Politics
Out of context: Reply #9267
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- Khurram0
Alongside this myth of a technological new age, the other grand narrative of capitalism in this period has been the de-centring of the Euro-American core of capitalist civilization by the rise of Asia, by which was meant first Japan, and then China. Postmodern globalization has been an epic of the self-transcendence of the West towards an Oriental horizon. (Both geographically and world historically it makes sense that, in such accounts of the future of capitalism, Asia should appear as the new West, an America for the next millennium.) For more than half a century us hegemony had helped make this development possible, by opening up its vast market to selected clients and providing them with free military protection from Communism. In its late, post-Cold War phase, us demand galvanized the rapid growth of Asia’s export powerhouses, which produced already existing manufactured goods but more cheaply. Instead of unleashing new productive forces more broadly or intensively, the latter’s accumulated surpluses eventually came to fuel the inflation of asset bubbles around the world.