Can a no-growth future and capitalism be compatible?

Is the era of economic growth over for advanced capitalist countries? If stagnation is what is on offer for the future, what does that portend?

The first question, although limited to the United States, is the subject of an interesting paper by the economist Robert J. Gordon, in which he makes a case that the era of high growth that has persisted for the past two centuries is drawing to a close and that, by the end of the 21st century, the annual growth in gross domestic product per capita may be as low as 0.2 percent — the estimated rate of growth prior to the 18th century.

The paper provides a useful starting point for discussion. A central idea that the paper rests on is that nearly all of the dramatic gains in standards of living, GDP growth and life expectancy that have occurred since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution had already occurred by the 1970s, and that those earlier inventions had vastly more impact than the Internet/computer/dot-com boom that arose in the mid-1990s.

To illustrate this point, Professor Gordon provides a graphic of past, present and projected future growth that assumes the shape of a steep bell curve. British economic growth is represented from 1300 to 1906, estimated by historians for the first four hundred years and by actual figures from 1700 because it was then the leading capitalist power. After 1906, actual United States growth in GDP per capita is used to the present day (because it became the leading capitalist power), followed by the author’s estimates out to 2100. The graph rises sharply starting at around 1870 until about 1950, peaking at 2.5 percent. It’s been downhill since, a trend that is forecast to continue until the growth rate declines to the Medieval rate.

If such a pattern does materialize — and Professor Gordon is far from alone in such pessimistic projections — what would that mean for an economic order, capitalism, that is based on endless growth? That is a question well outside the scope of his paper, and there is no intention here to imply a criticism of a paper for not discussing something beyond its scope. But as this blog attempts to tackle big questions, we are free to ask at a moment when stagnation is already upon us: Can capitalism survive an extended period of essentially no growth?

The Industrial Revolution and continued industrial innovation has brought fantastic changes to humanity, with the most dramatic changes coming in the 20th century. Professor Gordon posits three periods of major inventions: 1750 to 1830, 1870 to 1900 and the recent period of computer innovation. He argues that the first two periods brought a rapid series of inventions that took upwards of a century to be fully realized, fueling long periods of growth that lasted until the mid-20th century. Starting with the steam engine and the cotton gin, products resulting from the inventions of these periods include television, air conditioning and modern expressway systems.

Another example is indoor plumbing, which eliminated much manual labor, Professor Gordon writes:

“Every drop of water for laundry, cooking, and indoor chamber pots had to be hauled in by the housewife, and wastewater hauled out. The average North Carolina housewife in 1885 had to walk 148 miles per year while carrying 35 tonnes of water. Coal or wood for open-hearth fires had to be carried in and ashes had to be collected and carried out.” [pages 4-5]

Motorized vehicles also had a dramatic effect on productivity and standards of living:

“The average horse produced 20 to 50 pounds of manure and a gallon of urine daily, applied without restraint to stables and streets. … The low standard of living reflected not just the small amount that people could purchase but also the amount of effort at the workplace and at home where they had to expend to perform ordinary tasks. … To maintain a horse every year cost approximately the same as buying a horse. Imagine today that for your $30,000 car you had to spend $30,000 every year on fuel and repairs. That’s an interesting measure of how much efficiency was gained from replacing the horses. Gone was the need for unsanitary and repulsive jobs of people who had to remove horse waste.” [page 5]

After 1970, a slowdown in productivity growth (output per hour) began because the “one-time-only” benefits accruing from the earlier inventions and their spinoffs “had occurred and could not happen again.” The years from 1996 to 2004 brought an uptick in productivity and economic growth, but that had passed even before the economic downturn set in. The rapid development of online commerce lasted only a decade, and the innovations from the widespread adoption of the Internet have already occurred. Moreover, Professor Gordon argues, this most recent period of innovation did not focus on labor-saving measures but rather on entertainment and communication devices rather than replacing human labor with machines.

I would add that the primary economic effect of the Internet has been to shift commerce from one merchant to another, not altogether different from the mania of the past two decades in the U.S. to build new sports stadiums and casinos, which do nothing but shift consumer spending from one entertainment option to another with the additional expense of massive public subsidies. Professor Gordon illustrates his point most effectively when offering a thought experiment: You can keep all the inventions made in 2002 or earlier but none since, or you can have all the products of the past decade but none resulting from the two earlier periods of inventions.

“Option B is that you get everything invented in the past decade right up to Facebook, Twitter, and the iPad, but you have to give up running water and indoor toilets. You have to haul the water into your dwelling and carry out the waste. Even at 3 am on a rainy night, your only toilet option is a wet and perhaps muddy walk to the outhouse. Which option do you choose?

I have posed this imaginary choice to several audiences in speeches, and the usual reaction is a guffaw, a chuckle, because the preference for option A is so obvious. The audience realises that it has been trapped into recognition that just one of the many late 19th century inventions is more important than the portable electronic devices of the past decade on which they have become so dependent.” [page 5]

The author offers six “headwinds” that he believes will reduce the growth of U.S. GDP per capita to a snail’s pace: the mass of retiring baby boomers leaving the workforce will cause output per capita to grow more slowly than productivity; the decline in U.S. educational attainment and growth in higher-education costs; growing inequality; the outsourcing and wage pressure inherent in globalization; environmental damage; and debt and the reduction in growth that results from austerity imposed to reduce debt.

Other than the reference to globalization as one of the six “headwinds” that will increasingly buffet the U.S. economy, the paper too narrowly analyzes the U.S. economy as a closed system, a weakness perhaps unavoidable given its specific focus. It is in no way controversial to note that no country is immune from the problems of the rest of the world given the deeply interconnected state of the world capitalist economy.

The paper is valuable in that it provides a reminder that the era of rapid economic growth since the Industrial Revolution has been a unique period in human history, and that such a time might not continue. Capitalism is a system that requires constant growth, an often overlooked aspect that has asserted itself in dramatic form as the stagnation of recent years has inflicted so much economic misery in advanced capitalist countries, and elsewhere.

In previous posts on this blog, I have written that the Keynesian policies that fueled the long post-World War II boom in the U.S. economy rested on a pair of one-time occurrences that can’t be repeated because it depended on a strong industrial base and market expansion. A repeat of history isn’t possible because the industrial base of the advanced capitalist countries has been hollowed out, transferred to low-wage developing countries, and there is almost no place remaining to which to expand. Moreover, capitalists who are saved by Keynesian spending programs amass enough power to later impose their preferred neoliberal policies.

Those neoliberal polices are in the interests of the capitalists who impose them, but are not simply a “choice.” The competitive pressures of capitalism lead to globalization and austerity. Irresistible competitive pressures were foreseen by Karl Marx, who encapsulated some of these problems in his theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. In order to maintain profitability and compete successfully, a capitalist must reduce the costs of production. (This can be more or less stressed at different times; for instance, during the 1990s, there was a Wall Street mania in which industrial companies regularly made public pronouncements proclaiming their intent to become the “lowest-cost producer” in their industry in an attempt to curry favor with speculators.)

Corporate globalization is a natural consequence of the pressure to reduce costs; moving production to countries with far lower wages and few enforceable labor laws is an obvious response under the logic of capitalism. Mechanization is another response — machines make labor more efficient and require fewer workers be employed. But, Marx argued, more advanced methods of production are more capital-intensive, and thus higher efficiency is offset by diminishing returns on capital. The Marxist economist Anwar Shaikh summarized this concept this way:

“[T]he … pattern implies that the more advanced methods tend to achieve a lower unit production cost at the expense of a lower rate of profit. Competition, nonetheless, forces capitalists to adopt these methods, because the capitalist with the lower unit costs can lower his prices and expand at the expense of his competitors — thus offsetting his lower rate of profit by means of a larger share of the market.”*

One way of visualizing this phenomenon is to think of a construction company. Where many workers are necessary when equipped with shovels, far fewer are needed for the same job when the company buys a truck in which one driver can excavate many times the amount of dirt as a worker with a shovel. The company can buy newer and bigger trucks, but the amount of gained efficiency will never be nearly as dramatic as the purchase of the first truck. If we’d like to carry this example further, we might imagine that some of the displaced workers, after turning in their shovels, go to work on the assembly line building the trucks. But competitive pressures eventually cause the truck manufacturer to move the assembly line overseas.

Countervailing factors can frequently reverse this tendency; cuts to wages, work speedups, layoffs, downturns in the prices of natural resources and shuttering of facilities can each buoy profit margins. Nonetheless, some economists argue that it is precisely a falling rate of profit that has caused the ongoing global economic slump. Marxist economist Andrew Kliman perhaps is the most forceful in arguing that the rate of profit has been falling since the 1970s, leading to sluggish investment and economic growth and mounting debt problems despite the adoption of “free-market” policies.

He is not alone in arguing that, unless there is a transcending of capitalism, the only way within capitalism to restore profitability is through a full-scale destruction of the value of existing capital assets — a process not nearly complete despite the harsh austerity imposed around the world since 2008. (Such a destruction happened in the closures of the Great Depression and the physical damage of World War II.)

The various theories discussed here are not necessarily incompatible; capitalism is undergoing a deep structural crisis — not one of its recurring cyclical downturns. This crisis is the culmination of multiple factors that affect one another, and complex analyses are necessary to understand it. Professor Kliman directly declares that stagnation and a crisis-prone economy is the “new normal” while Professor Gordon describes his paper as “intentionally provocative.” But, coming from different perspectives, they envision stagnation as the capitalist future (although the latter discusses only U.S. prospects), as do other perspectives.

What does it mean for a capitalist economy that no longer can grow? The route out of past crises has been expansion to new areas, but infinite expansion on a finite planet is impossible. U.S. capitalists tolerated high wages for a time after World War II because they could expand into overseas markets and thereby increase profits. Once intensified competition from rebuilt Europe and Japan, and the relative maturity of markets, put pressure on profits, the rise of neoliberalism ensued.

In the absence of new markets, the only way to increase or even maintain profits is to reduce costs, and ultimately that means cutting wages and benefits. Doing so, however, leads to a new set of problems — consumer spending in advanced capitalist countries tends to account for 60 to 70 percent of economic activity. When working people don’t have enough money to spend, consumer spending declines and depresses the economy, further squeezing profits. More austerity simply means more economic contraction, as many Europeans are experiencing first-hand.

Capitalist businesses must grow or die, and capitalism functions only if it is expanding. When it doesn’t, or can’t, crisis is the result. If so much money is concentrated into so few hands, those wealthy hands can’t possibly buy enough to offset the deprivation of everyone else, nor should that be a desirable way to run an economy.

If stagnation is the “new normal” of capitalism, then deprivation, pain and worsening inequality is all that it can offer, save for the occasional temporary uptick — a never-ending race to the bottom. Is such a system really the best humanity can do?

* “Falling rate of profit” entry in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Tom Bottomore, editor) [Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1983], page 159

Could the rise of China fatally de-stabilize capitalism?

By Pete Dolack

The world is not limitless, yet growth without limits is touted as a permanent economic elixir. But natural resources aren’t infinite, nor can demand be infinite. What happens when the limits of growth are reached?

We aren’t supposed to ask that question about capitalism; the assumption is that economic activity will always grow. The insertion of China into the world capitalist system has created the opportunity for more growth as a country of 1.3 billion people has been thrown open to the world’s markets.

But what if, rather than throwing capitalism a lifeline in the form of a vast pool of consumers who will drive demand, China instead will fatally destabilize an already weakened world economic system?

China will be the final straw that will bring about the downfall of the capitalist system is the provocative conclusion of an interesting book by a Chinese economist, Minqi Li, who now teaches at the University of Utah. Professor Li doesn’t pull any punches in his book; indeed his book’s title is The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy.* The book’s central thesis is that the huge mass of low-wage Chinese workers will drag down wage levels globally; the increase of industrialization in developing countries will lead to exhaustion of energy sources; and that ecological limits will force a halt to growth, fatal to a system dependent on growth.

Professor Li believes that the combination of these crises will bring an end to the capitalist system by the middle of this century. The Rise of China, however, is not apocalyptic; rather it methodically builds it case piece by piece through a sober examination of economic trends, calculations of the limits to a range of natural resources, analysis of long-term environmental unsustainability, and study of historical trends going back centuries. Nor is this a bleak work; Professor Li writes in the Gramscian spirit: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. What will follow the collapse of capitalism is not pre-ordained but is up to humanity to determine.

The first two of the book’s seven chapters provide an interesting discussion of Chinese history, before and after the 1949 revolution. Pro-capitalist factions within the Chinese Communist Party gained the upper hand soon after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, with Deng Xiaoping wresting party leadership by the end of the decade. Early reforms granting concessions to workers and peasants cemented political control for the Deng faction, Professor Li writes, enabling the party to then introduce capitalism. A 1988 law granted enterprise managers full control in the workplace (including hiring and firing at will), and the development of market relations enabled privileged bureaucrats to enrich themselves.

Intellectuals on the one hand, and enterprise and bureaucratic elites on the other, sought the growth of market relations and a firm turn toward capitalism. The two groups, however, disagreed on how the spoils would be divided between them, and the party was split three ways on how fast and how far to move toward putting the economy on full market relations. It was Deng who proved to be “the master of Chinese politics,” Professor Li writes, as he was able to implement an intermediate strategy between the party’s poles and use the crackdown in Tianamen Square to reduce the intellectuals to the junior partners of the ruling elites and to break the resistance of urban working people. Thus the stage was set:

“Throughout the 1990s, most of the state and collective-owned enterprises were privatized. Tens of millions of workers were laid off. The urban working class was deprived of their remaining socialist rights. Moreover, the dismantling of the rural collective economy and basic public services had forced hundreds of millions of peasants into the cities where they became ‘migrant workers,’ that is, an enormous, cheap labor force that would work for transnational corporations and Chinese capitalists for the lowest possible wages under the most demanding conditions. The massive influx of foreign capital contributed to a huge export boom.” [pages 64-65]

The “socialist rights” that were revoked included job security, medical insurance, access to housing and guaranteed pensions. The creation of an exodus from the countryside provided a huge pool of surplus labor to keep wages extremely low.

“China’s economic rise has important global implications. First, China’s deeper incorporation into the capitalist world-economy has massively increased the size of the global reserve army of cheap labor. In some industries, this allows capitalists in the core states to directly lower their wages and other costs by directly relocating capital to China. But more important is the ‘threat effect.’ That is, capitalists in the core states force core-state workers to accept lower wages and worse working conditions by threatening to move their factories or offices to cheap labor areas such as China, without actual movement of physical capital. …

“Secondly, China’s low-cost manufacturing exports directly lower the prices of many industrial goods. To the extent that unequal exchange takes place between China and the core states, part of the surplus value produced by Chinese workers is transferred to the core states and helps to raise the profit rate for capitalists in the core states.” [pages 70-71]

Professor Li’s analysis rests on “world systems” theory, which divides the world’s capitalist countries into three general groupings. World systems theory emphasizes that capitalism is a global system that changes and mutates over time and therefore must be analyzed as a single unit rather than as a collection of nation-states. The global division of labor forms the basis for a division of the world’s countries into three broad categories: core, semi-periphery and periphery, with the latter two subordinate to the core countries and the periphery the most exploited.

Inequality between core and periphery is an “indispensable mechanism” of global capitalism, Professor Li writes, and the existence of a semi-periphery acts as an important buffer because it is exploited to a relatively lesser degree than the periphery and can also, to a lesser degree, exploit the periphery. The semi-periphery historically comprised a small percentage of the world’s population and thus could be “bought off” relatively easily and thus a buffer against any united resistance by the world’s non-core countries. But if the semi-periphery were to become a significant portion of the world’s population, the world system would be destabilized.

The massive size of China is the destabilizing agent, Professor Li argues. He presents four possible scenarios that could arise from the rise of China:

“First, China may fail. China’s great drive toward ‘development’ in the end may turn out to be no more than a great bubble. [In this scenario,] as China sinks back to the status of periphery or poor semi-periphery, China’s existing regime of accumulation will collapse as it can no longer withstand the exploding social pressures the very process of accumulation has generated. This scenario, however, may be the least devastating for the capitalist world-economy.

“For the capitalist world-economy, the problem of China lies with its huge size. China has a labor force that is larger than the total labor force in all the core states, or that in the entire well-to-do semi-periphery. As China competes with the well-to-do semi-peripheral states in a wide range of global commodity chains, the competition eventually would lead to the convergence between China and well-to-do semi-peripheral states in profit rates and wage rates. This convergence may take place in an upward manner or a downward manner.

“In the downward-conversion scenario (the second scenario), China’s competition, with its enormous labor force, will completely undermine the relative monopoly of the historical well-to-do semi-peripheral states in certain commodity chains. As relative monopoly is replaced by intense competition, the value added contained in the traditional semi-peripheral commodity chains will be squeezed, forcing the historical well-to-do semi-peripheral states to accept lower wage rates that are closer to Chinese wage rates.” [pages 109-110]

Professor Li is arguing that, in this second possible scenario, wages rates in industrialized countries not among the “core” states (industrialized countries other than Western and Northern Europe, North America, Japan, arguably South Korea) would collapse under the competitive pressure of China’s low wages, which long hovered at about five percent of U.S. wage rates, and in the mid-2000s were one-quarter to one-fifth of countries such as Argentina and Hungary. A collapse in wages in semi-peripheral countries around the world such as Argentina, Hungary and Turkey would spark unrest and lead to economic depression around the world.

“There is the third scenario, that of upward convergence. China may succeed in its pursuit of ‘modernization’ and become a secured, well-to-do semi-peripheral state. In the meantime, the historical well-to-do semi-peripheral states may succeed in maintaining their relative monopoly in certain commodity chains. As a result, the Chinese wage rates converge upwards towards the semi-peripheral levels. Unfortunately, this scenario is as dangerous for the capitalist world-economy as the second scenario. The problem, again, lies with China’s huge size. Should the Chinese workers generally receive the semi-peripheral levels of wages, given the size of the Chinese population, the total surplus value distributed to the working classes in the entire well-to-do semi-periphery would have to more than double. This will greatly reduce the share of the surplus value available for the rest of the world.” [pages 110-111]

Here, Professor Li is arguing that a multi-fold increase in Chinese wages simultaneous with a maintenance of wages in countries around the world would likely be unsustainable. Multi-national companies based in core countries have moved production to China to take advantage of its low wages and lack of effective labor laws, enabling them to extract more surplus value. “Surplus value” is the sizable difference between the value of what an employee produces and what the employee is paid; some of the surplus value is used by capitalists for investment or to cover other expenses but much of it goes into stratospheric executive pay and financial-market speculation.

An upward convergence of wages around the world in present-day low-wage havens such as China would significantly reduce capitalists’ profits. In this scenario, capitalists would seek to cut wages in core countries to make up the difference, which in turn would trigger reductions in demand. Declining rates of profit, under capitalism, lead to economic downturns. Each of the world’s major economic crises, from 1873 on, have followed declines in the rate of profit.

“If the scenario of upward convergence turns out to be too expensive for the capitalist world-economy, what if China’s upward mobility takes place at the expense of the historical well-to-do semi-periphery? In other words, imagine the scenario (the fourth scenario) in which the rise of China (and India) successfully displaces the historical well-to-do semi-periphery, what are the likely implications for the existing world system? … [A]fter all of the investment is distributed, how much will be left for the other half of the globe?” [page 111]

Were the growth in energy consumption of the Chinese and Indian economies to continue at the same rates, and likewise for the United States and the eurozone, the rest of the world would be left without an energy supply in two decades, Professor Li argues. He writes:

“Given these trends, the rest of the world will have to get by with less and less energy consumption after 2017 and by 2035 there would be virtually no available energy left for the entire world outside China, India, the U.S. and the Eurozone. It is certainly impossible for such a scenario to materialize.” [pages 111-112]

But will there be enough energy to meet even the increasing needs of whatever countries will be in a position to dominate energy resources? Because of the intense competition imposed by the market in capitalism — individuals, businesses and states must all engage in it — a substantial amount of available surplus value must be used toward further capital accumulation to secure and expand market share. Those who do not do so are eliminated in the competition.

Investment is a necessity, and to compete successfully, what is wrung out of labor must rise. Machinery is the route toward greater efficiency. But as machinery and consumer products become more sophisticated, energy and other resources are consumed at greater rates; thus energy inputs rise faster than the population, pushing energy usage beyond sustainability and degrading the environment.

The world is already consuming resources beyond the world’s bio-capacity, Professor Li argues. Not only have the world’s “core” countries already exceeded their regional bio-capacities, but China, India, the Middle East and Central Asia have as well. Using calculations in a 2006 report by the World Wildlife Fund in the USA and Canada, the Zoological Society of London and Global Footprint Network, China and India consume resources and impose domestic environmental damage at a rate twice beyond their ability to be sustainable. Although those countries consume per capita far less than do the U.S. or the European Union, they also have much lower bio-capacities.

Such problems are compounded by an imminent peak in oil and gas, and limits to a variety of metals and other natural resources. If renewable energy sources prove unable to make up for the future shortfall in energy from oil and gas, the world will have much less energy available to it in the latter part of the 21st century than is available now. Professor Li believes that renewable energy will only be able to produce a small percentage of that of non-renewable sources. Even if his pessimism proves unfounded, the unsustainability of present energy consumption remains — as is the damage being done to the environment.

Another looming crisis for the capitalist system is the lack of a successor to the United States as the system’s center. Capitalism has had a succession of dominant centers; each successive center has been bigger to be able to cope with increasingly complex tasks. When London succeeded Amsterdam as the financial center, the financial center became located within a country with a powerful military, not only a large merchant fleet as Amsterdam’s United Provinces possessed. With New York succeeding London, the country at the center is continental in size and possesses a military that can be projected around the world.

Professor Li predicts a rapid decline for the U.S., including an imminent end to the dollar as the world’s central currency. Here I believe the professor’s forecast will prove to be considerably off; although the U.S. has entered a period of decline, its military and financial powers will remain preeminent for some time. And the dollar and U.S. debt instruments remain safe havens.

Declines from the capitalist system’s apex have tended to be gradual and not precipitous; moreover, the former financial center tends to remain powerful in financial markets for some time after the military baton has been passed. And there is no country remotely near being able to mount any challenge to U.S. military supremacy; U.S. military spending is nearly equal to military spending of all the rest of world put together and a significant portion of the Pentagon budget goes to weaponry.

It is a contradiction that the “duties” of the central power contribute to its ultimate decline. For the U.S., that is not only the enormous drain of military spending that starves the rest of its economy of investment and needed social provisions, but that it props up the world system through its deficits.

“After the systemic breakdown of the early twentieth century, the capitalist world-economy can no longer afford another similar breakdown. The hegemonic power has since then assumed the new responsibility to actively manage the global economy. Instead of allowing the system to simply collapse [during the repeated economic crises from the 1980s], the U.S. responded to growing systemic instability by running large and rising current account deficits, in effect pumping ‘liquidity’ into the global economy.” [page 123]

No other country has a big enough economy, nor a big enough military to apply the muscle that underlies the capitalist system, to replace the U.S., yet the capitalist system is unable to function without such a center. The next hegemon must be bigger than the U.S., and there is no country or bloc that fits the bill. Moreover, Professor Li argues, such a hegemon would be so large that it would stifle competition among countries, kicking out one of the crucial legs of the capitalist system.

Crises in economics, the environment, shrinking natural resources and the chaos of global warming are leading to a threat to very survival of humanity, Professor Li argues. Moreover, multiple crises are leading to a point where economic growth is no longer possible, the ultimate contradiction for the capitalist system, the very existence of which is based on endless growth and accumulation. He writes:

“Centuries of relentless capitalist accumulation have set humanity on a course of self-destruction. The very survival of humanity and civilization is at stake. The crisis can not be avoided or overcome within the historical framework of capitalism. To rebuild human society on an ecologically sustainable basis, there must be an economic system that is based on the production for use which is capable of meeting people’s basic needs, rather than one that is oriented towards the endless pursuit of profit and accumulation.” [page 173]

What comes next is up to humanity to decide. Professor Li quotes world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein as predicting the world will enter a post-capitalist era in the second half of the 21st century. But what will that system or systems be? It could well be much worse — an authoritarian feudalism in which survival is a struggle in a time of scarcity is certainly foreseeable. Or it could be a democratic socialist system, in which production is for human necessity rather than an elite’s wealth accumulation and in which the consequences of a changing climate and the limitations on the world’s resources are handled in fully democratic, rational manners without elites to confiscate most of what is produced.

All social systems are historical, and capitalism is no exception, Professor Li argues. Indeed, all previous systems have reached their limits and been supplanted by newer forms. Ending on an optimistic note, he writes that “if the future socialism is able to make the best use of the human knowledge of nature that has been developed under capitalism and further expand that knowledge” and a sustainable relationship between population and resources can be established, then “humanity will be in a position to resume the great historical march to the realm of freedom.”

The Rise of China rewards the reader with a wealth of information and analysis. It is not necessary to agree with everything in the book to find it a valuable contribution toward understanding the stresses of the present economic crisis and a stimulant to discussion of the viability of continuing on the current economic path. One conclusion that shouldn’t be controversial, however, is that there will be no saviors. We’ll have to save ourselves.

* Minqi Li, The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy [Monthly Review Press, New York, 2008]

Not so fast: The contradictions in China’s capitalist rise

By Pete Dolack

Hand-wringing over China increasingly seems to be a preoccupation of mainstream journalism, popular culture and the world of politics. In the past two years, China has passed Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy and passed Germany to become the world’s biggest exporter. Speculation abounds on when China will be crowned the world’s largest economy.

Among other forms, the decline of the United States can take comical or satirical forms in novels, Rick Moody’s Four Fingers of Death and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story being two recent, outstanding examples. The plot of both unfold against a backdrop of a rapidly decaying United States at the brink of bankruptcy as the Chinese contemplate cutting off all credit, the former novel contemplating the human costs of economic free-fall layered over an absurd military gambit to salvage imperial prerogatives and the latter deftly using satiric exaggeration to lampoon the consumer fetishism that passes for U.S. popular culture. Laughing at the precipice is, arguably, better than crying.

Contemplation of the end of U.S. dominance can of course take much deadlier forms, such as the Bush II administration’s invasion of Iraq — a desperate ploy to re-assert U.S. military supremacy, impose a neoliberal paradise for its corporations, provide an economic and military base for the U.S. to assert itself over the Middle East and secure energy resources. Administrations from Nixon to Clinton had, in some form, carried out policies designed to slow down the incremental but steady relative decline of U.S. power in relation to the rest of the world, but such policies were tossed aside last decade in a mad gamble to restore undisputed supremacy. That the Bush II gamble backfired spectacularly cannot be in reasonable dispute; plunging the country into debt, wasting resources on military adventure, inflicting an appalling scale of casualties and engendering increased international willingness to oppose U.S. initiatives has instead accelerated imperial decline.

I think this is one critical reason for why U.S. corporate elites and their allied thinkers and policymakers split between Bush epigone John McCain and Barack Obama instead of their usual pattern of heavily tilting toward the Republican Party — the election of Obama promised a return to working with the allies of the advanced capitalist world instead of go-it-alone bull-in-the-china-shop adventures. That does not necessarily mean a less aggressive foreign policy as bombing campaigns in Libya, Yemen and Pakistan attest, but it does mean a more targeted use of the military, more consultation and more spreading of the costs and responsibilities, and therefore leading to a reduced burden and less instability, which are good for business. Wall Street in particular prizes stability. Therefore, the business elites who back Obama more or less got what they expected — a cool, steady hand at the helm of empire in which broader considerations are taken into account rather than a cowboy mentality that benefitted only a small, politically favored segment of Corporate America.

The general pattern of a relative decline in U.S. hegemony remains outside the ability of any strategy to alter. No country could possibly maintain the dominant position enjoyed by the United States in the years following World War II. Europe and Japan were in ruins, most of the rest of the world undeveloped and the U.S. possessed an intact manufacturing base and the ability to export its products around the globe. Europe and Japan rebounded, many other countries developed — sometimes in spectacular fashion — and there was much more competition.

But until the rise of China, there was no perceived direct threat to U.S. centrality. No single European country, nor Japan, was big enough to push the U.S. off its position at the apex of the global economy, and the centrality of the dollar in the Bretton Woods system and in the current era of free-floating currencies has cemented that status. An economically integrated European Union is not up to the task, despite the wishes of its industrial and banker architects, because there are too many centrifugal forces tearing at its foundation.

But now there is a country that seemingly has the potential to unseat the United States. But can China actually do so? Is Shanghai going to replace New York as the world’s financial center?

Let’s not hold our breaths just yet — China is not nearly capable today of becoming the new capitalist center.

Size matters. In earlier times, the seat of a small republic such as Venice could be the leading financial center based on the strength of its trading networks. Once capitalism supplanted feudalism, however, the financial center was successively located within a larger federation that possessed both a strong navy and a significant fleet of merchant ships (Amsterdam); then within a sizeable and unified country with a large enough population to maintain a powerful navy and a physical presence throughout an empire (London); and finally within a continent-sized country that can project its economic and multi-dimensional military power around the world (New York). China does have a population four times larger than the U.S., but its military and economy are much too small.

As the capitalist sphere grows larger and the problems of increasing complexity become more difficult, the capabilities of the center must become greater. Moreover, a center must be able to apply the force that maintains capitalism. There is no conceivable defensive reason for the U.S. to maintain military bases in more than 120 countries or to spend about as much on its military as all other countries combined. Such an overseas presence is a function of the force that has always underlaid capitalism: forcing open countries to trade, invasions and coups d’etat to ensure compliant governments, violent repressions against restive foreign populations and armed strike-breaking at home. There is no country or bloc that can meaningfully challenge U.S. military might in the near future.

Amsterdam’s reign as the financial center was doomed once the United Provinces (a precursor to the Netherlands) was soundly defeated in naval battles by the British, although Amsterdam did remain a significant financial entrepôt for some time. By the start of the 20th century, the U.S. had become the world’s biggest economy, and when it emerged stronger from the world wars while Britain emerged weaker, the U.S. became the global hegemon, although London remains one of the world’s most important financial entrepôts. History, however, does not repeat itself in neat patterns.

The rise of Britain and then the United States rested on exporting manufactured products and protecting their domestic industries. But unlike China, both also relied on internal consumer demand and had large areas of the world into which their corporations could expand; rising employee wages could be tolerated because of the ability of profits to grow in an era of expansion. In an era of mature capitalism, China is dependent on taking market share from others.

Success in doing that, so far, has enabled extraordinary trade surpluses, but the fact that much of that surplus is parked in U.S. Treasury bonds illustrates that China is nowhere near displacing the United States. On the surface, it appears as an irony that borrowing costs for the U.S. government are stable, or even falling, during a protracted economic crisis that originated within U.S. borders. But the centrality of the dollar, and the sheer size of the U.S. economy, makes U.S. government debt as reliable a safe haven as exists. If the U.S. government goes down, pretty much the entire global capitalist system goes down.

Only a currency that is fully convertible and represents the most rock-solid government guarantee could replace the dollar, and neither is the case with the renminbi. China in 2012 is a developing country and believes it must protect its young industries, just as other countries did during their rise. The advantage that China has over other countries is that, because of its vast trade surplus, it can afford to spend huge sums of money intervening in foreign-exchange markets to keep the value of its currency low, giving its exports a continuing advantage.

Doing so is really not so sinister; many countries, among them Japan, Switzerland and the United States, intervene in the markets to reduce the value of their currencies. (Despite the continual insinuations in the corporate media that the Chinese Communist Party issues decrees and, voila!, the renminbi is cheap, it requires continual heavy spending in foreign-exchange markets. You would think more corporate-media business reporters would be familiar with the fact that the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates ended nearly 40 years ago even if Republican Party congressional members aren’t.)

Both the Bush II and Obama administrations maintained policies aimed at a cheap dollar; Obama’s goal of doubling U.S. exports in five years would be impossible without a dollar valued low against other currencies, thereby making U.S. products more affordable overseas. Nonetheless, China does this at a larger scale than other countries and is too dependent on exporting cheap products to stop doing so.

The production of cheap products is dependent on ultra-low wages, and that brings us to the contradictions within China’s capitalist rise. China’s low wages are based on ruthless exploitation of its rural population, and even China does not have a limitless supply of peasants able to move to cities to work in sweatshops. And even China has limits to how much manufacturing capacity it can rationally use.

Democracy is a historical accident of capitalism, not a prerequisite or something somehow built in. The spaces and contradictions contained within the political systems created to stabilize the functioning of capitalism (including institutions to adjudicate conflicts among capitalists and mechanisms for selecting political leadership in the absence of an absolute monarchy or the continued ascendency of a static landed aristocracy) enabled working people to wrest some of that democracy for themselves. Authoritarian capitalism is a model that has built industrial or trading powerhouses on small scales: Singapore and South Korea come most readily to mind. China is unique in that it is using this model on a vastly larger scale, and to become a global superpower, not simply a regional player as the others. South Koreans eventually forced a democratic opening from below through organizing; it is an open question as to whether a similar pattern will emerge in China.

Regardless of any possible democratic opening, if Chinese can’t buy the products that are produced with new capacity, what good is this extra production? For China to re-orient itself to producing for internal consumption would mean having to allow dramatic growth in workers’ income. But doing so would mean ending foreign capital’s reason to move production to China. China could try to switch to high-end manufacturing — to some degree, it is trying to extend its mix of production to do just that — but it doesn’t have the capabilities of non-Chinese companies that are already making such products and it would have to compete by muscling out foreign competitors.

As their own populations become more restless, foreign governments would not be able to stand by and allow themselves to be swamped by cheap Chinese imports. Moreover, the internal demand for such high-end products is limited within China, so it would be right back to having to rely on exports; much of China’s demand for high-technology products comes from government infrastructure projects and there comes a time when such a high level of investment ceases to be prudent and becomes wasteful spending, as has happened to Japan.

Another way out for China is what it seems to be intent on doing — buying foreign companies and buying interests in foreign operations. Yet it seems to be doing this not for investment purposes but to guarantee supplies for its internal markets as it is increasingly unable to meet its own needs, especially in energy. The Chinese certainly have the capital reserves to pursue this strategy, thanks to their massive trade surpluses and the large profits of their state-owned enterprises, but at some point will appear to be throwing their weight around, engendering resistance. Right now, Western capitalists see a market of 1.3 billion people and dollar (and euro and pound) signs dancing in their heads if they can gain access to it. But we come back to the fact that the production that has been moved to China from the West and other East Asian countries is based on extremely low wages.

The Chinese Communist Party can continue to apply repression to keep wages low, but such policies directly contradict its historic Mao-based ideology, which rested on the now-shredded social safety net known as the “Iron Rice Bowl” — an achievement not lost to collective memory. If the endless drip of scattered local rebellions organizes enough to force competitive wages, Western capitalists would still want to sell their products in China, but would produce at least some of them elsewhere. At that point, could China continue to grow its economy eight to ten percent a year? It does not appear it could. Chinese industry could step in and build new capacity, or acquire the capacity that Western capitalists abandon, but the upward pressure on wages would undercut China’s ability to export cheaply, and without much increased internal demand China would have a glut of capacity that would face shuttering.

China has limits, as all countries do, and if social explosions happen on a massive scale, none of us knows what the outcome might be. The party continues to apply repression to keep a lid on dissent. How long can it do so? None of us knows the answer to that, either, although it is interesting that U.S. capitalists who have moved production to China have an interest in continued Chinese “communist” repression at the same time that Chinese “communists” are now the most fearsome capitalist competition. Rivals who cannot let go of each other: The U.S. needs China to buy its debt and China needs the U.S. as an export destination.

My friend Paul Gilman, an activist-historian who has spent many years studying China, has said to me during our correspondence on this topic that Taiwan and South Korea’s right-wing dictatorships had to invest in the countryside to keep peasants even with the urban proletariat in terms of living standards to prevent revolutionary outbreaks, and that partially explains why Taiwanese and Korean workers were able to force large rises in wages, to the point where neither country can be used as low-wage havens for multinational corporations. (The militancy of those working people also helped.)

Two numbers will illustrate these points: The percentage of China’s gross domestic product that is household consumption (that is, all the things that people buy for personal use from toothbrushes to automobiles) is an extraordinarily low 35 percent and wages for Chinese workers held steady for a quarter-century at approximately five percent of U.S. wages.*

Let’s put those two numbers into some context. Household consumption accounted for 51 percent of the Chinese economy in 1985. To put that in further perspective, household consumption in the United States today is 71 percent and in the largest economies of East Asia and Western Europe it is around 60 percent. At the same time, the wages of Chinese workers have drastically declined as a percentage of gross domestic product during the past fifteen years, while the composite profits of Chinese corporations, private and state-owned, have nearly doubled. And one final comparison: Wages in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan started at less than ten percent of U.S. wages but rose quickly in comparison to world standards.

And that in a nutshell explains why so many manufacturers have shifted so much production to China. And why all those corporations headquartered in the U.S. and elsewhere who manufacture in China do not want change to come to China any more than do China’s coastal corporate elites, who decisively influence policy within the Communist Party. (Maybe we can just call it the “Chinese Capitalist Party” and end the pretense.)

One manifestation of that party policy is heavily concentrating investment in coastal industry while neglecting the countryside. Hung Ho-fung, a sociology professor who writes frequently about China, in a New Left Review article pungently titled “America’s Head Servant?: The PRC’s dilemma in the Global Crisis,” reports that rural per capita income has never exceeded 40 percent of the urban level during the past two decades. China’s countryside is arguably overpopulated, but government-party policy induces the exodus that has maintained downward pressure on wages.

Following a wave of strikes in China last year, some factories were forced to raise wages by as much as 50 percent. The U.S. corporate press simultaneously marveled that Chinese workers had “suddenly” organized themselves and were “no longer docile” while also wringing their hands on behalf of capitalists that China might no longer be a reliable low-wage haven. No need to worry just yet — 50 percent added on to five percent means seven and a half percent of world standards. That seems to remain a good deal for capitalists. It would seem that the Chinese political leadership decided it was prudent to let restless workers vent some steam, win a real concession (in relative terms) and thereby boil off (for now) the possibility of an organized challenge coalescing.

Eventually, the surplus army of labor will dry up, and Chinese manufacturers will face the same situation that Taiwanese and South Korean manufacturers began facing in the 1990s. Wages will have to rise, sharply, to at a minimum be competitive with East Asian living standards, thereby reducing the level of exploitation to a point intolerable to Chinese capitalists, and even more intolerable to multinational corporations operating in China. The Chinese export model, however, may have trouble before the countryside empties out because of its dependence on suppressing internal living standards, continually growing external demand and maintaining its currency valued low. The specter of inflation also looms, and China is interminably showing signs of tapping the brakes.

Meanwhile, the world probably cannot absorb much more Chinese production — the deep economic malaise in Europe and North America shows no signs of relenting, and may get worse. China has no choice but to create internal demand. But Chinese capitalists/Communist Party functionaries are getting rich on the current export model, and in a one-party system there is a built-in resistance to change and a security apparatus that can be used to stifle internal dissent.

Then there is also the degradation of the Chinese environment, another looming check on Chinese expansion. And, finally, one more element to think about: Can capitalism survive hundreds of millions of Chinese dramatically raising their material standards? This question may seem counter-intuitive, as conventional capitalist wisdom assumes that more is better, implicitly assuming a bigger market means bigger profits.

Expanding markets has been a critical factor in rising Western living standards in the past. But what happens when there are no more markets to conquer, and, more directly pertinent here, are there enough raw materials and energy to support China — or China and India — reaching the material standards of the advanced capitalist countries?

One economist who believes that the size of China is resulting in irreconcilable contradictions is Minqi Li. In his book The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy, Li argues that future demands by Chinese workers to raise their living standards will put catastrophic pressure on the rest of the world: Either the size of China’s labor market will force living standards down in other developing countries to China’s low level, causing vast unrest in those countries, or Chinese living standards do rise but in doing so reduce what is available for the rest of the world, driving down living standards and reducing the availability of resources elsewhere to intolerable levels. Moreover, Li argues, there will not be enough energy available for the projected global demand before 2035 if the demand continues to increase at current rates.

Too pessimistic? Sorry, I have no happy ending to offer. Capitalism is a system that requires continual expansion: Expand or die is its remorseless law. Capitalism has in the past escaped depressions through expansion to new places. But there is almost nowhere else in which to expand. In the present crisis, private enterprises and governments continue to reduce workforces and cut wages and benefits. The products that are made cannot be sold because there is not enough income for working people to buy them; weak demand necessitates more cuts or moving more production to a new low-wage haven.

The world is in a vicious circle and there is no easy way out. Or no way out, other than by a better economic system — and creating one will require a tremendous grassroots struggle.

* Statistics in this and the following paragraph from the World Bank; Xinhua; and Hung Ho-fung, “America’s Head Servant?: The PRC’s dilemma in the Global Crisis,” New Left Review, November-December 2009