The Luxemburg/Lenin generation and a succession of Marxist thinkers through
to Harvey have had no alternative but to look to "displacement" of the final
crisis as an explanation for its failure to materialize in the most mature
capitalist economies. Without that theory to sustain them, they would have
ended up as social democrats or corporate executives. But Marx and Engels?
You think "the whole point" of his theory also was that the crises would be
displaced, rather than resulting in increasing immiseration in the developed
economies and socialist revolution?
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Patrick writes: * The intensity of uneven/combined development is naturally
>bound tobring some parts of the world economy into the fold, but don't get
>so
> enthusiastic about proletarianisation when you consider how many net
> jobs are to be found in Chinese manufacturing...
A 2005 study by the US Bureau of Labour Statistics noted that "in recent decades, China has become a manufacturing powerhouse. The country's official data showed 83 million manufacturing employees in 2002, but that figure is likely to be understated; the actual number was probably closer to 109 million. By contrast, in 2002, the Group of Seven (G7) major industrialized countries had a total of 53 million manufacturing workers."
See: http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2005/07/art2full.pdf
This observation is supported by a UN study the same year showing the Chinese share of global industrial output as having trebled between 1990 and 2002 - from 2.2 to 6.6%. By comparison, the US accounted for 23.3% of world manufacturing in 2002, up slightly from 20.7% in 1990, while the Japanese and German shares both declined, from 22.5% to 18.1% and from 10.2% to 7.9% respectively.
See: http://www.unido.org/file-storage/download/?file_id=44686 table 9.2, p.131.
I don't know of comparable studies which provide comparable data on the growth of Chinese manufacturing and jobs in the most recent period, but we can probably assume it's been, if anything, even more dramatic based on the explosive increase in overall Chinese GDP since 2002.
See: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/ICPINT/Resources/ICPreportprelim.pdf.