It is basically the "Mystery of Capital" thesis Hernando de Soto puts out or the converse to "What's the matter with Kansas?"
But these structures you describe don't seem to be trans-capitalist but pre-capitalist. That's fine. Such structures are really important, but it's not as if Europe, for example, isn't filled with them.
Capitalism makes such structures regular, fungible and liquid and it is really the capitalist institutions of the developed countries that are being adopted, as you describe it.
So I'm not seeing a reason to think the BRIC countries should become another pole in the global order rather than something dominated Empire's capitalism.
Rather, I'm seeing the BOVESPA down from 73 to 56, RTS from 25 to 17, SENSEX from 20 to 15, and Shanghai down from 6 to 2.5, all within a year and none showing particular signs of stopping their descent. These countries are all holding dollars and trading in dollars. Their own currencies are not internationalizing. And so, at the very least, we can conclude that their financial systems are not serving their "developmental" systems.
On top of that, their governments are - it seems to me - major impediments to an independent and transformative future led by these developmental structures you see.
>From best to worst, Brasil is doing okay, India is not succeeding in
serving its working class, Russia is a militaristic nightmare and
China? I don't see the Wal-Mart Communist Party handing over the reins
of power to anybody or anything any time soon.
If the thesis is that these countries will somehow out-transform Capital simply because they are pre-capitalist, I don't buy it. If the thesis is that they will catch up really fast to stagnant capital, I think it's going to be tough with these bubbles bursting.
On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 11:30 PM, <dredmond at efn.org> wrote:
> On Tue, August 19, 2008 10:33 pm, boddi satva wrote:
>
>> Second, the governmental structures of China and Russia are a terrible
>> model for the world to follow.
>
> Developmental states are not the same thing as the governments which spawn
> them, nor are they fixed in structure forever - they include things like
> social networks, civic participation, environmental regulations, cultural
> commons, science and technology, etc. China has quite a sophisticated
> developmental state, Russia and Venezuela are still in the midst of
> creating such states, and it looks like Brazil is just beginning the
> process (Brazil experts, correct me if I'm wrong).
>
> But this isn't the Cold War model of exporting static ideologies or
> systems - what's happening is that the semi-periphery is learning from
> itself, through trade, tourism, institutional contacts, and flows of
> media. So it's not that Poland, for example, simply adopted the EU way of
> doing things. Rather, Poland looked at what Spain did, what Ireland did,
> what Finland did, and copied what it needed. Russia is borrowing from
> Singapore (electronics zones) and France (aviation holding companies).
> Vietnam is borrowing from Shenzhen, China (export processing) and Taiwan
> (rural industrialization).
>
> -- DRR
>
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