Doug responded:
>The point wasn't to talk up a miracle in the colonies, the point was
>that the imperial countries grew spectacularly, contrary to the rest of
the
>world, which didn't, except for a few Southeast Asian countries that
are
>now in ruins.
>
It seems to me the problem with these figures is that they don't relate to the historical specificity of the period 1900 to 1994. The rates of accumulation and their distribution among capitalist and non-capitalist countries would be different, broadly speaking, from 1900 to 1914, followed by the World War interlude of forced military accumulation, then from 1919 to 1940, followed by the continuation of the World War interlude, then from 1949 to 1972-74 and the breakdown of Bretton Woods, and then again from 1989 to present.
Roughly speaking the polarity of capital accumulation keeps shifting. Applying Marx's "General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," namely the accumulation of wealth at one pole and poverty the opposite pole, to the world market since publication of the first volume "Capital" we see a shift from unipolarity under British hegemony, to multipolarity between 1914 and 1945, followed by the emergency of the U.S. dominated Bretton Woods regime. Within the Bretton Wooods financial system and underneath the bipolarity of the Cold War period from 1949 to 1989, developed a tripolar structure among the capitalist countries, the U.S., Japan, and a loosely unified Europe. Due to the centralization and concentration of money, commodity and productive capital around these three poles, the non-capitalist countries which were in the process of developing capitalist economic structures, and influenced by their geographical locations, were pulled into one of three economic areas. For example, Japan pulled in Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, and so forth. The U.S. increased influence in Mexico, Central and South America. The Europeans found themselves with Eastern Europe, Turkey, and eventually Russia.
So the growth rates would at least have to be broken down to take into consideration the main poles of accumulation and how the non-capitalist countries related to the particular pole they were subsumed under during the period under consideration.
It seems to me the present period is one of instability because their is the potential of a major shift in polarity, since the stagnant Japanese economy is like one leg of a three-legged stool sinking into the ground. The U.S., via the dollar, and Europe, via the euro (assuming its launch is successful) will be enabled to take more commanding role in the world market because of the slowdown in centralization and concentration in Japanese capital.
By the sheer size of their populations and density of their non-capitalist economic structures, China and India seem eventually destined to play a major role in shifting the polarity one direction or another.
As Marx said, it is the historical role of capitalism to develop the productive forces, regardless of the human consequences. It is in keeping with this historical role that some countries are laid waste. The historical role of the working-class is to take control of the productive forces developed by capitalism and develop them further, but with due regard to the human consequences involved.
Randy Stone
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