http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/images/cl3133.jpgFifth, the authors highlight a fundamental contradiction that stands in the way of the Chinese economy rebalancing its components of aggregate demand, namely, reducing the proportion of the sum of investment and net exports in favour of household consumption. With the economies of the Triad mired in stagnation, China's economy has been widely viewed as one of the principal means of lifting the world economy, and hence the wish that China should rebalance the components of aggregate demand in favour of household consumption. However, the problem, the authors say, is that the suggested way of rebalancing is fraught with a fundamental contradiction. It requires a dismantling of the low-wage, global labour arbitrage model of capital accumulation in global supply chains wherein China is the world's assembly hub, for it is only with a very significant increase in the real wage rate that the path of economic growth can shift to a mass consumption-led track. What does one make of all this? The powerful forces unleashed by monopoly-finance capital in the Triad economies and in China, as outlined in this book, seem to have come to a head. The long stagnation in the Triad economies alongside MNCs taking advantage of the global labour arbitrage opportunity has led to perpetual dire straits, unending hard times for the vast majority of the people there. In China, despite unprecedented economic growth over the last three decades, the size of its reserve army of labour is still a high proportion of the size of its active wage-labour army, this partly because of the high rate of growth of labour productivity that the adoption of technology imported from the Triad economies and the associated structure of production/demand have made possible. . . . Nevertheless, will the new Chinese working class that has emerged ultimately respond by demanding a significant role in the political realm in China, bringing the Maoists back to the centre stage of Chinese politics? And, in response to their unending hard times, will the US working class precipitate the formation of some sort of a labour party? Will both the Chinese and the US working classes coordinate their politics and begin to take on the crucial question of their respective aggregate rates of surplus value? Political agendas such as these are nowhere on the horizon even as there is an urgent mass need for their fulfilment.

More... (http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/dmello200615.html)