[lbo-talk] Keiretsu Capital

Grant Lee grantlee at iinet.net.au
Tue Jan 13 17:15:11 PST 2004


From: <dredmond at efn.org>


> I've never ascribed East Asia's success to Lee Kuan Yew's "Asian values".

Lee generally spoke of Confucian/Chinese values, not about "Asian values", which _was_ Mahathir's phrase (and pretty much his alone).


> But we can indeed talk about a regional or East Asian accumulation
structure

Yes -- it's called capitalism. Apart from that, all generalised models break down.


> -- in addition to the economic muscle of the keiretsu/chaebol/Chinese biz
> clusters, with their networks of Asian affiliates,

Which have absolutely nothing in common with the huge trading houses, cartels and ethnic networks found in early European capitalism?


> there's lots of central bank
> cooperation, new trade agreements, significant flows of goods, capital,
and
> media culture, and of course new forms of class struggle and resistance.

Which is absolutely identical to the arrival of the modern age in Europe.


> The Chinese peasantry has been integrated
> into an enormous, rapidly-growing trading region; the export markets for
Soviet
> peasants collapsed thanks to the Great Depression.

The similarity I was alluding to is --- in both cases --- huge proportions of the population being involved in "unproductive" labour and the barrier this forms to further development.


> It's a delicious irony of history that Hong Kong's alleged laissez-faire
> economy is the unwitting product of state intervention:

Well, yeah. All supposedly laissez faire regimes are the result of state intervention. That's the point.


> the Shanghai
> bourgeoisie fled to HK, and then the mainland allowed the city-state to
> flourish afterwards (mostly because it needed a deep-water port, and a way
to
> outflank the US-imposed trade embargo).

Hong Kong was founded a long time before 1949.



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