Sunday, September 30, 2018

Samir Amin — Financial Globalization: Should China move in?


Must-read. It is not only worth reading but also studying.

Samir Amin, recently deceased, was an Egyptian-French Marxist economist. The analysis presented in this post is spot on.

It reveals the plan of West (US) since China's "opening up" under Deng, and now the Trump Administration in particular, to submit the Chinese economy and therefore China to Western (US) domination both economically and politically.

"Liberalization" is a trap. Europe fell into it, although the UK wisely refrained from joining the EZ and is now disentangling it self from the EU.

This is clear as day to Marxist and Marxian economists, but it is opaque to Western educated economists, including Chinese economists educated in the West that and whose influence is an increasingly weighty in China.

This is a tricky game. Russia has avoided it so far as a result of Western overreach that brought Putin to power. Putin was aware of the abyss into which Russia was falling and pulled back from it. The West (US( hasn't forgiven him for it and is doing all it can to undermine him short of launching WWIII, so far.

China is also a target. We will see if President Xi is up to the challenge. We will also see just how devoted to Marx China really is. Will actions back words?

Western Marxists and Marxians like Samir Amin and Michael Hudson have spelled it out for them.

The post is also noteworthy for pointing out how conventional economics is useless since its models are unrealistic and do not take into consideration how economics, finance, international relations, geopolitics and geostrategy are bound up and interactive in the complex adaptive system of the ongoing Great Game being played on the grand chessboard.

Without understanding the world system and applying this knowledge in economics, economic models generated from deficient assumptions will be useless in the larger picture, which is the one that counts ultimately.

So what is the Trump Administration's strategy in this regard. On the surface, it seems to be contradictory. One one hand, they are pushing ahead with the global trade war, while on the other hand, the economists are on record as free traders and the president himself has said that he would prefer free trade.

The strategy is to place so much pressure on the world economy through US dominance that that the rest of the world submits to US dominance, either though bilateral trade deals that favor the US or free trade on the neoliberal model that guarantees US dominance though multinationals.

The US would prefer the latter but will take the former, too, until the others give up and allow complete "liberalization" under US dominance. In any case, the American Empire becomes a fait accompli.

While it is questionable whether this can be accomplished without major war, the US is fully preparing itself for that too, as are Russia and China, which are the primary targets, named publicly as such by US policy.

Most people have no clue about what is really going on with the hidden agenda at this level. But in terms of the Big Picture it is perfectly "rational." All parties concerned game it out on this basis at the highest levels of government, military and paramilitary ("intelligence").

Defend Democracy Press
Financial Globalization: Should China move in?
Samir Amin

See also

China digging in; Trump doubling down.

Zero Hedge
In recent weeks, Goldman Sachs has likewise been turning increasingly pessimistic.
JPMorgan Sees Full-Blown US-China Trade War In "New Baseline"; Could "End US Stock Market Rally"
Tyler Durden

See also

Review of Conservatives Against Capitalism: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization by Peter Kolozi, associate professor, Department of Social Sciences, City University of New York.

Chinese culture, which is deeply conservative like Russian culture and other traditional cultures, shares many core values with American conservatism. Anglo-American classical liberalism and neo liberalism (but not German ordo-liberalism) are opposed to traditionalism, of which conserativism is an aspect.

The much of the base of support of the Trump Administration is deeply traditionalistic, hence conservative in this sense.
Murtaza Hussain

See also

Import substitution and supply diversification.
China can produce enough grain on its own to feed its people, but while maintaining food supply security, it will also expand agricultural cooperation with overseas countries, especially countries and regions along the route of the Belt and Road initiative (BRI), an agricultural official has said.
Experts noted on Friday that China can rely entirely on self-production for main crops, but that for certain farming products, it would be good to have more sources of imports in case there are any significant changes in trade status....
Global Times

also

Apropos of the lede link — taking capitalism too far:
A subsidiary of Wanda Group apologized on Saturday and fired three managers who printed an advertisement for a new shopping mall on China's iconic "red scarf" worn by generations of primary school students known as the Chinese Young Pioneers (CYP).
The headmaster at Danyanglu primary school in Heze, in East China's Shandong Province also received a Party warning on Saturday for allowing the advertisement to be printed on the red scarf.

Grade-three students were given the commercialized red scarves, that advertized the opening of Heze Wanda Plaza, during an activity on traffic security on Tuesday afternoon, Legal Daily reported. More than 100 red scarves were retrieved later on Wednesday by teachers. The school also distributed yellow caps to students with the same advertisement. Yellow caps are part of young students' uniforms in many cities in China to make them more visible to motorists.

"Because we found this out early, not many students were seen on the street" wearing the advertisement, an official from the local education bureau in Heze, surnamed Gao, told the Legal Daily....
Ecns
Xinhua

2 comments:

Kaivey said...

Another sleepless night!

Kaivey said...

I thought this was interesting about the underclass. The conservatives seem them as losers, but someone has to be at the bottom, and it is policy to have 3% unemployment. They need help rather then be blamed. These people are often angry and can easily be manipulated into fascism.

"These so-called intermediate institutions have historically played a vital role giving ordinary people a sense of meaning and protecting them from the structural violence of the state and the market. Their loss has led to the creation of a huge class of atomized and lonely people, cut adrift from traditional sources of support and left alone to contend with the power of impersonal economic forces.

These insecure and disoriented masses of individuals have been identified by both conservative and leftist thinkers as the seedbed for totalitarianism, citing the historical experience of fascist and communist regimes in the 20th century. In her famous work “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact of loneliness.” This loneliness — “once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age” — had now become an endemic part of life for millions of people, Arendt argued, citing the experiences of European societies that became totalitarian during the 20th century.

Some conservatives echoed this warning, raising the alarm that the eradication of church groups, local community organizations, and extended family networks by a rampant market had helped lay the groundwork for state tyranny. "