Rob Schaap Thu, 7 Oct 1999 08:07:06 +1000
>So communications technology has helped control US inventories and consumer
>spending has been supporting the US economy. And perhaps an economy so
>dominant that it can export much of the globe's volatility to other
>economies through its finance sector...
Indeed
>But globalism cuts both ways, and the list of thinkable scenarios by which
>interest rates could hit the credit sector or foreign money could leave US
>markets, or e-commerce could cut profits, or revitalised labour could do
>the same, or Chinese domestic turmoil could cut projections, or ...
>
>
>Keynes's philosopher-king lever-wallah could have done the same if the
>second and third worlds and the longer term weren't his responsibility.
I doubt that the smug dominance of the US hegemony is likely to be punished in the way justice requires. I do not mean that the contradictions are not there, and it is true that Greenspan has his worries, but a little worry is part of a periodic corrective process for the continued dominance of US finance capital.
Essentially capitalism means the centralisation of capital. To he that hath, more shall be given, as in Jesus's parable on sound investment policy. We are talking about the law of uneven accumulation of capital on a world scale, even if Jesus, living in the Roman Empire before the capitalist mode of production had become dominant, was not able to expound it in a dialectical materialist way.
Rob suggests that western economists with dreams of omnipotence ignore the second or third worlds. That is largely true for the third world in that they assume it will take up the slack. Very sad, of course, and distasteful when muslims start killing christians in the island chains of South East Asia or christians kill muslims in the ethnic maze of the Balkans. But these are just details in the big picture.
That overall picture on a world scale is that everyone in practice assumes that the *third world provides the reserve army of labour for the world capitalist system*. That reserve army of labour is sometimes drawn into the world market, sometimes dumped and left as lumpen proletariat, in ever growing connurbations, as peasants pour off the land all over the third world.
How Keynes's philosopher king ought to respond is by accepting that deficit spending by governments causes problems on the level of individual states, but there is no reason why his arguments should not genuinely apply on a world scale. The snag of course for the electorates of the west, is that almost all the deficit spending ought to go to those countries in which the price of labour power may be anything down to a thirtieth of that in the west.
But if this is not done, the numbers of forced economic migrants will rise by the millions even faster, society will fragment even more and provide the breeding ground for vicious communal tensions and wars.
Could they be induced to think of a little charity as an insurance policy...?
Or is it not better to proceed from the stance of demanding that the world economy the social product of the collective labour of the people of the world, should be run in the interests of the people of the world?
Chris Burford
London