Colin Danby wrote (quoting Ricardo Duchesne's message):
> On the Asian sink question, I clearly misunderstood
> your original post:
>
> > But even if Europe extracted a lot of capital
> > from the colonies, did not Frank tell us that a high proportion of it
> > ended up in Asia or China as the ultimate "sink"?! Whatever happened
> > to Asia's "massive balance of trade surplus with
> > Europe"? Really, this is a major unrecognized problem in
> > Frank's very thesis.
>
> Can you tell me which AGF proposition the sink
> disproves, and why? Or are you arguing that
> there is an internal AGF contradiction and if so,
> what is it?
I am glad that the discussion on AGF is continuing, and I am also
would like to thank Ricardo for some kind comments on my *very* small
part in this discussion..With respect to the passages I have quoted
above, I would like to say something briefly about the sink, but I
am not trying to interpret Ricardo's statement, but am only giving my
own views.
It seems to me that the issue is not whether the colonial trade and
plunder was important in the rise of capitalism or not. I think Marx
was right that this was important. But the issue is that the effect
of this trade on a country depended on internal factors (as Marx
also claimed). Otherwise, Spain would have been one of
the fastest and earliest developers and industrializers, whereas in
fact it stagnated economically while the colonial plunder flowed in
and despite its strong political position in Europe. The colonial
plunder and profits kept up the powerful Spanish state of that time,
but the economy was in trouble. On the other hand, development
elsewhere in Europe was spurred by the increased trade with Spain
allowed by Spanish plunder of the "New World".
But the "sink" in Asia shows that Asia was part of the chain of
commerce (or the intensified chain of commerce) resulting from the
colonial plunder by Europe. Hence the question arises: why wasn't its
development spurred by this just as much as certain areas in Europe
were? The answer would seem to have to depend on internal factors in
Asia, just as the answer to the same question in Spain does.
But AGF denigrates internal factors. That, I think, is the
contradiction. In any case, it is a contradiction to any theory that
that denigrates internal factors but claims that the development of
Europe is explained by the colonial plunder. The contradiction is
all the sharper, the more one claims, as AGF does, that Asia was
getting the best of the trade with Europe. I am not at all clear as
to what AGF ends up saying in Reorient, which is one reason I am
quite interested in seeing how other people characterize it. (I
suspect that even after I have time to fully examine Reorient,
I will have a problem figuring out what it ultimately says.) Indeed,
at one point AGF says: "The question remains, however, why and how
Western Europeans and Americans then bested the Asians...A fully
satisfactory answer may be still beyond us..." (p. 285 -- typically,
AGF speaks of one area or people besting another, not of one econoic
system supplanting another)
(By the way, when I say that AGF denigrates internal factors,
I don't mean that he doesn't discuss certain differences. But he
denigrates the idea of qualitative structural differences. I
think Ricardo's summary of AGF's position, for example, shows that
AGF emphasizes quantitative differences in a way that implies that
the basic structure of the countries are the same. It's all factor
costs, etc. Similarly, with respect to wages, yes, he discusses wage
differences, and they even play a major role in certain of his
theorizing. But he doesn't pay attention to differences in class
structure which these wage differences may indicate. I think this is
related to his refusal to discuss the immense size of this
difference in wages which is claimed to have existed between India
and France or England.)
--Joseph Green
