> The recent success of the Chinese countries of the PRC, Taiwan, and Hong
> Kong, is indeed not inherently socialist in character, but it is a blow
> against neo-liberalism and hegemonism, particularly US hegemonism. It
> shifts the world balance of power just a little and opens new space for
> regimes to consider more progressive and partially socialist options.
>
> It suggests a certain degree of movement towards a more multi-polar world,
> in which there is greater scope for progressive politics.
>
> That indirectly is also in the long term interests of the working people of
> the USA.
What success? How is this in the interests of proletarians?
Louis Proyect is right: this is sheer fantasy. Is it a success merely to preserve nominal currency values against the dollar, when the only possible consequence of a dollar devaluation, if such a thing was brought about, would be to throw the world market into deeper disarray and make a world war more likely than it already is? And if they did not succeed in enforcing a dollar devaluation, then the gains of the PRC and Taiwan will prove to be at the expense of other Asian states -- Indonesia, the Phillipines, Korea.
This idea that the self-help attempts of desperate local elites bent now on surviving at any price, are somehow socialistic or in any sense a positive thing is surely wrong. Actually, the neoliberal critique is correct and capital controls are only the beginning of the slide into beggar-my-neighbour protectionism and can only intensify the savagery of the world deflation which is still in its earliest stages and has yet to engulf Europe and N America as it certainly will. Expect to see capital and currency control fan the flames not of keynesian revival but of nationalist extremism as local bourgeoisies try to deflect popular anger in their own backyards. Expect the resort to the printing press to become generalised without however the emission of dollars (or euros) preventing unemployment and bankruptcy from cascading thru the world system.
Chris Burford's theory is equivalent to celebrating the relative rise of the stern of the Titanic as the bow settles beneath the waves. This truly epochal world crisis will change everything and it will require considerable predictive zeal to comprehend. The collapse which began in the USSR ten years ago was (as I for one have been arguing for some years) only the first stage of a general historical process. The single most salutary aspect of this avalanche of crisis is the fate of the middle classes: the professional, managerial, entrepreneurial and technical-scientific strata now being expropriated and pauperised in every part of the world where the crisis has struck. The proletarianisation of people who only just emerged from those social origins is deeply significant and is bound to lead to not only the profound radicalisation of the working class but to the reinvigoration of socialist doctrines and revolutionary organisations as new leading cadres become available. The loss of the Russian new middle class to capitalism is a shattering blow which will foredoom every attempt at stabilising a post-Yeltsin Russian capitalism. It means there is now no social constituency whatsoever left to support the comprador-fascist regime, while the project for Russian renewal, in all its religious, national-chauvinist and communist guises will be much invigorated by its new and embittered recruits, who will be anxious for revenge.
Another thing I have repeatedly pointed out is that an early symptom of the collapse of the world market will be the disappearance not merely of some of its most visible (and virile) symbols, and its international institutions: but also, the wipeout of the most advanced and most truly internationalised sectors of production. The closures of semiconductor plants just announced here in the UK exemplify this trend, the significance of which has still not registered. If the most advanced sectors of international capital are going to take the heaviest hits, from where is renewal and a way out of the crisis going to come?
One more thing: from Russia to Bangladesh to Indonesia, anthropogenic climate change is greatly intensifying the scale of the crisis. The failure of the Russian harvest is almost a guarantee of food riots this winter. Previous food riots in Europe were catalysts of 1789 and 1917.
These are the synergistic sinews of revolution: mass discontent; an expropriated, disenfranchised salariat; and the fatal inability of the ancien regime to renew itself on the basis of *known, existent technologies*.
Mark
-- http://www.geocities.com/~comparty