On Jan 22, 2008, at 12:55 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>> On Jan 21, 2008, at 10:49 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
>>
>>> where's your marxian gut instincts, to hunt down all the
>>> partially devalorised constant K that could be returned to
>>> production
>>> were there the will and the market (i.e. demand side) and protection
>>> from competition?
>>>
>> I'm not sure what kind of system you're talking about here - some
>> sort of national protectionist capitalism, or some kind of autonomist
>> collectivism, or what.
>
>
> Ah, you duck the analytical question: is the Rust Belt economy
> overcapacity or undercapacity?
Compared to what? According to the Federal Reserve, capacity utilization in U.S. manufacturing was 79.5% in December - 77.3% in high-tech and 80.1% outside high-tech. That's a below the late-90s peak (though that peak was pushed higher by high-tech; outside high- tech, recent utilization rates are pretty much where they were in 1999). Capacity was reduced outside high-tech in 2003 and 2004, but it rose about 1% in 2006 and 2007. So yes, there's some overcapacity, but it's still nowhere near as bad as it was in the mid-70s and early-80s.
> On potential ways forward, as I understand it (from only a brief visit
> and follow-up reading), the Venezuelan strategy is to develop a
> variety
> of industries that were wasted away by neoliberalism, even if that
> means
> violation of WTO. Call it a 'basic needs ISI' plus manufacturing
> balancing, as opposed to traditional Third World ISI oriented to
> replacing luxury-good imports for a small fraction of the consuming
> population (i.e., the South African or Rhodesian models).
So we go from Argentina, to the Rust Belt, to Venezuela, to Rhodesia?
Doug