[A-List] Sino-Africa Relations

[Jurriaan Bendien]

Hi Sabri,

I don't mind discussing but I prefer to stick to topics I have thought or 
studied about, and my knowledge of China and Africa is just very inadequate. 
I've only briefly visited Morocco, and never went to China. So I don't 
really know what I can contribute. I've read Henry Liu's articles with 
interest though, he's a very gifted analyst. It's just that I think the US 
economy is less reliant on the world economy than it appears to be to many 
leftists, leaving aside various strategic imported raw materials (especially 
oil), on which a lot of the leftist discussion focuses. The "Achilles heel" 
of US capitalism is supposed to be the relentless creation of credit money, 
but I've yet to be convinced of that argument.

I'm much more interested actually in Michael Hudson's intriguing claim that 
"Financial manipulation has nothing to do with employment or profit. It 
makes money purely from money. Marx discussed this in Vol. III. It is as 
much pre-capitalist as post-industrial."

Seems to me it has everything to do with profit at least, and it can hardly 
occur without employment, indeed the FIRE sector (financial services, 
insurance, real estate and business services) has been one of the fastest 
growing sectors in the world economy also in employment terms, suggesting to 
some leftists the advent of parasitary "rentier capitalism". What Marx 
discussses in Cap. Vol. III is really that "financial manipulations" are a 
permanent feature of capitalism.

BTW Marx dated the start of the capitalist era at the 16th century, i.e. the 
era of what is now known as "mercantile capitalism". That is to say, the 
realisation of surplus values from production is only one mode of the 
accumulation of capital; another mode is e.g. the realisation of surplus 
values from unequal exchange, which Marx sometimes called "profit from 
alienation". In his characterisation of the essence of capital, Marx 
generally wished to restrict the concept of surplus values to value added in 
the form of products newly produced by surplus-labour, but whether that is 
really valid, is a moot point. Marx traced out how commerce gradually 
conquers the sphere of production, transforming most inputs and outputs into 
marketable goods and services. However, he never developed his analysis of 
finance capital and joint-stock companies (the organisational structure of 
capital) to any great extent, even although these existed - at least 
embryonically - from the 16th century or thereabouts as well. I therefore do 
not regard Marx's  analysis of capitalism as adequate or complete (a 
"bible"), more as a sort of "Streitschrift" highlighting certain important 
facets of it, relevant to workingclass concerns at the time. Marxists often 
claim arrogantly to understand capitalism in its totality, but I don't 
really think that arrogance is warranted, nor that the analyses that are 
made necessarily have much emancipatory effect.

A confusing reality of our times is the large-scale creation of financial 
claims to resources and property incomes quite independently from what 
happens in the sphere of production, and not reflected in gross output 
measures. Marx himself never prepared his thoughts about this for 
publication.  Nevertheless, I would argue that this circuit of what Marx 
sometimes called "fictitious capital" is still reliant on value-adding 
production by human labour in the last instance, i.e. in order for the 
redistribution of financial claims through monetary manipulations to be 
sustained, the total "economic cake" (outputs of tangible products and 
services) must continue to grow.

However it's my 47th birthday today, and I am taking a break... Never 
thought in my youth I'd live this long, but I have... The older you get, the 
more you realise how simplistic your previous theories were, and how little 
you know anyway...

Best,

Jurriaan