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One of my last endeavours as a University lecture was to help organize (c. 2006) a project where an Aboriginal community school sent presents of sporting equipment to a poor Chinese school. This was was a case of the poor helping the poorer. I was of course fully aware of the ironies involved. Australia had created a "futures fund" to take billions of dollars out of the economy and keep down domestic demand and the standard of living. Similarly the Chinese government had and still has a strategy of buying billions of dollars worth of American bonds to keep down domestic demand and the standard of living. I doubt if any of the powerful on either side would have known or even cared about the attempt to link up the schools. If anything the corrupt elite would snicker at such endeavours - very much like the CPSSU no doubt laughed at the international solidarity which lasted for so long. The current situation in China would no doubt be causing a lot of discussion within Party circles. My best guess and of course it can only be that, is that the CCP does not know what to do. Yet they must know that international demand for their goods is softening and will continue to soften and could even collapse dramatically at any moment. So some would see the logic of increasing domestic demand. Now that is the limit of my understanding of economics (very easy to reach!), but I do understand that increased demand capacity is never simply an economic matter. There is always a political cost to having a working class which has enough of the surplus to become confident, cheeky and even arrogant. In other words labour discipline deteriorates as in the glorious 1960s in the West. But there is really no alternative to increasing domestic demand in the current conjuncture. Is a Volcker type option open to the Chinese as Artesian speculated recently? I don't think so. So things appear to be stagnant but they are "mined with a motion and it crowds and combs to the fall". And all the time the leak in the Gulf has morphed from being a symbol to a concrete instance of the running sore that capitalism has become. comradely Gary ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
