Japan's economy in free fall

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Fri Sep 18 09:00:25 PDT 1998


Doug, assuming the day of reckoning, when it comes whether sooner or later, will mean either barbarism or revolution, how about some imaginings of how the revolutionary reckoning might look ?This would be very hypothetical and only a fantasy about Japan or elsewhere or both. Let your mind go free.

How might these crises be resolved in some way other than leaving capitalist relations of production in place ? What is the outline of a macroeconomic shift to expropriating the expropriators ? Assume for a moment that the workers of the world just suddenly wake up and are ready to rumble. How would you advise them to do it ?

As Marx says, the difference between we humans, and spiders and bees is that we build our projects in imagination first.

Charles Brown

Detroit


>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 09/18 11:22 AM >>>
Mark Jones wrote:


>Doesn't it strike you as just a trifle apcoalyptic, unprcedented anyway,
>for a paper like the FT to recommend nationalising the Japanese banking
>system?

Why? The U.S. effectively nationalized Continental Illinois in the mid-80s and Citibank in the late 80s, and took on $200 billion in bad S&L debts. Mexico nationalized its banks in the early 80s, Pinochet nationalized lots of bum Chilean debt, and lots of Latin American private sector debt became public sector debt during the 80s debt crisis. The Scandinavian countries socialized lots of bad bank debt in the late 80s/early 90 It's a well-established crisis management tecnique, of a sort that all you catastrophists are convinced doesn't work. In a hedging formula designed to annoy Lou, I'll say again maybe it won't work this time, maybe the crisis tendencies can't be displaced or deferred; maybe it is the day of reckoning. But then again, maybe not.

Doug



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