On Mon, 9 Mar 1998, john gulick wrote:
> Your persistent celebration of Central European and Japanese
> neo-mercantilism misses the flip side of the dialectical coin -- neo-liberal
> America with its super-dollar and its credit card Keynesianism realizes the
> value that these countries' workers produce (kind of like the pre-Plaza Accord
> days all over again). You can't have your cake (boosting Germany and Japan)
> and eat it too (busting on late imperial Amerikka), b/c they are partners in
> crime.
Ah, but I come not to praise the new metropoles, but to specifically point
out that they really are *metropoles* -- zones where the wealth of the
entire planet has, through the incidents of accident and the magic of late
development accumulation regimes, been super-concentrated. Surely this
fact alone is of some small importance to Left praxis and theory, which
remains all too Americentric. The answer isn't to start hawking
the virtues of the yen-euro codominion, which will surely be one
of the budding growth industries of the early 21st century (one shudders
to think of the hordes of indigenous Thurows, Krugmans and Peters which
will soon be gracing the covers of Asian and European business
Web-channels), so much as to uncover the objective rifts, fissures, and
non-identities of the world-system -- the immanent, shifting but
inevitable conflict, occasionally open, but usually veiled -- between the
global proletariat and the multinational corporations which employ them.
The point is that East Asia and Central Europe are going to be the key
battlegrounds for the global class struggle; in a world-economy where the
US makes up only around 20% of total production, and is trillions of euros
in debt to the new metropoles, we like Britain before us are slowly but
inexorably becoming irrelevant to the command-and-control functions of
the global economy. We've got to fight the Silicon capitalists of the 21st
century as well as the mouldering Gingrichite revenants of the 19th.
-- Dennis
