Date: Wed, 02 Nov 1994 11:15:47 +1000
From: Steve.Keen-AT-unsw.EDU.AU
Subject: Re: Market Socialism


Louis Proyect wrote:

|It occurs to me that the success of Western Europe, Japan and United
|States vis a vis the former Soviet bloc has less to do with the
|efficiency of "markets" but more to do with their plunder of the third
|world which occurred over a period of centuries and which catapulted
|those countries into the modern, industrial era...

There is much truth to this for Western Europe, some for the USA, but
almost none for Japan. While Japan's first rise from feudalism did
eventually result in extreme imperialism, they were a power before
they were imperialist. Their rise from atomic ashes was partly
financed by US money, but again they were already an economic power
by the time Japanese multinationals started to make much money out
of low wage exploitation of the third world.

The USA has been imperialist for large parts of this century, and
it did wage war against Mexico last century; but I doubt that
any accounting system would find that it made money out of it
"foreign adventures"--certainly in comparison to Western European
countries such as Holland (in particular), England, France, Spain,
Portrugal, where colonial exploitation was an inherent part of
government policy for centuries.

In other words, you have to use a dynamic internal to capitalism
to expain the growth of the USA and Japan. And that is something
which the Old Scribbler himself had no problems with.

Cheers, Steve Keen


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