educated by most standards, have difficulty following your discourse, how do you expect the working masses, on whose behalf you develop so much theory, to understand your esoteric deliberations coded with incessant pseudo intellectual name dropping.
>
> To my serious question (corrected):
>
> >> Will the main effect of mergers be to give monopoly power
> >> to national capital at home and thereby the ability to secure additional
> >> surplus value in circulation while positioning these monopolies to better
> >> compete on the global market in which each can undersell the other as each
> >> sells at marginal costs only for the sole purpose of destroying
> >> international rivals having made superprofits in production and circulation
> >> at home?
>
Thank you for the corrected version of your question. It is useful if you expect a correct answer. You may have notice that the division between domestic and global markets have been blurred for almost 2 decades by globalization. Most automobiles are now "world cars" in which the geographical source of the products parts are diverse and difficult to identify. In finance capitalism, the question as you posed it is no longer operative. Several mergers are between corporations across national borders with global markets and sources.
>
> Henry repeats his one sided analysis:
>
> >Merger are not designed to increase competition, rather they aim to stabilized
> >prices with increased efficientcy through labor cost reduction.
>
> Like the monopoly capital theorists, Liu only sees the stagnation of
> present capitalism--restricted output and rationalized labor forces to
> stabilize prices and net revenue (profits) at the expense of gross
> employment and production. Unlike the fearless neo Trotskyist Comrade
> Robert Brenner, our hybrid Marxist does not see the aggression and
> fraticidal competition of modern capitalism at an international level.
> Eschewing simple dialectics, he cannot understand the inter-penetration of
> the opposites of stagnation and aggression and thus
> ignores the upward spiral of violence and conflict in the modern
> bourgeois world system in which monopolies strengthen themselves at home
> the purpose of destroying their rivals abroad.
>
Mergers are in fact in the process to eliminate what your fearless neo Troskyist Comrade Brenner allegedly identified as "fratricidal competition of modern capitalism at an international level." It appears there is more of that on this lists than in the outside world. Wake up, capitalism is not dying of ts own cancer, unless the oppressed kill it. In the meantime, no amount of improvement of the workers' lot will eliminate the need for revolution. Making workers suffer in order to preserve the intellectuals' revolutionary purity is futile and immoral. The motto for workers should be: take what one can and then take more
> Henry, back to the ABC's of Leninism:
>
> Imperialism is characterised both by monopoly stagnation and by
> aggressiveness. These tendencies have to be explained in their unity: if
> monopolisation causes stagnation, then how can we explain the aggressive
> character of international competition? In fact both phenomena are
> ultimately rooted in the tendency towards breakdown or imperfect
> valorisation due to overaccumulation, Henry c K.
>
Lenin was talking about 18th century imperialism. If Lenin were alive today, he would surely see that conditions are different, or he would be unworthy of respect.
Globalization has effectively eliminated both national and corporate competition worldwide. Look at the EU. The new geo-political regime is regionalism. The driving force behind the current merger mania is precisely that the decline of real competition has created a redundancy of corporate entities, thus a natural process to reduce the number of independent companies is at work, resulting in less demand for workers for the same market size, because growth is lacking behind capital formation due to excess profit. As for this over accumulation of capital, I have identified that in my previous as one of the key internal inconsistencies of finance capitalism. As for imperfect valorization, if by that you mean the support of commodity prices by any of various forms of government subsidy, that condition has largely been eliminated by globalization. Governments have unwittingly lost their power to effectively subsidize commodity prices, which is why there is a general collapse of commodity prices globally now. Even the cost of money, on which governments traditionally have sole power to determine through monetary policy, is now determined by the global free floating or fixed foreign exchange regimes. Capitalism has come a long ways since Lenin's time, and to fight it, new awareness and strategies need to be developed. I suggest you stop reading only books that you happen to agree with and open your eye to the real world. It may do your considerable intelligence justice.
> But you take refuge in the decadent stagnation myths of John Maynard
> Keynes, Alvin Hansen and Paul Sweezy--who all built their systems on the
> faulty foundations of formal logic and bourgeois reason. But it is
> bourgeois science, that ugly flower of yes/yes-no/no thought, that again
> mystifies the working class about the violent direction of the system that
> makes it overthrow a matter of life and death.
I did not take refuge anywhere. You are not going to overthrow anything with your little incesteous in-group.
>
> >> What percentage of profits do these monopolies make at home? And ,
> >> following Brenner, what are the implications of these mergers for the
> >> nature of competition on the world market?
>
> >I have never read the authors you named, nor do I have any desire to.
>
> And here Henry c K Liu reveals the irrationalism that undergirds Chinese
> hybrid Marxism. Please see Werner Meissner's analysis of Chinese communist
> philosophy.
>
You flattered me behind what I deserve. I am certainly not the personification of Chinese hybrid Marxism. As to irrationalism, it is not a sin for revolutionaries, although I have never claimed that I heroic enough to be one. As for Werner Meissner's analysis of Chinese communism (thanks for the small cap, it is very appropriate), I have not found Western analyses on China very enlightening. Please read the Chinese writers I suggested at the top of this post.
Cultural imperialism is unacceptable, even from a Marxist.
Henry C.K. Liu (its not difficult to type, not Henry c K.)