Re: Hardt & Negri on Genoa

Louis Proyect wrote:
>Since US imperialism was not fighting Korean and Vietnam type wars on the
>African continent, the build-up of friendly anti-Communist regimes was not
>necessary.

A little bit of problem about synchronising time-lines here, and also 
the inability to explain some specificities.

That may "explain" Japan, S Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, maybe even 
Singapore, to some degree. Some of us liked to say that the Asian 
Financial Crisis, not the collapse of the Berlin Wall, marked the end 
of the Cold War in E Asia; that the official version of the end of 
the Cold War was just EuroAmericanbabble.

But how would one explain the Philippines? Or the differential 
social, economic and political performances of the various states -- 
we really are not all grey, you know? Or the fact that the timing of 
the surge in the rest of E Asia occurred post-1985 by which time 
communism was pretty much moribund -- at least in E Asia, but 
probably in Europe as well.

In the downturn of the early to mid-1980s, much of what later came to 
be called the 'second tier of tigers' were being written off -- as a 
quick run-through the Asian WSJ of the time would suggest: minimally 
you might recall the talk that the used-by date of off-shore 
platforms had passed. Then the opposite happened -- one explanation 
here is that it was an outcome of Reagan's attempt to buttress US 
capitalist interests in the form of the Plaza Accord; still, that too 
cannot account for the specificities and variable performances of the 
nation states, those entities in which you profess so much interest. 
Anyway, that surge was what gave birth to the phrase "E Asian 
Economic Miracle", which was then read backwards as a coherent, 
seamless story. Of course E Asia was both convenient and inconvenient 
to the powers-that-be and the IFIs -- the only apparently bright spot 
in an ocean of disasters. Inconvenient, because for all their 
gymnastics, it was really not quite assimilable to the 'standard' 
theory (hence the ill-concealed glee when the financial crisis hit, 
but also because of the hubris of the regime commanders of the 
region); convenient, because it was by any assessment a bright spot 
-- and they surely wanted to claim some credit for it, incorporating 
it within their favoured mode of analysis -- a process perhaps partly 
registered through successive years of the World Development Report 
of the early 1990s through a subtle shift in terminology from market 
to market-friendly.

The bigger story of worldwide disaster remains largely true. But this 
little glitch that is E Asia cries out for explanation beyond the 
comforting one of the need to build up friendly anti-communist 
regimes. You concede too much and explain too little with such a 
formulation. It requires a will to ignorance to be satisfied with it. 
And that -- more than whatever labels you wish to saddle me with -- 
is what truly perturbs me. Don't you think it a little sad that I 
should find a Stiglitz rather than someone like yourself a little 
more enlightening? Because, believe it or not, my sympathies are 
actually more with you than a Stiglitz.

kj khoo