East Asia 1, Silicon Rentiers 0

Jonathan Lassen jjlassen at rochester.rr.com
Wed Jan 10 18:21:16 PST 2001


Dennis,

Sorry to keep on shooting cites out like this, but there are lots of people working on the regional and global dimensions of capitalism in East Asia: Mitchell Bernard, Robert Stevens, as well as Marty Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett in "Development, Crisis and Class Struggle: Learning from Japan and East Asia." And Samir Amin's work, which also incorporates East Asian capitalism in its theorizing, can hardly be accused of being confined within national boundaries.

For critiques of actually existing neoliberal capitalism based on concrete class struggles, you're going to have to deal with the already-existing theorizing of popular groups in the region, such as: the KCTU, the JCP, Thailand's Assembly of the Poor, BAYAN in the Philippines, PRD in Indonesia, the old Maoists, the nationalists, the Listian-left and new left in China, just to name a few. And then there's PP21, AMRC, the Third World Network, Global South, and lots of other regional groupings that deal with this stuff all the time. The stuff just almost never trickles up/down? because the US is still the beast.

A snippet from Marty Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett (2000):

p. 119

"...even though no new large-scale domestic industrial core was established [in Japan], the third phase of scrap-and-build [after 1986] did not make the Japanese economy less export dependent. It merely made this export dependence less domestically based and more indirect. Henceforth, Japan's continued export growth would mainly hinge on sales of the most advanced components and technologies to Japanese capital's offshore facilities. The sales to the Asian facilities would derive largely from these facilities' exports to the US and other developed country markets. This dynamic was reflected in the changing international composition of Japan's overall trade surplus: in 1984 just 3.2% of the total Japanese trade surplus was accounted for by Japan's trade surplus with East Asia; as of 1993, this share had risen to 57.2%."

Jonathan

At 12:42 PM 2001/1/10 -0800, you wrote:
>On Wed, 10 Jan 2001, Jonathan Lassen wrote:
>
> > I think there's a great deal of literature out there about why
> non-American
> > capitalism works. What about Amsden, Tabb and Wade?
>
>They've done excellent work (I'd also add Michael Gerlach's sterling
>"Alliance Capitalism" to the list), but they stay within very confined,
>national boundaries, and the problem is, things like the Mitsubishi
>keiretsu, or investment flows in the chip industry (not to mention the
>skyscraper-sized lizard of Eurocapitalism, currently rampaging through
>Eastern Europe), follow a multinational logic all their own. My point is
>that to resist this logic, we need to think it through concretely,
>i.e. rise from the abstract critique of neoliberal capital to the reality
>of the class struggles of, say, coastal China. Weirdly, much of the best
>global analysis nowadays takes place on the cultural level,
>e.g. explications of China's 5th generation filmmakers, or the wondrous
>achievements of the Hong Kong films. We don't yet have good ways of
>relating neoliberal economics to our cultural maps (of course, Seattle
>shows it can be done).
>
>-- Dennis



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