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# Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx
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The IMF assured people in 1980, "During the 1970s ... a generalised debt management problem was avoided . . . and the outlook for the immediate future does not give cause for alarm" .102 This was written just months before the second international recession, in the early 1980s, and caught all these states unprepared. As export markets shrank and international interest rates began to rise, the debts they had incurred in the 1 970s crippled their growth, threw them into recession and blighted their economies right through the 1980s, which became known as "the lost decade" in Latin America, with a fall in GNP per person for the continent as a whole of 10 percent.103
The impact on local capitalists and mainstream political forces was not, however, to question the new opening to the world market. Rather it was to insist, as in Russia and Eastern Europe that the opening had not gone far enough. The new doctrine was accepted in one form or another by the late 1980s by populist politicians and even former guerrillas in Latin America, by the politburo in China, by the Congress Party leadership in India, by those who had once proclaimed their commitment to "socialism" in Africa and by the successors to Nasser in Egypt.
The conversions were not always voluntary. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank intervened where they could, making offers, mafia style, to debt-laden countries which their rulers rarely found themselves able to refuse, since doing so would rule out any sort of accumulation strategy. The various debt programmes were more concerned with protecting the interests of Western banks than with ameliorating conditions in the indebted countries. But more was involved than just a surrender to imperialism on the part of the governments that accepted them. Those capitals, private and state alike, that had grown during the period of state-directed "development" did not see any way of continuing to expand within the confines of limited national markets. They wanted access to markets and to technological innovations outside national borders. They might allow, even encourage, national governments to haggle over the terms on which capital in the metropolitan countries allowed this to happen, but they would not reject them outright. And in the process some of them were indeed able to develop more than a national profile.
So the Argentinian steel maker TechNet took control of the Mexican steel tube maker Tamsa in 1993, acquired the Italian steel tube maker Dalmikne in 1996, and then went on to expand into
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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.
Occasionally 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.
The 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.
The End of the Golden Age
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These problems were most felt in the poorest regions of the world, especially Africa. However much they dismantled their old, protectionist, import-substitutionist policies, they still remained unattractive to the multinationals they wanted to woo: "Small, poor countries face increased barriers to entry in industries most subject to the global forces of competition" .107
Much the same applied to exports. China and a few other countries did continue to break into world markets. But the export orientation of these countries meant that their own internal markets for foreign-produced consumer goods did not grow at a corresponding speed and that their expansion was, in part, at the expense of other countries in the Global South. So African countries which had begun to enjoy some export growth in manufactured goods found themselves losing markets to China. The "combined and uneven development" that had characterised the long boom continued into its aftermath, with the difference that many economies actually contracted even as others grew rapidly. It was as if the "Third World" itself had split in two, except that immense pools of poverty remained even in the part that was growing.
Those who ran the local states could often feel insecure even when the developmentalist strategy was successful in its own capitalist or state capitalist terms. Their success depended upon a high level of domestic accumulation-and the other side of that, a high level of exploitation that could only be achieved by holding down workers' and peasants' living standards. But even when they succeeded in getting high levels of accumulation (which was the exception rather than the rule) they remained weak in their bargaining position with the multinationals. As multinationals took over local firms, their proportion of the local capital investment could rise to 40 or even 50 percent of the total, increasing their leverage over local decision making. But states in the poorer parts of the world did not have anything like the same leverage over multinationals, since the small size of their domestic economies meant they probably accounted for no more than 1 or 2 percent of the multinationals' worldwide investments and sales.
Huge gaps usually opened up between what those who ran the state had promised the mass of people and what they could deliver.
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High levels of repression and corruption become the norm rather than the exception. When the developmentalist strategy ran into problems, something else accompanied the repression-the hollowing out of the mass organisations that used to tie sections of the middle class to the state and, via them, some of the working class and peasantry. The oppressive state became a weak state and looked to foreign backing to reinforce its hold.
All this happened as problems of profitability in the advanced countries drove their capitalists to look for any opportunity, however limited, to grab surplus value from elsewhere. There was not much to be got from the poorest of the poor anywhere in the world, but what there was they were determined to get. Imperialism meant that at the top level of the system rival capitalist powers argued vehemently with each other about how to satisfy their diferent interests. At a lower level, it meant constraining the local ruling classes of the Third World to act as collectors of debt repayments for the Western banks, royalty payments for the multinationals and profits for Western investors as well as for their own domestic capitalists. Debt servicing alone transferred \$300 billion a year from the "developing countries" to the wealthy in the advanced world. 108 A website dedicated to defending US overseas investment boasted:
Most new overseas investments are paid for by profits made overseas. Foreign direct investment by US companies was only \$86 billion in 1 996 . . . If you subtract out the reinvested earnings of foreign operations, the result was only \$22 billion . . . US companies' overseas operations also generate income that returns to the US . . . In 1 995, this flow of income-defined as direct investment income, royalty and license fees, and charges and services-back into the US amounted to \$ 1 1 7 billion.109
There could be no end to the squeezing. The share of foreign investors in the trading on the Brazilian stock exchange rose from 6.5 percent in 1 991 to 29.4 percent in 1 995,110 and the share of new Mexican government debt held by non-residents grew from 8 percent at the end of 1990 to 55 percent at the end of 1993.111
Under such circumstances, the instability of the world economy in the aftermath of the "golden age" found heightened expression in the countries of the Global South. Even those expanding rapidly and extolled by neoliberal media commentators could suddenly be faced with near insuperable debt problems, deepening slump and possibly accelerating inflation-as happened in Mexico in the early 1990s, Indonesia in the late 1990s and Argentina at the beginning of the 2000s. And the fate of the mass of people in countries regarded as marginal by international capital, like most of sub-Saharan Africa, was deepening poverty, repeated famines and, all too often, recurrent bouts of ethnic conflict spilling over into civil wars, often financed by foreign firms interested in control of raw materials. There may never have been a golden age for such parts of the world. But there was certainly a leaden one.
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Restructuring through crises
Global capitalism in the last quarter of the 20th century was marked once again by many of the features Marx had described. There were recurrent economic crises, and the restructuring through crisis of capitals, big and small, privately owned and state owned.
All the major industrial economies sufered at least three real recessions, except for France and Canada which each experienced one "growth recession" and two real recessions, and Japan which avoided a real recession for nearly 20 years after the crisis of the mid-1970s, only then to enter a 13-year period of near stagnation after 1 992.
In the former Soviet bloc countries recessionary tendencies of the late 1 980s now turned into slumps. But soon different paths emerged. The former USSR (CIS in the graph below) suffered an enormous economic contraction, and output in 2000, even after two years of recovery, was only 70 percent of the 1990s figure. The picture was similarly miserable for Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and the bulk of former Yugoslavia. By contrast, the central European economies (CSB in the graph) only contracted to a little over 80 percent of the 1990s figure and recovered to begin to surpass it in 1 998-although this figure was still hardly greater than that for 1980.113
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The End of the Golden Age
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Part Three
THE NEW AGE OF GLOBAL INSTABILITY
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CHAPTER NINE
The Years of Delusion
The new hype
"A substantial decline in macroeconomic volatility" was "one of the most striking features of the economic landscape over the past 20 years or so", declared Ben Bernanke in 2004.1 Such had long been the view of most mainstream economists and politicians:
New Paradigm advocates received cautious support from the US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan . . . Mr Greenspan said the recent economic performance was "not ephemeral" .2
They spoke of the longest continuous period of American economic growth for four decades and the lowest level of unemployment for three. This was supposedly a new, unprecedented period of non-inflationary capitalist expansion, baptised "the great moderation" or "the new economic paradigm". Stagnation, unemployment and inflation had supposedly been left behind.
For Bernanke, the explanation lay in the greater capacity of the states and central banks to handle the money supply than in the 1 970s. For others it lay in the new technologies associated with the microprocessor:
A new economy has emerged from a spurt of invention and innovation, led by the microprocessor . . . opening all sectors of the economy to productivity gains . . . The new economic paradigm has brought us the best of all worlds-innovative products, new jobs, high profits, soaring stocks. And low inflation.3
The advances of what was called "Anglo-Saxon capitalism", supposedly based on unleashing "economic freedom" and "entrepreneurship", were contrasted with the laggardly rates of growth in Europe and the stagnation in Japan. In Britain New Labour boasted it was following the US example. "No return to boom and bust" was the refrain in every budget speech of chancellor of the exchequer (and future prime minister) Gordon Brown.
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