File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9709, message 37


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



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