>And here
>arises an issue I would assume Doug has previously disabused
>anyone of raising on His list:
I hope the suggestion of godliness was just a typographical accident. But in general, there are no proscribed topics here.
> the struggle between financial circuits
>of K and "productive" circuits.
You're right that I'm skeptical of any analysis that draws too sharp a distinction, and especially one that spies a serious conflict, between the two. Under capitalism, there's no economic act that's undertaken except for money. Production presupposes the existence of earlier profits in monetary form, and, if all goes well, throws off new profits in monetary form. If expected M' isn't greater than the initial M, then there's no production of commodity, C.
And then there's South Africa's major industry, gold mining, which is a very basic primary sector activity undertaken to retrieve a metal that serves a monetary role. But who'd even mine tin or copper if not to sell it for money?
> (That's not between the "banks" and
>the "manufacturers," by the way, since the interpenetration is well
>advanced, but about the source of profits.) I'll come back to this in
>a minute because I think there is a major relationship here to the
>nation-state and its prospects (for Malaysia, e.g., the only way to
>understand Mahathir's exchange controls of September 1998 is, as
>Jomo KS has well documented, through considering the national-
>based cabal's interests).
There's little question that Mahathir's capital controls "worked" in the technical sense. But it shouldn't be forgotten that he's a repressive bigot. Critiques of international capital that amount to defenses of national capital can get very ugly. Leaving aside the heavy artillery of Naziism, in your part of the world, Patrick, we had capital controls and severe autarky under apartheid SA and Smith's Rhodesia. So when you talk about making alliances with "capitals" it puts me in mind of the downside. In the U.S. I see Nader people too willing to make allowances for the right (someone in the Nader circle has declared me "not a progressive," by the way), and the Fair Trade Campaign too reliant on money from the rabid Roger Milliken. I'm certainly not opposed to capital controls, but they do have a lot of bad associations.
>Separately off-list, if you want, I'll send over a paper that the
>Congress of SA Trade Unions recently commissioned on this very
>point: how reimposition of capital controls can allow not just for
>defensive currency support (as valuable as that would certainly be
>against periodic bear-raiders), but also for proto-Keynesian
>reflation.
With what capital?
>Angela, by invoking the difference between global speculative
>financial Kism and domestic-grounded Surplus Value creation, yes,
>those assumptions can be (though are not necessarily) affirmed.
What's domestic-grounded SV creation? Import substitution? Right now, real sector activity is deeply internationalized, with capital goods and workers coming from all over.
What kind of immigration policy does a nationalist developmental strategy pursue?
Doug