Date: Thu, 4 Sep 1997 14:16:04 -0700 (PDT) From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond-AT-gladstone.uoregon.edu> Subject: M-TH: Re: Query & Comment on East Asia On Wed, 3 Sep 1997, Doug Henwood wrote in regards to SDRs: > Keynesianism > failed, among other reasons, because it sought to outwit the class struggle > with clever solutions - easy money, deficit spending - ones that promised > more for folks on the bottom without taking away (much if anything) from > those on top (which is the way JMK wanted it). Obviously, that can't work. > Either it's all a sham, or something *is* taken away and given to those on > the bottom (inflation benefits debtors as it hurts creditors), or the real > power of those on the bottom is increased (a more generous welfare state > improves the bargaining power of the working class). So either this SDR > issue is a sham, or some real redistribution is undertaken. If the latter, > then it'd require a mobilization of a sort I don't see on the horizon right > now. Doug is on the mark as usual. The problem with SDRs or special drawing rights is that they're backed by national currencies: dollars, yen, and in a year or so, euros. They're just another form of international credit, and international credit is solidly in the hands of a nascently transnational finance-rentier capitalist class. Collectively, all those Soroses, Eisners and Gates ought to know they need insurance against further disruptions of a highly unstable, deeply leveraged, bubble-besotted superstructure (after the S & L disaster, the 3rd World debt crisis, the Japanese bubble and five-year-long banking crisis, the real estate bubble and bust, and now the Wall Street bubble, it's incredible that our elites still have the gall to claim that "markets are more efficient", but such is life in the Left-less 1990s for you) but then, there's no powerful workingclass movement to challenge them right now, so they all think, just like the liberal elite up till 1929, that their own investments will pan out, while the dummies (specifically, the 4.5 billion of us global proletarians) will get the shaft. This raises an interesting point, however, namely that the global credit structure of late capitalism has undergone a significant shift in the last twenty years: the USA has become a net debtor (to the tune of $840 billion, last I heard) and Japan and Central Europe are net creditors. The kind of mobilization Doug is talking about means, in a nutshell, soaking the new metropoles to pay for development elsewhere. And believe me, they do have the money: the German banking system has mushroomed from $2 trillion in assets in 1990 to around $4 trillion in 1996. Right now, the EU and Japan are investing a great deal in their new neocolonies of Eastern Europe/Southeast Asia, and have given the latter limited debt relief (10% of Poland's foreign debt, e.g.). This, along with drastically lowered interest rates in Japan, has prevented a global credit collapse (as opposed to the localized disasters of the Russian/Mexican marketization meltdowns, hastily recontained by the Paris Club banks and Clinton), but isn't enough to fund a genuine boom. Bottom line: the Long Depression of the 1990s grinds on. -- Dennis --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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