Bond against _Empire_

[Nathan Newman]

And even worse, once most states develop a "national champion", they usually
hook up with international capital and lobby to cut exactly the programs
that led to their own growth.  Peter (my dissertation advisor) basically saw
most state-led gambits as just one more route to globalization, sometimes
better for the population when not in the hands of kleptocratic states, but
not creating any real autonomy, since any strengthening of local bourgois
forces inevitably led to the original social impulse being stomped.  He had
a lot of sympathy for the Wallerstein view that everything from Chinese
communism to "national champion" development were just various forms of
jockeying to jump rungs on the global capitalist hierarchy, not real
alternatives to internationalization.

Nathan Newman

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brad DeLong" <jbdelong at uclink.berkeley.edu>
Why do you think that Brazil or India could do it? My reading of
Peter Evans's _Embedded Autonomy_ is that the Brazilian government
decided that it needed to develop a computer hardware manufacturing
capacity, and with heroic efforts over a decade managed to develop
the capability to build a computer eight years behind the times at a
cost four times what it took Digital Equipment to make it--but that
in the meantime every business and consumer in Brazil who wanted to
actually *use* computers was very, very heavily taxed. And India's
pre-liberalization growth was not impressive at all. (Of course, its
post-liberalization change in income distribution has not been
impressive either.)

Brad DeLong