----- Original Message ----- From: "Dennis Robert Redmond" <dredmond at efn.org> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2001 8:49 PM Subject: Re: Just in time for Davos
I think our "differences" here are exaggerated, or else someone have an excessively rosy view of East Asian capitalism.
I won't argue over whether there are different regimes of capitalist accumulation in different parts of the world. I'm sure there are, it would be surprising if there weren't.
The issues are:
Is East Asian capitalism driven, in the final analysis, by the quest for maximum profit? If it isn't, than it's something different all right, but it wouldn't be capitalism. If it is, then on this obviously defining characteristic of capitalism, they think exactly like Wall Street, and want to be like Wall Street - no, better yet, they want to BE Wall Street, if only they can win out in the global competition.
Is investing in a chip always more historically progressive than investing in a security? Well, it all depends on where that chip - or that security - ends up going to. If that chip or that security ends up contributing to the enormous expansion of GDP that just came to an end, apparently, in the US recently, then I would say that this is not only not a progressive, but a regresssive result, regardless of the East Asian origins of the chip, in the prevailing historical circumstances. Not to mention that quite a few of said chips were bound for use in Wall Street, to spin up the turnover time of the money product of evil finance industry.
Amd finally, is not the U.S. military based in East Asia by invitation of these very same keiretsu and chaebol capitalist regimes, in the face of the intense hostility to their presence by the peoples of such countries?
-Brad Mayer Oakland, CA
> On Wed, 31 Jan 2001, Brad Mayer wrote:
>
> > I rather doubt that the East Asian bourgeoisie, especially the one in
> > Tokyo, have any higher priority other than joining their "rentier"
brethren
> > in the financial plunder. And this is, after all, _calculated_ plunder,
>
> If so, the Nikkei would be at 30,000 and Japanese investment would be at
> 15%. But the Nikkei is at 13,000 and rates of national investment are 28%.
> Amsden, Wade, Gerlach et. al. have shown pretty convincingly that East
> Asian keiretsu capitalism is organized differently, has different
> priorities, and thinks differently from Wall Street. The concept of the
> total system doesn't mean that everything is the same; it means there are
> global equivalences, which are unstable, they can emerge out of nowhere
> and also fall apart (markets, currencies, firms, etc.). South Korean
> elites invest in Korea, and not in Swiss real estate; NEC is getting into
> the systems-on-a-chip biz, not stock punting; VIA is eating up Intel's
> marketshare in mobos, etc. This needs explanation, not comforting thoughts
> that, anyway, the whole world is like the US. It's not, and that's why the
> US has a huge military machine and deploys it as regularly as it does.
>
> -- Dennis
>
>