> Coherent thoughts and lucid words elude me at the moment, but the effect
> of
> this article is more jarring than any other seemingly innocuous piece of
> journalism I've read in a long while. At one and the same time this piece
> conveys that 1) "globalism," that peculiar admixture of world-spanning
> neo-liberalism and overripe US financial-military imperialism, looks far,
> far different than any acute observer could have prognosticated in the
> late
> 1990's and 2) the confluence of political trends that respond to/exploit
> the
> contradictions of "globalism" are far, far more regressive than any
> hopeful
> radical internationalist might have envisioned in the late 1990's.
>
> In the metropolitan centers, you've got decadent concentrations of hedge
> fund and private equity wealth; in select "authoritarian capitalist"
> semi-peripheries, you've got cliques of propertied power taking advantage
> of
> primary commodity or transnational assembly line booms to buy into and
> sustain inequality-enhancing asset bubbles for sale on Wall Street or the
> City of London. In the former, socio-political conditions for
> nativist-populist reactions are being sown deeper every day; in the
> latter,
> regimes that style themselves as national developmentalist but in fact are
> mostly about private accumulation gather strength every day. And the two
> tendencies strengthen one another.
====================================
This is true. Globalism is shaping up much differently than a "radical
internationalist" might have expected even a decade ago, primarily due to
China's spectacular transformation and growth, the massive buildup of FX
reserves there and in other developing countries, and the accelerating
integration of the world capitalist economy in the intervening period. There
has been an interesting discussion of all these phenomena recently on Louis
Proyect's Marxism list.
The appearance of so-called "sovereign wealth funds" in China, Singapore, and the Mideast aggressively seeking overseas acquisitions, such as the WSJ describes, does challenge our traditional understanding of the relations between the more economically advanced and poorer countries of the world - embodied in the classic concept of imperialism - doesn't it?
Lenin, you'll recall, described "the export of capital" as "typical" of imperialism. But he and the other theorists of imperialism were referring to the lending relationship which existed between the capital-rich imperialist "core" countries and the poor and mostly colonized and semi-colonized nations a century ago. China's current capital exports to the most developed capitalist countries are an unanticipated reversal of the situation which prevailed in Lenin's time and during the 20th century through to the Asian monetary crisis at its end.
The outward foreign direct investment in banks and corporations by China and others to which the article refers is still in its embryonic stages and small in percentage terms, but the export of capital, as we know, also includes portfolio capital - state and private investment in foreign stocks, bonds, and other securities - or what Lenin called "usury imperialism". By that definition, China with over $1.3 trillion in FX reserves, most of it invested in US Treasury bills, notes and bonds, is a very significant capital exporter, as are other "emerging" capitalist economies.
Implicit, of course, in the notion of imperialism is the control it gives the lending countries over the economic and political development of the debtor nations. It remains to be seen how this will play out, for example, in China's case. The Chinese government lends on more favourable terms than do those of the OECD countries, and though the heightened activity of China's banks, energy and other corporations have raised some concern in Africa and elsewhere, the Chinese still seem to be mostly viewed as counterweights to rather than adjuncts of imperialism. Certainly, at this stage, China can't be said to control the domestic or foreign policy of its largest debtor, the US, (if only) although its role in financing the US current account deficit has given it invaluable leverage against US protectionist efforts to block its exports and against efforts of the US state to isolate it militarily and diplomatically.
Certainly an interesting subject, and one which I'm sure we'll be increasingly having to grapple with.