fantasy and political organization

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Jun 7 07:26:43 PDT 2001



>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>While underdeveloped nations still have something to gain from
>>protectionism, America, Europe, & Japan don't.
>
>I suspect only large "underdeveloped" countries could gain from
>protectionism now (abstracting from all the external political
>pressures - meaning from Washington and the IMF - that would make
>them very hard to sustain). That would mean China, India, maybe
>Brazil. But smaller than that, how can they do it? The internal
>market would be too small, and the native technology base too thin.
>
>Doug

The large home market -- the sine qua non of capitalist development -- does not primarily depend upon the size of the territory or population. Neither England (the first fully capitalist nation) nor Japan (the last to embark upon industrialization among rich nations) is large; in fact, they are rather tiny by any standard, and certainly far smaller than China, India, & Brazil. All so-called NICs are very small, too. The creation of the home market depends upon class relations (whether or not the agrarian sector has been proletarianized; whether or not the landless who migrate to urban centers can be absorbed into the regular & industrial sectors, rather than into the irregular & service sectors; whether or not the state actually exercises effective political control over all its territory; whether or not the state can effectively & equitably collect taxes, especially from capitalists & petty producers; whether or not the state holds other key economic instruments [controls over currency, interest rates, etc.]; etc.), reinforced or undermined by imperial powers' political interventions & competition in the world market.

That said, a large territory & population would be an advantage, provided that it is unified & well governed. So-called nation-states on the periphery have been built upon the ruins of the projects of visionary "nationalists" who in fact didn't think in terms of petty nations & who dreamt, instead, of "Gran Colombia," Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism, and so on.

Bolivarianamente,

Yoshie



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list