File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9712, message 77


Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 17:22:15 -0800 (PST)
From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond-AT-gladstone.uoregon.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: Containment and Pacification


On Wed, 3 Dec 1997, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

> So I don't quite agree with Dennis when he says:
> 
> "...how does this facilitate accumulation--well, obviously it doesn't.
> Which is why Japan and Europe effectively own the mortgage on our
> industrial base. American capitalism is fundamentally uncompetitive with
> its trading rivals...."
> 
> It has facilitated accumulation in America, and it will continue to do so
> for a while. But I do think that it has created certain divergences in
> strategies of accumulation between America and the rest of the core
> industrialized nations. This difference will probably diminish in time, as
> Europe and Japan discard the search for social democratic peace bought by
> "lifetime employment" in the primary labor market, the welfare state, etc.

My point was that the American jail-'em-or-draft-'em accumulation model
made sense only in the context of the American Empire, i.e. a situation
where American corporations were technologically, financially and
organizationally dominant in every major industry on the planet. This
situation has changed, but America continues to specialize in a rogue
military Keynesianism, to the tune of $280 billion a year or so (plus
another $50 billion per annum on cops, jails, courts etc.). Meanwhile, our
competitors invest more per capita in civilian industry than we do, have
more egalitarian systems of distribution, and in general are richer than
we are, even in that most mainstream of terms, per capita market GDP.

Let's not confuse the prosperity of a tiny elite of US rentiers with the
real industrial might of Japan and the EU in relation to a decidedly
inferior US industrial base. The crisis of the German welfare state is
really not just about the East; it's also about the gradual extension of
voting and citizenship rights to Germany's 10 million immigrants, many of
whom get benefits nowadays. It's just not as simple a situation as the
outright class barbarism sweeping America these days, and the
possibilities for resisting Capital as well as the concrete machinery of 
a nascent transnational welfare state are way, way more advanced in the 
Eurostate.

-- Dennis



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