It's the weak link of neoliberalism, for sure. Japan's problem is, it doesn't have an EU-style superstate to funnel capital to its neighbors.
At 23:34 17/03/01 -0800, Dennis wrote:
>On Thu, 15 Mar 2001, Chris Burford wrote:
>
> > So if they have to destroy a significant fraction of their capital,
> > their most rational reform would be to turn their investments in their
> > neighbours into outright gifts and hope to regenerate current economic
> > activity in Japan on the strength of increased economic activity in
> > the region as a whole.
>
>Who said anything about destruction? The point is East Asia has to start
>consuming what it produces. The US current account deficit can't go much
>higher without causing major havoc, and the Eurobourgies are not about to
>allow Japan to bulldoze the EU's industrial base.
>
>East Asian workers need *a raise* -- either via feisty unions, more
>deficit spending, or a welfare state, take your pick.
Thanks for coming back.
You may think I am employing the concept of destruction of capital pedantically or mechanically, or may be I have jumped several steps in connecting it with your comment about the need for Japan to funnel capital to its neighbours in the way the EU does, but the person I had in mind who said anything about destruction was Marx.
He wrote in the first section of the Manifesto:
"how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones."
The Mainfesto is a declaratory work rather than an analytical work. But the concept of a destruction of a proportion of the productive forces, which means the destruction of capital as well as the material closure of shipyards, mines, and chainstores etc, is consistent with the marxian concept of the total exchange value in an economy being related to the total volume of commodities in circulation.
You point out that east Asia as a whole needs to become a more prosperous market. At the same time an article in yesterday's Guardian summarises the situation that Japanese banks need to write off 30 trillion yen of "non-performing" loans.
Now suppose the impossible, that the socialist revolution for which Yoshie said Japan is in many ways ripe, took place, and the new government held talks with the Peoples Republic of China, and others about how to strengthen the east Asian economy as whole. Would it not be in the direct material interests of the workers of Japan and east Asia, if those 30 trillion yen were written off by an accounting device that enabled accumulation (socialist hopefully) to resume on the basis of the much improved purchasing power of the east Asian region as a whole?
Without such a major international financial understanding your other measures for increasing prosperity in the rest of east Asia, feisty unions, more welfare state, deficit spending, will rebound on the international viability of their economies in a world ruled by finance capital.
The subtlety lies in the accounting devices by which capitalism writes off (destroys) portions of itself. But if we follow the money closely and clear-headedly enough we can argue that it should be done in such a manner as to ensure the victory of living labour over dead labour, and the working people of the world over any particular national section of capital.
Europe in a thoroughly reformist way, has found a method of transmitting Germany's surplus to develop a wider European market.
That at any rate was my meaning, which I thought was compatible with yours.
Chris Burford
London
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