[PEN-L:32930] Re: Dollar falls against yen

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 09/12/02 00:34 -0800, you wrote:
> Chris:
>
> > Behind the bland murmurings, the question is who
> > is going to bear the international burden of the
> > latest crisis of capitalism?
>
> I say, we the "peoples" of periphery and semi-periphery, and the
> working classes of the core.

I think that is right. I think the term semi-periphery is a useful one for
the industrialising countries which earnestly desire to join the
imperialist heartlands but keep on getting knocked back especially when
there is a crisis of global capitalism.


> Who else?


Well it looks as if it not going to be former Asian little tigers. And,
most importantly, it is not going to be China, which looks like the nearest
thing to an engine of growth in the world, at least for East Asia,
(whatever the profound reservations we may have about the capitalist
direction in which it is going).

I suppose one of the results of the USA turning to a weak dollar policy is
it will give little alternative to Japan except to fall into economic orbit
of China on the best terms it can manage.


> By the way, we are also facing another serious crisis: it is the
> ever expanding permanent reserve army of labor, or, permanently
> unemployables (remember Melvin's advanced robotics and
> computerization?), or "untouchables", if you like.
>
> Unfortunately, they will not evaporate any time soon and they are
> the ones who vote for religious fundamentalists back home, for
> example, however "reformist" or "mild" ours might be.

Yes I assume that radical islam must be analysed as a reactive idealist
response to these global contradictions. I say reactive because I think the
word 'reactionary' has a totally dismissive connotation now. There are
aspects in the islamic faith, which are unfamiliar to many of us, but which
seem to me to draw on the solidarity of primitive communism. I suspect that
progressive leftists in the west will never understand it unless they are
open to an analysis of its dual nature. Without this leftists in the west
may be vulnerable to the imperialist propaganda that liberal democracy must
be imposed by conquest on the countries of islamic faith.

Perhaps, under a different thread title, you could post something which
analyses radical islam economically in a thoughtful way.

Chris Burford