Friday, February 2, 2018

Michael Roberts — Trading economics the Chinese way

In my view, the Chinese economy remains at a structural crossroads. The state and state enterprises continue to dominate the economy in investment, employment and production. That means that foreign capital, domestic private capital and market forces do not hold sway, even though they have been increasing in weight and power over the last 30 years.
My view is controversial in Marxist circles. The vast majority of Marxist economists and ‘experts’ on Marx’s ‘theory of the state’ reckon that China is capitalist or ‘state capitalist’. But for me, the class nature of the Chinese state remains open.
All I would add at this point is to remind readers of the data that I published in a past post on the sheer weight of the public sector and public assets in the Chinese economy.…
The high ratio of publically owned to privately owned capital is at the bottom of the US complaint against "unfair competition" by China. The argument is that state subsidies skew competition in the favor of state actors.

This means that the liberal world cannot exist side-by-side with a socialist system. Collision course.

But the post is really about a new economic theory called "trading economics." It's something everyone should become familiar with given the influence of the Chinese economy on the global economy. Roberts provides a summary.

Trading economics accords with the Chinese geopolitical strategy of trade instead of war (war viewed as the chief strategy of the US).

Michael Roberts Blog
Trading economics the Chinese way
Michael Roberts

3 comments:

Noah Way said...

Exactly. "Democracy" is just a code word for capitalism, and its goal is to eliminate any system that could possibly compete with it.which explains why the US is so busy "spreading democracy" at the point of a gun.

NeilW said...

Another patterns in the tea leaves individual I see. The Chinese are right. The future lies in simulations and big data collected from real people interacting with the simulation, not looking for teddy bears in clouds.

What's scary about this is the Chinese 'globalisation' view, is their view. It'll be their way or the highway.

Tom Hickey said...

What's scary about this is the Chinese 'globalisation' view, is their view. It'll be their way or the highway.

I don't think the Chinese are necessarily dogmatic about exporting market socialism with Chinese characteristics. They are smart enough to realize that there is no one size that fits all.

The future is some mix of capitalism and socialism as a dialectical progression, and it will manifest differently under different conditions.

I am pretty sure that the Chinese understand this, if only because they understand the uniqueness of Chinese culture and the inability of most Westerners to understand even the basics of it, like yin-yang complementarity, which is the foundation of dialectical thinking.

What's particularly scary to me is that Chinese economists are being educated in Western conventional economics.