>>> Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> 02/26/00 01:49PM >>>
Enrique:
>> Can capitalism continue to exist if North America, Western Europe, and
>> Japan were to be totally delinked from the rest of the world? I doubt it.
>Why not? Europe thrived through the 50's, the 60's, the 70's...when, short of
>oil, it was fairly delinked from it, at least economically. And oil would not
>have been all that hard to replace: more public transportation, more coal, gas
>and nuclear power.
Not fairly but *totally* delinked. I'm asking people to imagine if capitalism could survive if North America, Western Europe, & Japan were *entirely* cut off from the rest of the world. No import, no export, no investment, no movement of manpower, no debt service, nothing -- no traffic between rich nations and the rest of the world. I doubt that capitalism could survive under the above conditions.
*************
CB: The reason it wouldn't survive is that it would have to turn on and exploit its domestic working classes even more than now, eventually begetting the ire of those proletariats, and forcing the socialist revolution. Superprofits from neo-colonialism is the buffer the imperialist ruling classes use to blunt the contradictions of the class struggle within the metropole nations. There has never been capitalism without colonialism.
CB