e-Con e-News

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‘Before you study the economics, study the economists!’

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e-Con e-News 04-10 August 2024

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‘5 Ways to Make a Billionaire: 1) Exploit a monopoly.

2) Exploit inside information. 3) Buy off politicians.

4) Defraud investors. 5) Get money from rich relatives.

– Robert Reich, former US Labor Secretary (see ee Economists)

Reich has forgotten his name (Reich is German for empire!), and his old portfolio! – Labor. Billionaires have to in utero ensure the exploitation of workers. He also forgets workers are truly indispensable to robbing the world. He would also like us to forget that it’s workers who ultimately can wield the tools to ‘make’ a truly better world!

     Anyway, aren’t billionaires a dime-a-dozen these days? Aren’t trillionaires & zillionaires where it’s at? Or are they mere celebrity-fied mirages of the real powers that be, the actual anonymous, who rarely appear on TV?

     ‘What do the Rich Think Rich Means?’ – was one of SBD de Silva’s pithiest aphorisms. ‘How long can this go on?’, he’d add, grimly laughing at the raucous reveling of Colombo’s wannabe classes in hotels & casinos & clubs, malls & luxury cars (the German envoy in Colombo is a used-Mercedes salesman! The Japanese envoy a used-Toyota shill!) with an ostentatious yen for bodacious bling. Indeed, some people consider an impoverished beggar carrying constantly devalued money, as rich. Some even measure the wealth of nations too, by money. Au contraire, Sri Lanka with its fertile soil (including the ocean floor!) & latent talents, has been declared ‘bankrupt’, even as the government admits it has not taken an inventory of the country’s ‘assets’ (see ee Random Notes).

     Our economists blame our mentality, ‘race’ (‘The Sinhala are a lazy people’), climate, religion, culture, society, geography, and politics. They cite polls, surveys & indices (GDP, Rule of Law, Happiness) that confirm our pathology as if these measures fall from the skies, and not off a desk in Washington or London.

     This ee looks at how truly advanced countries measure the wealth of nations: modern industry.

And the most important modern industry is the machine-making industry, ie, the machine tool industry. Economists published in the media in Sri Lanka never mention such mundane words: machine tools. They can’t afford to. Then again, they have absolutely no idea what ‘machine tools’ even are, and their indispensable role in a modern economy. They also refuse to admit that the imperialist countries have no interest in our such advance, and that only socialist solidarity can rebuild our world that keeps being shattered to prolong capitalism (see ee Quotes, Industry & Socialism).

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• The USA is escalating war in Myanmar & Bangladesh to further fracture Asia and thwart links between India & China & Africa, even as they escalate genocide in West Asia & East Africa. Meanwhile like heroin addicts demanding their fix, the merchants, their media & their economists in Sri Lanka keep demanding ‘exports’ even as they lament, ‘Exports under threat as tensions mount in West Asia.’

     And look how all the virtuous democrats of yesteryear (lavishly funded by cutting-edge genocidaires) warn that elections (if held, & the ‘wrong’ parties & leaders win) must not change the IMF’s 17^th panacea (see ee Economy, IMF benchmarks cannot be changed – President). Or else? The IMF seeks to reinforce imperialism’s usual strategy: to prevent modern industrialization. Hobbling any attempt at modern industrialization is the true history of non-settler colonialism.

     Meanwhile, we have to appear dazzled by the various ‘visions’ – short-sighted economic policy documents (like Ranil Wickremesinghe’s Regaining Sri Lanka in 2004 & Vision 2020 in 2017, and the Chamber of Commerce’s Vision 2030), that have been drafted and handed down by the US Treasury’s Sri Lanka Division: their gunpowder gospel, which has no use for so-called Sri Lankan experts, economists and thinktanks, who are only supposed to twitter and parrot their talking points.

     Last ee examined the USA’s ‘Tonya Harding’ (cripple your competitor) school of sabotage to block the emergence of any such industrialization in our countries. This ee Focus looks at the success of China’s industrialization and the disastrous (some may say crippling) record of industrialization in Africa. ee also looks at the emergence of this stage of capitalism – Imperialism, 1899-1900. ee does not subscribe to ‘neoliberalism’ – a confusing trope, which bribed scholars promote, which wishes us to say goodbye to overthrowing imperialism by strengthening the historic role of the working class, while offering Keynesian fixes (which, in truth, means war!) to prolong capitalism

     ee’s muse SBD de Silva noted how our University Economics Departments and the Ministry of Education studiously ignore the examples of industrialization from Japan to China. They have to, or they will lose funding and scholarships to white havens. In this ee Focus, Zambia’s Grieve Chelwa duly notes therefore, ‘the paucity of comparative scholarly work that seeks to draw out China’s lessons for Africa’s industrialization.’ He notes, ‘rather than place the blame at the feet of Africans, as many, especially Western scholars, are wont to do, [China] sees this history of lacklustre industrial performance as largely the result of the ‘failure of Western development prescriptions’. He also notes the ‘total dominance of Western intellectuals & experts in the policy process in Africa.’ Chelwa looks at China’s ‘alternative, state-led development model as opposed to the private sector-led, market-centric approach that is the staple of the World Bank & International Monetary Fund.’ He stresses the failure (again, thwarting?) of ‘integrating various [production] elements into a system’.

     Indeed, ee constantly points to the media’s incessant faking in Sri Lanka about what true industrialization means. Industrialized countries hide their true nature. Many of our ‘educated’ do not even know that colonized Singapore is far more industrialized than most Asian countries. The colonial media therefore loves to romanticize handicraft and the fake ‘apparel industry’, confuse assembly & manufacture, and claim tourism & plantations as industries. This ee therefore pinpoints very specifically at the ‘machine tool industry’, which we are denied. These ‘mother machines’ enable ‘the production of other machines & equipment’ and ‘are at the very core of the manufacturing engine’. Countries’ ‘manufacturing development trajectories’ have been ‘driven mainly by their machine tools industry, which have ‘introduced and spread technical change’!

     ee profoundly disagrees however with Chelwa’s analysis of China’s modern industrialization. Capitalist media & their economists love to (have to!) whiteout the real basis of China’s rise. Not only do they ignore what happened right after 1949, they totally malign what actually happened 1964-76, during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR). The current leader of China, Xi Jinping, during the GPCR was a student sent to the countryside, and his account of his experiences there have become a bestseller in China[ (& recently translated into English). Here is what China had to do to survive the second and third decade of its independence:

     ‘…the high cost of fighting the ‘paper tigers’ of imperialism. During those years when both superpowers were China’s enemies, China gave the Vietnamese US$20billion to fight the US invasion and they supported liberation movements elsewhere, especially in Africa (Tanzam railway, etc) to the tune of several billion. In addition, the relocation of industry to the interior of China for defence purposes took up half the national capital construction funds for the decade after 1964…

      ‘No estimates or published statistics exist for the billions of labor days invested in basic farmland capital construction from one end of the country to the other during the Cultural Revolution. If such calculations are ever made, it is safe to say they will dwarf the Pyramids, the Great Wall or any other previous human construction in scale and social purpose many times over. The policy decision of Mao and his Central Committee put a heavy burden on the peasants, did not raise their immediate disposable income, but did create the debt-free infrastructure (irrigation works, roads, railways, mines, oil wells, hydropower etc) that have become the basis for China’s later advances and her ability to turn to consumer production. In addition it must not be forgotten that the People’s Communes supported social income policies that provided healthcare, educational & other services at a level never before reached in the countryside.’ (Stephen Endicott, Socialist Development in Rural China, Reflections on the Experience of the People’s Commune, 1989)

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• Indeed, another world war (did the last one ever end?), despite its attendant horrors, will only force the birth of new socialist countries:

Industry & Socialism – ‘The imperialist framework & the capitalist form of appropriation strangle the productive forces, prevent them from developing. The only way out is to organize world economy on the basis of economic co-operation between the advanced (industrial) and backward (fuel & raw material supplying) countries (and not on the basis of the plunder of the latter by the former). It is precisely for this purpose that the international proletarian revolution is needed. Without this revolution it is useless thinking of the organization and normal development of world economy…

     But in order to be able to start (at least to start) organizing world economy on proper lines, the proletariat must triumph at least in several advanced countries. So long as that is not the case, our Party must seek roundabout ways of co-operation with capitalist groups in the economic field…

     That is why the Party, which has overthrown the bourgeoisie in our country and has raised the banner of the proletarian revolution, nevertheless considers it expedient to ‘untie’ small production and small industry in our country, to permit the partial revival of capitalism, although making it dependent upon the state authority, to attract leaseholders and shareholders, etc, etc, until the Party’s policy of doing the utmost possible in one country for the development, support and awakening of the revolution in all countries” produces real results.’ – JV Stalin, The Party Before & After Taking Power (see ee Economists)

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Contents:

What do the Rich Think Rich Means? Or, Undermining Industrialization in Sri Lanka