Re: [Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey

[Walter Daum via Marxism]

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Patrick Bond wrote: David's just replied to the latest version of the 
critique by John Smith, published recently in the Review of African 
Political Economy:

http://roape.net/2018/02/05/realities-ground-david-harvey-replies-john-smith/

I’m not convinced. Harvey claims that Smith’s GPS is cockeyed and that 
is wrong to interpret the reversal of the East-to-West drain as the same 
as South-to-North. He says that for him the East means the block 
consisting of Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. And he 
says that “wealth has moved from West to East.”


It is of course true that this East has grown much wealthier, and has 
gained relatively in comparison to the rest of the world. But that is 
not exactly what he said in his commentary that Smith quoted and in 
previous works – namely, that the "flow of value" had shifted and has 
largely been reversed, so that the East is now "draining" value from the 
West. There is a difference between the amount of wealth in a region and 
which way the wealth flows.


Moreover, as to East vs South, in a 2009 article on Socialist Project 
(and the next year in The Enigma of Capital), Harvey wrote that this 
unprecedented shift "has reversed the long-standing drain of wealth from 
East, Southeast and South Asia to Europe and North America that had been 
occurring since the eighteenth century." Here, with Southeast and South 
Asia included, it appears that the reverse drain now goes not just to 
China, Japan and the "Tigers" but also to poorer countries like India, 
Bangladesh, Pakistan, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines and 
Indonesia.


Harvey supplies no figures, but I think it hard to believe that the new 
wealth in Harvey's East is derived from draining value from the West. 
(All the harder to believe this of Cambodia and Bangladesh!) Where, for 
example, does China's growth and wealth come from? Above all, from the 
super-exploitation of hundreds of millions of *Chinese* workers, many of 
them migrants driven economically out of their rural homes to the cities 
where they live and labor under miserable conditions (remember the 
Foxconn suicides) with wages one-tenth or less of those in the West.


Yes, China and Japan own lots of US debt. But the rate of return they 
get on it is close to zero, as Larry Summers has gloated. More 
generally, China's overseas investment income has been in the red for years.


It is an extremely dubious proposition that the flows of centuries have 
reversed direction and that the East in Harvey’s terms is draining value 
from the West – and even more dubious that, as he implied previously, 
that the South is draining value from the North. I can believe that the 
East, like the West, is draining value from the South. But that is not 
what Harvey’s GPS tells us.


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Re: [Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey

[Patrick Bond via Marxism]

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On 2017/09/03 01:00 PM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism wrote:

https://rdln.wordpress.com/2017/09/03/imperialism-a-critique-of-david-harvey/


David's just replied to the latest version of the critique by John 
Smith, published recently in the Review of African Political Economy:


http://roape.net/2018/02/05/realities-ground-david-harvey-replies-john-smith/

Realities on the Ground: David Harvey replies to John Smith

John Smith is lost in the desert and dying for water. His trusty GPS 
system tells him there is fresh water ten miles to the East. Since he 
believes ‘for East to West’ one should ‘read South to North,’ he heads 
off to the South never to be seen again. This is alas the quality of the 
argument he makes against me.


The East whereof I speak when I comment that wealth has moved from West 
to East in recent times, is constituted by China, now the second largest 
economy in the world (if Europe is not considered as one economy) 
followed by Japan as the third largest economy. Add in South Korea, 
Taiwan and (with a bit of geographical license) Singapore and you have a 
power block in the global economy (once referred to as the ‘flying 
geese’ model of capitalist development) that now accounts for roughly a 
third of total global GDP (compared to North America that now accounts 
for just over a quarter).  If we look back at the world as it was 
ordered in, say, 1960, then the astonishing rise of East Asia as a power 
center of global capital accumulation will be blindingly obvious.


The Chinese and the Japanese now own large chunks of a spiraling US 
government debt. There has also been an interesting sequence of each 
national economy in East Asia taking its turn in searching out a spatial 
fix for the massive amounts of surplus capital being accumulated within 
their borders.  Japan began capital export in the late 1960s, South 
Korea in the late 1970s, Taiwan in the early 1980s.  A lot of that 
investment went to North America and Europe.


Now it is China’s turn.  A map of Chinese foreign investment in 2000 was 
almost totally empty.  Now a flood of it is passing not only along the 
‘One Belt One Road’ through Central Asia into Europe, but also 
throughout East Africa in particular and into Latin America (Ecuador has 
more than half its foreign direct investment from China).  When China 
invited leaders from around the world to attend a One Belt One Road 
conference in May of 2017, more than forty world leaders came to listen 
to President Xi enunciate what many there saw as the initiation of a new 
world order in which China would be a (if not the) hegemonic power.  
Does this mean China is the new imperialist power?


There are interesting micro-features to this scenario.  When we read 
accounts of awful super-exploitative conditions in manufacturing in the 
global South it often transpires that it is Taiwanese or South Korean 
firms that are involved even as the final product finds its way to 
Europe or the United States.  Chinese thirst for minerals and 
agricultural commodities (soy beans in particular) means that Chinese 
firms are also at the center of an extractivism that is wrecking the 
landscape all around the world (look at Latin America).  A cursory look 
at land grabs all across Africa shows Chinese companies and wealth funds 
are way ahead of everyone else in their acquisitions. The two largest 
mineral companies operating in Zambia’s copper belt are Indian and Chinese.


So, what does the fixed, rigid theory of imperialism to which John Smith 
appeals have to say about all of this?


According to John Smith I failed to take up the question of imperialism 
in The Limits to Capital.  I mentioned it only once, he says.  The index 
records some 24 mentions and the last chapter is entitled “the 
dialectics of imperialism.” It is perfectly true that I there found the 
traditional conception of imperialism derived from Lenin (and 
subsequently set in stone by the likes of John Smith) inadequate to 
describe the complex spatial, interterritorial and place-specific forms 
of production, realization and distribution that were going on around 
the world.


In this I was later intrigued to find a fellow spirit in Giovanni 
Arrighi who in The Geometry of Imperialism (written around the same 
time) abandons the concept of imperialism (or for that matter the rigid 
geography of core and periphery set out in world systems theory) in 
favor of a more open and fluid analysis of shifting hegemonies within 
the world system.  Neither of us deny that value produced in one place 
ends up being appropriated somewhere else and there is a degree of 
viciousness in all of this that is 

Re: [Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey

[Michael Yates via Marxism]

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I would be surprised if those discussion China as imperialist have read John 
Smith's book.
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Re: [Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey

[RKOB via Marxism]

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In my opinion China has clearly become an imperialist power in the last 
decade. Nevertheless, its development has a clear uneven character.


For those who are interested in this issue I would like to refer to a 
number of studies and pamphlets:


China‘s transformation into an imperialist power. A study of the 
economic, political and military aspects of China as a Great Power, 
http://www.thecommunists.net/publications/revcom-number-4;


China’s Emergence as an Imperialist Power, 
http://newpol.org/content/china%E2%80%99s-emergence-%E2%80%A8imperialist-power


Is Lenin’s Theory of Imperialism Incompatible with the Concept of 
Permanent Revolution? 
https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/imperialism-theory-and-permanent-revolution/


The China Question and the Marxist Theory of Imperialism, 
https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/reply-to-csr-pco-on-china/


Lenin’s Theory of Imperialism and the Rise of Russia as a Great Power. 
On the Understanding and Misunderstanding of Today’s Inter-Imperialist 
Rivalry in the Light of Lenin’s Theory of Imperialism, 
http://www.thecommunists.net/theory/imperialism-theory-and-russia/


Russia and China as Great Imperialist Powers. A Summary of the RCIT’s 
Analysis, http://www.thecommunists.net/theory/imperialist-china-and-russia/



Am 04.09.2017 um 07:26 schrieb mkaradjis . via Marxism:

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"Chinese corporations are investing in mines in Africa and Latin
America, ports in Australia, Greece and Sri Lanka, etc."

It is fascinating to think the degree to which Chinese imperialism
plays such a dominant role in Greece through control of its main port,
yet if we were forced to think through old, established dogmatic
categories, we would have to insist that Greece was an imperialist
country and China was a semi-colonial (or "oppressed") country.

It is a good example of how refusing to see Russia and China as
imperialist powers seems to me to be a refusal to simply look today's
reality in the face.

It is true, as Chris says, that it is complicated, "because China is
still a source of cheap labor for US, European and Japanese
corporations." That was also true of Tsarist Russia, whose vast
countryside was immensely more backward than is today's Chinese
countryside, yet Lenin, correctly, saw it as an imperialist country. I
believe that is called "the law of uneven and combined development."

On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 11:11 AM, Chris Slee via Marxism
<marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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While I disagree with some of David Harvey's formulations, I think we do have 
to recognise that the rise of China is a significant change.

Chinese corporations are investing in mines in Africa and Latin America, ports 
in Australia, Greece and Sri Lanka, etc.

Does this make China an imperialist power?

The situation is complicated, because China is still a source of cheap labor 
for US, European and Japanese corporations.

Chris Slee

From: Marxism <marxism-boun...@lists.csbs.utah.edu> on behalf of Philip Ferguson via 
Marxism <marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu>
Sent: Sunday, 3 September 2017 9:00:26 PM
To: Chris Slee
Subject: [Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey

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https://rdln.wordpress.com/2017/09/03/imperialism-a-critique-of-david-harvey/
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Re: [Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey

[mkaradjis . via Marxism]

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"Chinese corporations are investing in mines in Africa and Latin
America, ports in Australia, Greece and Sri Lanka, etc."

It is fascinating to think the degree to which Chinese imperialism
plays such a dominant role in Greece through control of its main port,
yet if we were forced to think through old, established dogmatic
categories, we would have to insist that Greece was an imperialist
country and China was a semi-colonial (or "oppressed") country.

It is a good example of how refusing to see Russia and China as
imperialist powers seems to me to be a refusal to simply look today's
reality in the face.

It is true, as Chris says, that it is complicated, "because China is
still a source of cheap labor for US, European and Japanese
corporations." That was also true of Tsarist Russia, whose vast
countryside was immensely more backward than is today's Chinese
countryside, yet Lenin, correctly, saw it as an imperialist country. I
believe that is called "the law of uneven and combined development."

On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 11:11 AM, Chris Slee via Marxism
<marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:
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>
> While I disagree with some of David Harvey's formulations, I think we do have 
> to recognise that the rise of China is a significant change.
>
> Chinese corporations are investing in mines in Africa and Latin America, 
> ports in Australia, Greece and Sri Lanka, etc.
>
> Does this make China an imperialist power?
>
> The situation is complicated, because China is still a source of cheap labor 
> for US, European and Japanese corporations.
>
> Chris Slee
> 
> From: Marxism <marxism-boun...@lists.csbs.utah.edu> on behalf of Philip 
> Ferguson via Marxism <marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu>
> Sent: Sunday, 3 September 2017 9:00:26 PM
> To: Chris Slee
> Subject: [Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey
>
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>
> https://rdln.wordpress.com/2017/09/03/imperialism-a-critique-of-david-harvey/
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Re: [Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

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Yes, rise of China is very important.  And exactly what category it fits in
is complex for the reasons you identify.

Phil



On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 1:11 PM, Chris Slee  wrote:

> While I disagree with some of David Harvey's formulations, I think we do
> have to recognise that the rise of China is a significant change.
>
> Chinese corporations are investing in mines in Africa and Latin America,
> ports in Australia, Greece and Sri Lanka, etc.
>
> Does this make China an imperialist power?
>
> The situation is complicated, because China is still a source of cheap
> labor for US, European and Japanese corporations.
>
> Chris Slee
>
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Re: [Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey

[Tristan Sloughter via Marxism]

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> Chinese corporations are investing in mines in Africa and Latin America

And military bases in Africa and the Middle East.
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Re: [Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey

[Chris Slee via Marxism]

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While I disagree with some of David Harvey's formulations, I think we do have 
to recognise that the rise of China is a significant change.

Chinese corporations are investing in mines in Africa and Latin America, ports 
in Australia, Greece and Sri Lanka, etc.

Does this make China an imperialist power?

The situation is complicated, because China is still a source of cheap labor 
for US, European and Japanese corporations.

Chris Slee

From: Marxism <marxism-boun...@lists.csbs.utah.edu> on behalf of Philip 
Ferguson via Marxism <marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu>
Sent: Sunday, 3 September 2017 9:00:26 PM
To: Chris Slee
Subject: [Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey

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https://rdln.wordpress.com/2017/09/03/imperialism-a-critique-of-david-harvey/
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[Marxism] Imperialism: a critique of David Harvey

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

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