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In a message dated 12/30/2009 2:03:08 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, [email protected] writes: > Anyone remembers the main precedent to this decision? Of course, we all do. Shall we end in a new Pearl Harbor?< Comment I am not at all sure if China’s excess or surplus steel capacity, is sufficient to cause the war drums to beat as imperial world war. I do not think so, at least on December 30, 2009. America is perpetually at war with someone and the American state long ago earned its title as the international hangman of revolution and the enemy of the people of earth. War by American imperialism happen nowadays for all kinds of reason, because war is driven as a profit making institution, popularly called the military-industrial complex. China’s problem is seeking bourgeois solution to common sense problems. China’s expanding steel capacity can be put to use for domestic development, and at the end of the day, this will happen no matter what kind of bourgeois nonsense is put forth by members of its educated elite and certain leaders in the CPC. . For instance China probably need a country wide mass transportation system requiring much steel. Hospital, schools, cultural centers and all kinds of uses for steel are needed in the domestic economy. This is not to say I know what is best for the people of China. I do not. It is to say China’s problem is not overcapacity, but rather a lack of political will and prostituting itself to American capitalist theoretical models, which in reality never were applied in America. All this talk about free markets is just so much nonsense. At every stage in the development of American capitalism, government has paved the way for each new boundary of development. From the Erie Canal to the Tennessee Valley Authority to our modern highway system to new infrastructure projects being proposed today. Heck, everyone knows that America went into Civil War over the role of government and whose distinct economic interest government would cater to. Certain people in positions of power in China, advocating what amounts to classical Central bank polices are no more than modern day Chiang Kai-shek’s, seeking further integration into the new financial architecture.This is not to suggest I am trying to dictate government policy for China. I am not. The current financial crisis offers China an opportunity to lurch policy back unto the right direction. The virtual collapse of the “export sector” presents the classical danger/opportunity scenario. Foreign markets registered an abrupt contraction in 2007 causing massive closure of ten of thousands of foreign joint-ventures or wholly-owned enterprises, big, medium and small, in the Chinese export sector located along the coastal regions. In fact, dealing with 10 million migrant workers made unemployed by the collapse of the export sector and another 10 million college graduates - not to mention a certain disruption in the agricultural sector, is going to require innovative communist economic policy. In addition 20 million new workers enter the economy seeking deployment of their labor every year. Finally, China population grows by 12 million a year. A booming export sector under the optimum of conditions cannot meet the demand for improved living conditions of just the 20 million new workers entering the labor market annually. The wages paid in the export economy are to low to drive domestic consumption as an overriding impulse to expand domestic production. When any sector of a country economy collapses from lack of market demand, but its products are socially necessary to society, these industries cannot be allowed to lie idle and those who suggest such should be put on trial and jailed for crimes against humanity. Thus, in my way of thinking China, as does America, needs continuous “ economic stimulus,“ as direct consumption rights for the masses. Giving people socially necessary means of life, when they have no money to buy such means, will in fact drive domestic production. This is not to say I know exactly what is right for China. I do not. It does strike me as interesting that some leaders and policy makers in China would set a goal of reaching half the wage level of America in fifty years or by the year 2050. - “to increase per-capita GNP to the level of the medium-developed countries by 2050.” The old Soviet plans of the 1930s were much more ambitious than this. Finally, China could reach its 2050 target in ten years if American capitalist reduced wages by 50% in the next decade. It might not be wise or the best approach to economic policy to set per capital income in America as an index. Real time consumption and infrastructure development - schools, hospitals and improving agricultural production might be a better bookmark. II. To break out of the bourgeois conundrum that appears as surplus capacity, infrastructure projects along side a system of permanent sovereign birth credit instruments - (the right to acquire socially necessary means of life), without a prior demand for labor contribution, could be implemented with no harm to anyone. The worst thing that could happen is that a few million people would not try to contribute their labor, but in an era of permanent labor gut, more people than this are not going to be employed by capital anyway. Who but an American bourgeois degenerate can argue against providing people consumption rights when free market economy proves itself unwilling and incapable of providing such? Expanding domestic consumption, on the aforementioned basis, would stimulate and drive production as the program of revolutionary communism. Wages of the workers in the state sector could be doubled every two year for the next six years as a platform of domestic consumption growth. Then labor could be deployed to meet the demand for all kinds of services required by an advancing society. The appearance of excess capacity would disappear over night. Such a program would entail shifting the mode of distribution in the domestic economy, which is going to happen one way or another. The administration apparatus for such a policy already exists in the 159 large State Owned Enterprises (SOE), constituting the “public/state sector” of the economy, providing all the fundamental inputs from utilities, heavy industry and energy resources. At the end of the day it is this institution which has facilitated private sector growth, outside the export sector and remains the foundation of national growth. . The export market is and will always be small compared to the potential of the Chinese domestic market, consisting of 1.4 billion people. All of Europe - 731 million and America - 300 million, is only one billion or so people. South America population is 371,090,000. Europe, America and South America ’s combined population is smaller than the population of China. Obviously, the leaders of China are aware of this and more attune to the actual conditions of their economy. The role of exports and technological transfer is important for any country. Both are important but should be subordinate to developing and expanding a system of domestic sovereign credit, detached from and not requiring a prior labor contribution from the masses. I most certainly do not know what is best for any country other than my own, but it seems any country that follows the American path will end up in the mess we know find ourselves in. For my money, several hundred "captain of American finance" need to be jailed and put of trial, along with half the Senate for crimes against the American people. . Thus, I vote against capital, with my first vote against the central bank theorists, domestically and internationally, who should be put on trial and compelled to explain the logic of their program in clear terms. WL. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
