Bruce McFarlane

Michal Kalecki on Capitalism

The appearance of a definitive English Language collection of Kalecki’s works, edited by Jerzy Osiatynski, is an event to be warmly welcomed. The collection makes available articles previously published in obscure places, as well as important articles which have been translated from the Polish and Italian. They thus make many of Kalecki’s major contributions available to a general audience for the first time. These first two volumes of a projected seven-volume set deal with topics which throw light on capitalist dynamics. They begin with pre-World War II papers stemming from Kalecki’s reaction to the Great Depression and close with his articles in the Economic Journal of 1962 and 1968 on growth processes of the modern capitalist economy, as well as the posthumously published Kyklos paper about the nature of class struggle, and the first English publication of a joint paper on the possibility of reform in capitalism, ‘Observations on the “crucial reform”’.1

Politics of the World Bank-International monetary fund nexus in Asia

To what extent does globatisation and the things exposed by the Asian crisis indicate a new stage in the development of monopoly capitalism and imperialism has been reached? The following discussion aims to answer these issues by concentrating on the political manoeuvring of international finance capitalism: the multilateral finance companies, the transnational corporations and the World Bank-IMF incubus.

Book reviews including 'Development and security in Southeast Asia, vol. 3: globalization', edited by David B. Dewitt and Carolina G. Hernandez

Population and Ethnic Demography in Vietnam, a revised translation of a text originally published by the Hanoi Social Sciences Publishing House in 1995 authored by the director of the Institute of Ethnology, offers itself as the first book in English on this broad subject. Seeking to advance the study of ethnic groups in Vietnam, Khong Dien defines a new research terrain in the field of ethno-geography and ethno-demography with a special concern for such indicators as birth, mortality, marriage structure, and migration, albeit, as acknowledged, a line of enquiry he traces back to Marx. As acknowledged, ethno-demography requires precise statistics. The book divides into four chapters: ethnic composition; the distribution of population and ethnic groups; the process of migration and population redistribution; and population structure and population growth. Under ethnic composition, definitions and classification principles are placed under the spotlight offering some history of socialist research on this problem. By the late 1950s, 64 ethnic groups had been scientifically identified in Vietnam falling into three linguistic families. In preparation for the general census of 1979, a revised list of 54 ethnic groups was determined. But where the merging of groups was a scientific convenience, so new ethnic identities have appeared challenging these earlier determinations. As for population distribution it is notable that, of the 54 identified groups, only Kinh, Hoa, Khmer and Chain live predominately in the plains, the rest in the mountainous regions. The most notable feature of ethnic groups in the north is that they are widely distributed across communes and districts. Southern ethnic groups tend to be more concentrated, but the impact of war, migration and other factors has also imposed change. But across three census periods; 1960, 1979, and 1989, the demographic expansion of Kinh in the northern mountains is pronounced. Today there are only eight provinces in which Kinh are less than 50% of the population. We wish to know more about the impact of Kinh migration upon the highlanders along with associated forestry activities. Under migration, we learn that the role of the state in guiding migration has deep

Is European integration qualified by a new Balkanisation? Some economic aspects

Underlying tendencies towards unifying economic policies, plans and investment strategies have, in recent decades, resulted in the EEC and now a super-market to include EFTA members hitherto outside the bloc. However, in Eastern Europe centrifugal tendencies, previously kept under control, have been let loose, so Europe as a whole is not “integrating” in any unproblematical way. We need to look at this process and see what realistic place the ex-socialist states of Europe are going to play in relation to the “core” dominated by Germany and France. It will be recalled that in countries like Yugoslavia,’ Czechoslovakia and Poland, a unified national market had been the key to economic development pursued up until the 1980s. The existence of a national market, with consumer incomes generally rising, boosted the level of effective demand in the whole economy, and made industrialisation possible. Certainly it is hard to think of countries like Serbia and Croatia having developed as well as they did, had they not produced for the whole Yugoslav market, and the same surely applies to the other central-European socialist states. The economic crisis of the 198Os, the associated rise of nationalism and anticommunism and the incompetence of East European officialdom combined to fracture these national markets in the 1980s and 1990s. It is now quite clear that processes operating to break up the national market inside the territory of the former states of Yugoslavia and U.S.S.R. have succeeded in their aims. Croatia, Slovenia and Ukraine now produce for a much smaller, local market, while feverishly seeking new export-outlets to offset the loss of the unified national markets which had previously sustained their economic dynamic. For, unless that previous impetus can be regained in some alternative way, the division of labour will not be deepened, costs per unit are not likely to be reduced as throuth-put falls, and any dynamic gains from “extension of the market” could be lost.* However, the social and political consequences of “Balkanisation” are as significant as the economic ones. Already, new configurations of social classes are emerging in former Soviet and East European territories. Uneven economic development is being accentuated. These themes will be taken up in the rest of the paper.