The shape of things to come?
Socialist Outlook magazine1980sPhil HearseTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
Global restructuring
In recent years there has been much discussion on the left of the 'new international division of labour', the re-ordering of the world economy as a result of the prolonged capitalist crisis since the 1970s. In particular this discusssion has centred on the relative economic decline of the United States, and the growth of 'newly industrialised' countries in the third world. Here PHIL HEARSE argues that third world industrialisation is often overestimated, and the main feature of the coming period will be a vicious triangular battle for economic dominance betweeen the USA, Europe and Japan.
It is now widely recognised by Marxists that capitalism goes through long periods of expansion and recession, as well as conjunctural booms and slumps, and that world capitalism has been in the grip of a long period of recession since the late 1960s/early 1970s.
The notion of 'long waves in capitalism', first systematised by the Russian economist Kondratieff, has been most developed in the last two decades by Ernest Mandel. His argument, put forward as long ago as 1964, that the long post-war capitalist boom would be followed by a long period characterised by 'an undertone of recession', while highly controversial at the time, is now hardly disputed. Beginning at the end of the 1960s, but most dramatically in the world slump of 1973-5, world capitalism has since been in continual crisis. (1)
Quite rightly, Marxists have concentrated their attention on the effects of this crisis on the living standards of the working class (in both the advanced and the dependent countries) and on the drive towards the austerity and militarisation offensive which came in the wake of the crisis, and the political consequences for the workers' anti-capitalist struggle.
But by putting these matters at the forefront of their attention, revolutionary socialists (unlike some Marxist academics) have tended to neglect a further crucial aspect of the crisis: each capitalist crisis necessarily leads to increased rivalry between the major imperialist powers – and a new international division of labour, a new carving up of economic spheres of influence, between the major capitalist powers.
Today this expresses itself, within the framework of the increasingly shaky 'Western alliance' in a bitter three-cornered fight for economic and political dominance between the United States, Japan, and the European imperialist countries, of which West Germany (FRG) is easily the most economically powerful.
This economic restructuring intersects with the emergence of a series of semi-industrialised dependent countries in the 'third world' which can no longer be simply described as 'semi-colonial'; the international debt crisis which hits the nations of Latin American particularly cruelly; and the spectacular emergence of some of the countries of the 'Pacific rim' – Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan – as major centres of industrial production. But this three cornered fight between the three major imperialist centres is now 'overdetermined' by a new factor – Gorbachev and perestroika in the Soviet Union and the possibility of a new period of international 'peaceful coexistence' which could open up massive new markets in the post-capitalist states over which the Europe, Japan and the US will bitterly fight.
What is at stake here is the whole configuration of world economic and political reality. Our intention here is simply to try to describe some of the elements of this changing situation, which are crucially important for Marxists in analysing what sort of political approach they should adopt in Britain to phenomena as diverse as the 1992 single European market, Gorbachev and the international debt crisis.
The decline of US hegemony – and its limits
World War 2 devastated much of Europe and Japan, and finally completed the process of Britain's decline as the major imperialist power. With the Soviet Union in economic chaos, the United States emerged in 1945 as the uncontested most powerful economic and political state, leader of the 'free world' in every sense. But the reconstruction of the Japanese and German economies in the 1950s and '60s, made possible by factors including the Marshall Plan, cheap labour in countries where the labour movement had been destroyed or defeated, and the 'third technological revolution', began to erode American pre-eminence.
The US was hit particularly hard by the inflation caused by the Vietnam war, leading to the decline of the dollar and the end of the US's pre-eminent economic position. By the time of the onset of the world recession in the 1970s the US, by a whole series of economic indicators – particularly that of labour productivity – was losing its economic dominance to West Germany and Japan (see table 1).
But the major contradiction, which conditions much of the triangular conflict between the the major imperialist centres, is that while the US has lost much of its economic dominance, it remains overwhelmingly the world's leading military power – which makes it a vital component of most major political/military conflicts worldwide. And the dollar, despite the ending of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement which included automatic convertability (2) is still the world's major trading currency, in which debts between nations and major corporations are settled. Moreover, even if the US economy is not the most productive, measured in labour productivity, it is still by far the largest, with easily the largest internal market.
Successive Presidents Nixon, Carter and Reagan have all tried to utilise a combination of dollar/financial leadership, and military leadership of the West to retain US dominance against the Japanese and European challenge. 'Star Wars', the aggression against Libya and Nicaragua, and the US financial and trade deficits are all examples of this, as we shall see.
Markets and 'large economic zones'
The term 'multinational coporation' is often confusing when discussing the real economic warfare between the major capitalist states. The term 'transnational corporation' is much more accurate because when we examine any of the major corporations which operate on a world scale, they are nearly all owned by the capitalist class in one imperialist country: IBM and Ford are American; Hoffman-Roche and Nestle are Swiss; ICI is British, and so on. Whereas there may be examples of joint ventures between these corporations, their national sovereignty and ownership is, in general, not in doubt – except in the case of international takeover bids, which only proves the point. We are a long way off a situation where the transnational corporations have divided up the world into spheres of uncontested dominance, but there is a real trend in that direction, especially in the countries which are experiencing a limited, dependent, industrialisation.
For example, in Asia Japanese corporations are waging an all-out war against US companies: in Thailand you will hardly see anything but Japanese cars – not a Ford or Chrysler in sight – a reversal of the situation 20 years ago. But if the world economic crisis worsens over a long period, then national economic protectionism, and a fight to construct 'large economic zones' of influence will become an irreversible trend. One of the first signs of this fight over the new international division of labour is the growth of economic protectionism of home markets.
Protectionism in Japan, through a complex system of import licenses and spurious technical specifications, makes it very difficult for European and American companies to compete in the Japanese national market. There is a growing trend to protectionism in the United States, many echoes of which were expressed in the 1988 presidential election campaign, and there is not the slightest doubt that a 'single European market' in 1992, will have a dynamic towards a 'fortress Europe' – on an economic level at least. The three large imperialist centres, guarding their own internal markets, will then fight for dominance over larger economic zones.
The whole project of the 'single European market' is about constructing a political-economic entity which can compete with Japan and the USA. No one doubts that it will be a 'protected' market, which is why Japan especially is so concerned to beef-up its productive capacity within the boundaries of the EEC, which its products produced in Japan and in other Asian nations will have difficulty penetrating. Equally, more and more European corporations are realising that to compete on a world stage after 1992 they need a bigger financial and productive base than they currently have. The logic is the merging and integration of the bigger European countries into real 'multinational' conglomerates, which is why firms like GEC, Siemens and Phillips are all looking for new European partners.
Ultimately such industrial integration supposes financial and even political integration – a single Western European state, no less. This was acutely recognised by the then US Secretary of State Dean Rusk when he said in 1969: 'The problem with Europe playing an economic role commensurate with its production capacity is that its political units are too small'(!). There lies the problem, which has been obvious for 25 years and more. A single West European state would be either German-dominated, or dominated by a German-French axis. It is this which scares the life out of Mrs Thatcher and Lord Young and why they want to hang on to the 'special relationship' with the USA.
During the 1970s an august international body called the 'Trilateral Commission', consisting mainly of ex-government ministers and liberal academics from the advanced countries, but with some encouragement from the Carter administration, was set up to discuss the possibility of joint management of world economic affairs by Europe, Japan and the US. It was an unofficial body, which hoped that this joint management would then aid the economic development of the third world. World economic reality intervened, and 'trilateralism' collapsed as an influential current in world bourgeois politics. It has been replaced by triangular economic warfare between the three major centres of the advanced capitalist world.
The trend to construct large economic zones, and the move towards European capitalist integration, has been paralleled by an attempt by the Japanese-led ASEAN countries to develop a wider Asian economic grouping; and the operations of the Pacific Basin forum are expressive part of these discussions. A further example of the gearing-up for the triangular inter-imperialist fight is the way the United States has forced Canada to accept a 'free-trade zone', in effect a single market dominated by the US trusts.
The three 'large economic zones' would could thus emerge would be a US-Canada axis with predominant influence on a reluctant Latin America; a West European axis; and a Japanese-led Asian axis, incorporating the four Asian 'newly industrialising countries'. Each would then fight for influence and markets in the rest of the world.
The relocation of production
The new international division of labour in the 1970s involved a restless quest by the large economic corporations to find new markets, and new centres of cheap production. Of course, one of the main elements here was the price of labour (another striking confirmation of the labour theory of value, but leave that aside). Some basic comparisons will show what is involved. While the Japanese economy is at least twice the size of the British – it is a much richer country – labour is often cheaper. Labour in Italy costs three times that in Hong Kong, which in turn is twice as expensive as that in Thailand. The trend therefore to try to relocate production to countries where labour is plentiful and cheap is obvious. The constraint is the lack of fixed plant and capital in those countries. In fact, of course the majority of foreign investment by transnational corporations is in other developed countries, not in the semi-colonial or semi-industrialised countries.
But the quest for cheap sites of production led to a well-known result. In several countries of the third world, transnational corporations have constructed assembly plants for components made in the advanced countries, either for re-export to the imperialist countries or for local sale (The example of all those products with Japanese names like Toshiba and
Saisho made in Singapore and Taiwan is an obvious case in point). In very schematic and simplified terms, this is an important part of the basis of the process of dependent industrialisation in a number of countries – a very limited number – which have partially escaped the fate of most semi-colonial countries as suppliers of raw materials and importers of manufactures made in the advanced countries. This is not to deny that there has been a certain 'autonomous' development in some of these countries, a result of the growth of world trade, a rise in the price of oil in the 1970s, and the spill-over from the post-war boom. But in manufacturing industry, the role of the transnational corporation investment has been decisive.
Without doubt this phenomenon has led to an increase in the size of the proletariat in these countries, an increase in the urban population and a decline in the peasantry. It has not however freed these countries from dependence, economic and political, on the advanced imperialist centres. It will not prevent them from being the targets for incorporation into the zones of influence of the three major imperialist centres. But this limited dependent industrialisation does mean that it is no longer simply possible to describe some of the so-called 'third world' countries as 'semi-colonial'. (3)
Above all, it is important not to overstate the extent of third world industrialisation. Nigel Harris has been imprudent enough to title a book The End of the Third World (4), as if global industrialisation was at hand. But even Alain Lipietz, (5) a severe critic of those who underestimate industrialisation of the 'periphery' (see his book Miracles and Mirages, Verso) lists a total of only eleven 'newly industrialising countries' – and his eleven include Greece, Portugal, Spain, Israel and Yugoslavia – countries not normally associated with the 'third world'. The number of generally-accepted newly industrialising countries comes down to about six – Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Mexico and Brazil. The latter two, together with Argentina (long a semi-industrialised country (6) are in the thrall of debt bondage and unlikely to deepen their industrialisation process significantly in the foreseeable future. Korea also has a debt problem and growth is slowing.
The progress of third world industrialisation will depend primarily on whether the long period of recession in the world economy is replaced by a new expansion such as occurred in the 1950s and 60s. This depends on huge world-historic political and economic developments, including big defeats for the international working class, which are a long-way off and very far from being certain.
The US fights back
If US economic hegemony has declined, the American ruling class – immensely rich and powerful (7) – is not about to surrender. We have already made the point about the strength of the US internal market, and indeed within the overall process of relative economic decline, there are sectors of the US economy which have expanded – especially those in the South West sunbelt (where the labour movement is weaker, and where the bourgeoisie is more concerned about Asian markets than is its east coast counterpart). This sector of the US bourgeoisie tends to be more isolationist and less concerned about the alliance with Western Europe.
On the economic front, the US has ruthlessly used the trade and budget deficit to suck in capital from Japan and Europe, and by effectively devaluing the dollar, has lessened the wealth of all international corporations and financial institutions which hold the bulk of their capital in dollars – still, as we have mentioned, the world's major trading currency. This has had a contradictory effect on the rest of the Western capitalist world in the early and mid-1980s; whereas the budget deficit has reflated the US and thus world economy and boosted world trade, it has at least temporarily strengthened the position of the US within this reflation – which is, as everyone now agrees, going into reverse.
The precise mechanisms of the US economic revival were spectacularly innovative, and had immense effects inside the United States itself. While many socialists were still talking about 'Reaganomics' being identical to the deflationary phase of Thatcherism in the early 1980s, in fact in some ways it became the complete reverse. The US launched what has been described as 'military Keynesianism' – a vast increase in defence expenditure – by printing dollars, and sucking in investment capital from overseas. As has been convincingly demonstrated by Mike Davis, (8) this had numerous reflationary spin-offs throughout the US economy, and created a more economic space for the US middle classes – numerically vast compared with any other nation. These affluent millions were the political base of Reaganism, unattracted by even the mildest references by the Democrats to social welfarism. But of course increased wealth for the US middle classes was matched by lay-offs, 'give backs' and austerity for sections of the working class, and the massive growth of poverty and a homeless 'underclass'.
Despite the consumptionist buoyancy of the US economy, it was based – in the end – on borrowing or printing money, and the expansion of service industries, especially financial services, rather than any real advances in labour productivity and basic industrialisation vis-a-vis Europe and Japan. Only through the burgeoning defence industry did the US manage to keep its technological edge in computers and electronics, an advantage persistently challenged by Japan.
The most ruthless US fightback has been on the political and military front. The early 1980s missiles and Star Wars offensive forced the West Europeans to concede political and technological superiority to the US, and for good measure disrupted any European political openings towards the USSR, which would have had strong trade spin offs. The anti-Libya offensive, including the bombing of Tripoli, was – among other things – about asserting US political leadership, disrupting European trade and diplomatic links in the Middle East, and dragging the West Europeans behind US political objectives. The same considerations are involved in the ultra hypocritical US furore about the Libyan chemical factory (from the world's leading manufacturer of chemical weapons!), which neatly stole a march at the international conference on chemical warfare and put the West Germans on the defensive about their role in the Libyan factory.
Military clout counts for an immense amount in world politics. The issue of who is going to supply countries like Saudi Arabia with the newest military equipment (like F-16 fighters) determines, in part, who is going to be their political ally and where they bank their petro-dollars. Since World War 2 Japan has not counted for much in the military field, an immense handicap in the economic struggle with the USA, and none of the individual European countries can contest the immense US defense industry (which is why there is such pressure for an integrated European defence industry).
Enter perestroika
Gorbachev's new foreign policy – that of detente and peaceful coexistence – is beginning to change the ball game in the triangular conflict between the major imperialist powers. The response of the Bush government team to the Soviet proposals on joint political management of conflict, and major aid and trade, will be one of the major determining factors in how the US-Europe-Japan battle pans out.
There is as yet no firm evidence that the US intends to lessen its military (and thus economic) pressure on the Soviet Union. Star Wars has not been abandoned; Gorbachev's proposals for a mutual demilitarisation of the Pacific met with a cool response; and if the US is talking about troop reductions in Europe, it is not primarily in response to Soviet unilateral military reductions, but because the US wants to put more of the cost of the military budget in Europe onto its NATO allies, and believes that it can replace troops with its huge new array of ultra-sophisticated and terrifyingly destructive 'smart' conventional weapons. (9)
All that being said, Gorbachev's detente offensive does present the US with a tremendous foreign policy and international trade dilemma. Last autumn a West German government and trade delegation – led by Chancellor Kohl but including dozens of leading business executives – visited Moscow, to howls of protest from the US government (and Margaret Thatcher). The reason is obvious: the USSR alone is a market of 280 million people. Add in the rest of eastern Europe, and this is an immense potential opening for world capitalism. None of the major imperialist powers want to see a real economic strengthening of the USSR; but of course, business is business, especially if it can be done at the expense of your rivals!
Reagan's summit with Gorbachev in Moscow, which decided nothing of political importance, was an indication of a growing realisation in US government circles that if Europe (and perhaps now Japan) are going for a major programme of aid and trade with the Soviet Union, the US cannot afford to be left out. In a sense, this is the central foreign policy dilemma facing the Bush administration. Will it make a major turn towards detente and trade with the Soviet Union? Has it the military and political clout to prevent the other Western powers from going ahead anyway? And if the US does goes for detente and economic co-operation, what more political concessions can it force out of the Soviets?
It is important to realise that there is an important debate inside the United States political elite and foreign policy establishment over Gorbachev and perestroika. The options are not so simple as a divide between those want to do business with Gorbachev and those who want to keep up the cold war. Before going all-out to become the main imperialist aid-and-trade partner of the USSR, the issue of whether Gorbachev will last, and whether he can deliver economic reforms which will open up major markets has to be settled. It is quite conceivable that the US will adopt a complex package of simultaneously trying to do limited business with the USSR, while keeping up the military pressure – and at the same time trying to stop the Europeans and Japanese getting too close to the USSR. There is already evidence that the Japanese are selling high tech goods to the USSR, which the 'COCOM' agreements prevent Western allies supplying for 'security' reasons. But it will be a difficult balancing act for Bush, as the West Germans and Japanese hungrily eye the immense markets of the USSR-eastern Europe.
Of course, there is a sense in which the United States can try to scupper perestroika altogether. To break the USSR's over-concentration on heavy industry and raw materials, to turn towards more production for the consumer market, Gorbachev desperately needs a reduction in military production and the military budget. If the US simply refuses to play ball on the military front, if detente is a non-starter, then there is a real question mark about the ability of the Soviet Union to generate the economic space to engage in trade with the West which it wants. This of course is the line of the US military establishment and cold-warriors like Richard Perle.
On top of the issue of the triangular Europe-Japan-USA relations with the USSR, there is another huge complicating factor: the political evolution of China, a topic which would require a whole article in itself. It is obvious that for geographical and historical reasons Japan is best placed to take advantage of any major opening to foreign investment in the Chinese economy. On the other hand, George Bush is very conscious of this danger, hence his rapid visit to China after Hirohito's funeral; and the US can count on the distrust of re-emergent Japanese militarism, still strong in China. The battle for Chinese trade willbe a fascinating spectacle.
Who pays the price?
Every capitalist crisis involves major restructuring, both inside the major capitalist economies and internationally. The effects of recession are always uneven; not every sector of the world working class suffers equally. In the advanced countries themselves, the example of Britain is a vivid expression of how some industries and areas – particularly those associated with old technologies – have declined disproportionately. But, of course, overall there has been a generalised attack, continuous since 1975-6, on the living standards of the masses in the advanced capitalist countries.
But there are many other sections of the world's working class particularly hit by global restructuring. First and foremost are the tens of millions of workers, peasants and urban poor in those countries held in debt bondage. The total owed by the third world to the Western banks today is around $1 trillion – in fact, in today's world, a small amount. (The total public debt of the US is $2 trillion, and the annual turnover of the top 200 transnationals is over $3 trillion).
Despite occasional scares about the over-extension of Western banks' lending capacity, the debt crisis works to the permanent advantage of the Western banks and ruling classes. Numerous countries, particularly in Latin America, now have their national economic policy, universally that of austerity, decided by the IMF. Millions have been impoverished by the debt crisis. But this crisis is of course directly the result of huge bank lending promoted by the West in the 1970s to facilitate the profitable re-investment of petro-dollars and the partial industrialisation which we discussed earlier.
The policy of the IMF towards the debt-laden countries is simple. Implement austerity against your own masses; export as much as possible, at whatever rock-bottom prices the world market dictates, and don't step out of line politically, with the US in particular. The Western banks themselves are cashing in by 'debt-for-equity' swaps, which retire a small portion of the debt for whole or part ownership of local firms. The way in which the debt is used as a form of political warfare was graphically illustrated when Costa Rica's president Arias announced his central American peace plan. The US government immediately intervened with the US banks to prevent further loans to service Costa Rica's $4.5 billion foreign debt.
And there is a third set of victims of global restructuring – those who will be the victims of Soviet foreign policy deals which are the trade-off for economic relations with the United States. Nicaragua is an obvious example. The eviction of the ANC training camps from Angola is another. And we should not forget those millions of Soviet workers who will be the victims of Gorbachev's austerity measures at home.
A socialist political response
Socialists are in principle neither capitalist free traders nor protectionists. We are not the partisans of any imperialist economic bloc. We don't stand with the EEC against the US and Japan. Our job is to defend the interests of the workers wherever they are attacked by the effects of global restructuring. But there are aspects of this approach which have particular relevence to British socialists.
First, the British Thatcher government is in a tremendous quandary about whether to go along with a more unified political and economic Europe, or to try to maintain its special links with the US. It is clear that chancellor Lawson, Thatcher and Lord Young are at loggerheads on this, and it is becoming a major theme of British bourgeois politics – with Kinnock and the Labour leadership going for a 'capitalist Europe' solution. Socialists have every reason to oppose cold war Atlanticism, but our alternative has to be a socialist Europe, a united Europe which includes eastern Europe and creates new economic relations on an internationalist basis with the third world. Such an approach implies an internationalist approach of linking up politically and in struggle with working class and socialist forces throughout Europe, east and west. As part of forming links with the masses, and the political vanguard in eastern Europe, we should demand aid and trade with the Soviet Union and eastern Europe on favourable terms, and an end to 'COCOM'-type restrictions against economic co-ooperation with the post capitalist states.
The demand for a united socialist states of Europe, a Europe of the workers east and west, is in no way counterposed to an internationalist attitude towards the oppressed countries of the third world. We don't want a 'fortress socialist Europe' which puts up barriers against the third world. Obviously, a united socialist Europe would be a tremendous political and economic blow in favour of the oppressed masses in the semi-colonial and dependent countries, a huge geopolitical bloc which would give them internationalist aid in developing their economies. Here and now, we should be fighting for the eminently reasonable, democratic and socialist demand – cancellation of all the debts to the imperialist banks! This is a demand which will be supported not just by Marxists and socialists, but by huge numbers of people with a minimum of humanity, let alone socialist consciousness.
In adopting the policy of a united socialist Europe, incidentally, we should be under no illusions that Gorbachev is a 'pan-European' in the sense that he wants to prioritise links with Europe over those with the USA. In re-inserting itself in the new international division of labour, the USSR wants to play the field. A struggle for a united socialist Europe will be in a certain sense struggle against Gorbachev.
Our second major conclusion relates to the internationalist approach of socialists to the world struggle for socialism. It is true that the world proletariat, and the urban poor, are not confined to the three major imperialist centres we have been discussing. The size of the world proletariat has expanded enormously over the last 20 years. Major components of the world working class exist, of course, in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe and they are reawakening politically at tremendous speed. A lot depends on the outcome, and the possibility of building a socialist democratic current in these countries. And there are new huge centres of the proletariat and urban poor in some of the 'newly industrialising countries' – like Brazil and Mexico. Given the crisis these countries are in, there will be explosive outbursts of militancy among the workers of these semi-industrialised countries.
But we should be aware of the sociological and political limits of the development of the proletariat in the semi-industrialised countries. It is useless to adopt an 'arithmetical' approach to the balance of class forces, which says there are X million new workers in the third world and thus the working class is X much stronger. For the truth is that the political consciousness, and hence the trade union and political organisation in these nations is very uneven. We have the Workers Party in Brazil, and we have an important new radicalisation in Mexico. But what do we have in Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong? Very little. For that matter, even in South Korea, the organisation of the working class, despite mass student protests, is very weak. So sweeping generalisations are not much use in drawing up a real balance sheet of the relationship of forces, and the extent of the challenge to imperialism.
Even if the political battles in Central America, South Africa and the Soviet Union have centre stage today, the historical task of building a force for socialist transformation in the imperialist centres, and especially Europe, where the workers' movement is much stronger than in the USA or Japan, remains crucial from the viewpoint of the world transition to socialism. This is not a plea for 'Eurocentrism'; but it is a plea against the somewhat fashionable 'third worldism', which often seems to stake everything on the outcome of battles in the dependent countries.
We can express this in a slightly different way. Today with the crisis in the USSR; the intifadah of the Palestinian masses; the new crisis in Central America; the struggle of the South African masses; the new rebellion against austerity by the Spanish workers – the examples are endless – you have, in the context of global restructuring a joint crisis of Stalinism and imperialism – just as we asserted when the birth of Solidarnosc in Poland coincided with the upsurge of the central American revolution between 1979-81.
The crisis is international, and the solutions are international. The solution of the crisis in Nicaragua is the extension of the revolution in central America. The workers and poor in the indebted countries need the solidarity of the workers in the imperialist countries against debt-bondage. A socialist answer to '1992' presupposes an effort of linking up struggles between workers on a European level, which will become more and more obvious. Again the examples are endless.
The conclusion is that there is, once again, a growing interaction of the different crises and struggles in the different 'sectors' of the world. It needs an internationalist response based on an international programme which supports workers' struggles everywhere; and the building of an international revolutionary movement with that programmme. In the epoch of global restructuring a retreat into 'national particularities' will not come up with political answers in any country.
Notes
1. See, inter alia, Late Capitalism (1971: Verso); The Second Slump (1975 Verso) and Long Waves in Capitalism (CUP 1979). See also Mandel's 'The economics of neo-capitalism' in the Socialist Register 1964. Neo-capitalism was an ambiguous and confusing term, since abandoned by Mandel. The first sign of the oncoming slump was the West German 1966 recession.
2. Bretton Woods guaranteed that the dollar would be automatically exchanged against gold, thus tying together the dollar with gold prices. While this made the dollar literally 'as good as gold', it also kept its value artificially high. By ending convertability Nixon devalued the dollar, allowing US corporations to compete better on the world market.
3. See E. Mandel 'Semi-colonial and semi-industrialised dependent countries' in New international vol 2 no 2 p149.
4. The End of the Third World Nigel Harris, Pelican 1986
5. Alain Lipietz is a leading proponent of the 'regulation school' whose founding theorist is the French political economist Michel Aglietta. Aglietta coined the thoroughly confusing term 'Fordism' (misusing Gramsci's notion of Fordism as a particular form of work organisation) to denote mass production/mass consumption capitalism as a particular 'regime of accumulation'. The confusions of this term cannot be elaborated here, but see the excellent article by Simon Clarke in Capital and Class no 36 (Winter '88 edition). Since this use of 'Fordism' is confused and unsustainable, Marxism Today's discourse on 'post-Fordism' is doubly confusing, verging on the unintelligible. But for an unscrambling and demolition job see the article by Chris Reynolds in Workers Liberty no 11, and 'Old Ideas for New Times' by Gemma Forrest and Mike Freeman in Living Marxism November 1988. Also useful is the article 'Vanguard of the Vogue' by Ben Fine in the Morning Star of 14 September 1988.
6. Lenin already in 1916 recognised Argentina as not being simply a 'semi-colonial country' and even talked about the 'Argentinian model'. Argentina also went through a further 'import-substitution' industrialisation between the wars under Peron. Quoted by Mandel (1985). For an account of Argentina's autonomous economic development see The Malvinas and the End of Military Rule by Dabat and Lorenzano (Overso 1984), where Lenin's definition is also discussed.
7. As an example of the immense (and disgusting) wealth and power of the US ruling class see the wonderful book Greed and Glory on Wall Street which charts the fall of the Lehman investment bank (Ken Auletta, Penguin Books, 1986). If you think bitter faction fights are confined to the far left, this book shows the bourgeoisie are ten times worse!
8. See 'The Political Economy of Late Imperial America' by Mike Davis in his Prisoners of the American Dream (Verso 1986).
9. On 'smart' weapon technology see Newsweek January 23rd 1989.