>At 02:05 PM 7/19/01 -0400, you wrote:
>>Jim Devine says:
>>
>>>Michael wrote:
>>>>It may be that intellectual property laws may be the most effective form
>>>>of protectionism devised so far.
>>>
>>>except that it's not the kind of thing that's called
>>>"protectionism." It protects individual corporations or other
>>>property-holders, not the domestic markets of countries. It's an
>>>extension of "normal" property rights like patents, copyrights,
>>>trade marks, etc. The owners of "intellectual property" can easily
>>>take their property and move to another country.
>>
>>The decline of protectionism + the rise of intellectual property
>>(among other things) = "Kautsky's story of 'ultra-imperialism' (the
>>rich capitalist powers unified against the world)...without the
>>positive connotations that Kautsky saw (the ending of the anarchy
>>of production)"?
>
>Instead of the _equation_ of the "decline of protectionism" (etc.)
>with ultra-imperialism (UI), I'd say that the former is the result
>of the latter.
>
>The rise of UI started after World War II, when the US became the
>hegemonic power in the capitalist sphere. The US power was cemented
>by elite fear of the USSR and of various popular revolutions, from
>Cuba (1960) to Portugal (1975) and beyond. US hegemony, along with
>fear of a return to a new Depression at the end of WW II, encouraged
>the creation of GATT and other efforts to unify the world market. In
>the early phases, US-based industry was dominant economically, so
>that they wanted to gain access to other countries' markets, so the
>US supported GATT. Over the years, the superiority of US-based
>industry has faded, but the generally pro-trade MNCs have gained
>much more clout.
>
>The US-led system of UI has changed a lot over the years, partly due
>to the disappearance of the USSR. There's a lot more emphasis on
>solidarity of the "trilateral" powers. Even though there are a lot
>of stresses within the UI coalition (cf. Kyoto), we see nothing
>similar to the aggressive competition amongst nation-states that
>prevailed before WW II.
>
>Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
There's nothing on the political horizon to replace US hegemony --
therefore Ellen's dissertation on dollarization holds up, I think,
despite the alarms sounded by Wynne Godley who writes as if the USA
had already entered into the same twilight of the empire that the UK
had earlier.
Can US hegemony be too strong, in the sense that you discuss in "The
Causes of the 1929-33 Great Collapse: A Marxian Interpretation" at
<http://clawww.lmu.edu/faculty/jdevine/subpages/depr/d4.html>?
Yoshie
