{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","uuid":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","normalized_title":"zombiecapitalismglobalcrisisandtherelevanceofmarx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","isbns":["9781608461042"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":426,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Zombie%20Capitalism%20Global%20Crisis%20and%20the%20Relevance%20of%20Marx","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/search"},"page":{"printed_page":221,"pdf_page":221,"physical_index":221,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"5d26d37c5847fda3d31e0b266f836132fa0e2c6df6d3bc1244950f01bbe9c70a"},"chapter":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","content":"Brazil, Venezuela, Japan and Canada, adopting the name Tenaris.104 There is a similar pattern for some Mexican companies. In the late 1 980s Alfa, the largest industrial group in Mexico, with 109 subsidiaries spanning automotive components, food, petrochemicals and steel, embarked on a growing number of joint operations with foreign firms. The glass maker Vitro, which had bought two American companies, became \"the world's leading glass container manufacturer, with its market almost equally split between the US and Mexico\".105 The logical outcome of this in Mexico was for its ruling class to forget its old nationalism and to join the North American Free Trade Area and increasingly to operate as a subordinate component of US capitalism.\n\nOccasionally the collaboration produced positive results for wider sections of local capital, provided some job opportunities for the aspirant middle classes (in Ireland, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and coastal China), and even created conditions under which workers could boost their living standards through industrial action. All too often, however, it created still further indebtedness to foreign banks which the national states had to cope with. In such cases a narrow stratum of people gained a taste of the fleshpots of multinational capital while the conditions of the mass of people deteriorated, or at best remained unchanged. A yuppie class lived in protected enclaves as if it were in the wealthiest parts of the industrialised world (and often went a step further and lived part of the year there), while much of the population festered in ever proliferating slums and shantytowns.\n\nThe assumption of the new economic ideology-most forcefully addressed in the \"neoliberal\" notions of the \"Washington Consensus\" of the IMF and World Bank-was that if some capital accumulation in some countries had been able to gain a new lease of life by reinsertion into the world system, it could do so anywhere if only the last restrictions on trade and the movement of capital were removed. But the reality proved to be rather different. A few areas attracted new productive investment, but only a few. At the end of the century only a third of worldwide foreign direct investment went to the \"emerging markets\" of the Global South and the former Communist countries, and of this more than half went to just four countries-China/Hong Kong, Singapore, Mexico and Brazil. Another quarter went to just seven countries (Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, Bermuda, Venezuela, Chile and Argentina), leaving 1 76 countries to share out the remaining 25 percent.106 And much of the investment was not new investment at all, but simply the buying up of already operating companies by multinationals based in the metropolitan countries.\n\nThe End of the Golden Age\n\n221","previous_page":220,"next_page":222}