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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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