> largely the result of the exploitation of the periphery. My
> notes on O'Brien are somewhat disorganized, but here's another
> discomforting stats: He estimates that commodity
> trade with the periphery in 1800 amounted to only 4 percent of the
> aggregate gross national product of W.Europe.
Funny, no, how Krugman, Lawrence (and David Gordon too) argue today that
trade with the periphery being less than 5% of the GNP of the advanced
capitalist countries it cannot possibly account via a reduction in the
domestic demand for unskilled labor for much of the accentuated income
inequality within the imperialist countries. I used to think this
argument was simply wrong, that Adrian Wood and James Galbraith must be
right. But then a Marxist (a very smart one) pointed out to me that we
tend to have anexaggerated sense of how globalized production has become
because to the extent there has been internationalization of productive
capital, it is consumer good production which has been moved abroad (James
Galbraith underscores this too) and while consumer goods are the kinds of
goods that the mass of people buy (clothes, toys, etc), they tend to be an
increasingly small part of total production, given the primacy of dept I
and all that. I guess, Wood and Galbraith could still be right about how
globalization is responsible via defensive innovation for a substantial
reduction in the demand for unskilled labor, perhaps this is more true for
Western Europe than the US, still a relatively more closed economy than
the other major imperialist powers (true?).
At any rate, all what I thought were verities about globalization is
subjected to a brilliant critique in the latest special issue on
globalization in the International Journal of Political Economy, esp. the
essay by Italian Marxist Paolo Giusanni. To the extent that there is
globalization it is mainly in financial services and speculative capital
movements, but such movements are as violent within the imperialist
countries as outside. So it is not globalization we are talking about but
financial fragility in general. It's a mischaracterization of the
situation as Giusanni argues through an intensive empirical investigation.
In Sun NYT it was noted that Stiglitz has put emphasis on the
growth of short-credit, as opposed to long term loans, as a major engine
of the Asian crisis. Last Sunday in the New York Review of Books, Thurow
argued that the baby tigers were forced to take on more short-term credit
because of the weakness in Japanese FDI. Again, we are not experiencing an
aggressive new globalized stage of capital accumulation; rather we have
entered a period of great financial fragility and monetary instability.
Best,
Rakesh
