[Marxism] Re: An increasingly precarious role for the global hegemon (corrected)

[John Enyang <x03002f@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tom O'Lincoln writes:
>
> The "decline of smokestack America" is a hoary issue. Why are
> manufacturing jobs more important than other jobs?
>
The decline of manufacturing is important precisely, for one, because of
what has replaced it -- an economy which, aside from the armaments and
agricultural export sectors which are the last bastions of US
competitiveness in relation to its European and Asian rivals, is  built on
financial expansions, bubbles and financing of consumption by private and
public debt. This bubble economy, and the consumption that goes with, it
is kept inflated inflows of both capital and manufactures from the regions
with which the US runs a trade deficit (that is most of the rest of the
industrial core).

Tom O'Lincoln continues:
>
> I don't seewhy a decline in manufacturing should bring on recession as
> long as other sectors grow.
>
Aside from the agricultural and armaments sectors, th US has largely made
up for the decline in its manufacturing base through the expansion of
financial and other "services" associated with managing its hegemony, a
hegemony which increasingly takes the parasitic form of a financial
swindle against Asia, Europe and the resource rich states of the Arabian
Penninsula. See http://www.monthlyreview.org/1104amin.htm for a detailed
discussion.
>
> The falling dollar is not an unmitigated evil for the US economy. It
> will make imports expensive, notably oil. But it will also make it
> easier to export. From the point of view of the foreigners who have kept
> buying US securities to prop up the dollar, the eventual fall of the
> dollar is double trouble. On the one hand, they'll find it harder to
> export to America and will have to compete with cheaper American goods
> on the world market..

Given that Tom O'Lincoln has already written off the importance of the
manufacturing sector of the US economy above, precisely which sectors of
the US economy will have their (competitive) fortunes revived by the
decline in the value of the US dollar relative to Asian and European
currencies? The financial "services" sector? Arms and agriculture? The
latter are already about as competitive as they can be, due to the
political pressures the Godfather can bring to bear on Japan, the Gulf
States etc to keep their markets "open" to its exports in this sector.

Additionally, much of the US manufacturing capacity has already been
transferred overseas in the form of large capital investments in off-shore
manufacturing platforms and a decline in the value of the US dollar
relative to other currencies, especially the value of the currencies of
those countries that have the largest trade surpluses with the US, is not
going to reverse this fact. Furthermore, an attempt to recover US
advantages relative to Asian export manufacturing platforms in this way
may itself be vulnurable to or trigger competitive devaluations or
otherwise turn out to be a destabilising rather than stabilising for US
hegemony.

The decline of US hegemony is not taking place in a historical vacuum.
A study of decline of British hegemony over first global manufacturing
(1870--1914), and then finacial sectors (1914--1930's), offers a case
study in this regard.

J.Enyang




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