Primitive Accumulation and China’s Industrial Revolution: Implications for North America

An unexpected development has transformed the world economy. That development is the emergence of undeveloped capitalisms – China in particular – as dynamic new centres of capital accumulation. These new capitalisms – industrializing on the backs of the long march of hundreds of millions of peasants, migrating from the countryside to the city – have, for the moment, saved the mature capitalisms of the world economy from their own contradictions. How stable this expansion of the world economy will be, how long it can last, is difficult to say. But the expansion of the world economy is nonetheless real, and coming to terms with this is the central challenge in navigating the terrain of the economy today. This paper will aim to : 1) suggest an outline of the dynamics of crisis in the world of mature capitalisms; 2) document the surprising mildness of the capitalist slump at the turn of this century; 3) suggest some ways in which developments in China in particular have impacted on the crisis tendencies in the mature capitalisms; 4) describe the way in which, following on the analysis developed by Rosa Luxemburg, the co-existence of mature capitalisms with undeveloped capitalisms can help stabilize, for a time, the crisis tendencies of mature capitalisms; and 5) consider what some of the implications of this analysis are for economy and politics in both the developing and developed world.