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Çin ve 21. Yüzyıl Krizi
En son iktisadi çöküşün merkezinde ABD'nin olduğu, yaygın bir görüştür. Ancak Minqi Li, sistemin bir sonraki sarsıntısında durumun böyle olmayacağını belirtiyor. Bu kitap, Çin'deki siyasi ve iktisadi dengesizliklerin sistemin çöküşüne neden olacağını ve bunun, çok yakın bir gelecekte gerçekleşeceğini söylüyor.
Sınıf mücadelesi, küresel iktisadi dengesizlikler, petrol fiyatlarının yüksekliği, iklim değişiklikleri gibi etmenleri inceleyen yazar, bir sonraki krizde Çin'in bu çelişkilerin merkezinde duracağını iddia ediyor.
Çin, sermayenin yayılabileceği son büyük alan ve ucuz emek kaynağıdır. Sistem sınırlarına gelip dayanmıştır. Dünyanın ekolojik sınırları ve Çin Komünist Partisi'nin iç siyasetine ilişkin konuları bu savla birleştiren Li, Çin'in çok önemli bir aşamada olduğunu belirtiyor.
Sınıf mücadelesi, küresel iktisadi dengesizlikler, petrol fiyatlarının yüksekliği, iklim değişiklikleri gibi etmenleri inceleyen yazar, bir sonraki krizde Çin'in bu çelişkilerin merkezinde duracağını iddia ediyor.
Çin, sermayenin yayılabileceği son büyük alan ve ucuz emek kaynağıdır. Sistem sınırlarına gelip dayanmıştır. Dünyanın ekolojik sınırları ve Çin Komünist Partisi'nin iç siyasetine ilişkin konuları bu savla birleştiren Li, Çin'in çok önemli bir aşamada olduğunu belirtiyor.
268 pages, Paperback
First published October 15, 2015
14 people are currently reading
269 people want to read
About the author
Minqi Li
9 books15 followersMinqi Li (born 1969) is a Chinese political economist, world-systems analyst, and historical social scientist, currently professor of Economics at the University of Utah. Li is known as an advocate of the Chinese New Left and as a Marxian economist.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 29, 2016
The big mistake would be to see this title and think it's a "book about China." There are no anthropological, sociological, or journalistic narratives or anecdotes about how it is to live in China during the 21st Century Crisis. Rather, Li offers a great deal of data support to the plain fact that China is in a central structural position within the global capitalist system. To live in the world today is to be deeply affected by and necessarily interested in how it is with China, just as to live in the world today requires attention to how it is with the US (if not moreso).
The book is very data-heavy and even has some math, which the average leftist at this time might be unaccustomed to. In every instance, Li does his best with succinct explanations of political economic concepts to make his arguments comprehensible to any curious reader. The data are not overwhelming, but they do produce a cumulative affect to put meat on the bones of the general suspicion that there is a "crisis" ahead. No partisan conviction or vague premonition, Li points to various ways in which this crisis will come about, and indeed shows that it is unavoidable.
China and the global system are reaching serious limits in terms of class warfare, labor supply, declining profit rate, and most significantly declining accessible natural resources and climate catastrophe. As Li calculates it, an economic slowdown is inevitable, but the limits of feasibility are not sufficient to prevent catastrophic climate change threatening human civilization in its entirety (i.e., we're very likely locking ourselves in to greater than 3C average global temperature rise, which means that eventually the planet will be uninhabitable).
Yet this doesn't discourage Li, especially in the final chapter, from a programmatic policy and strategic discussion of what socialism might look like in the 21st century. While we hear a lot of vague talk about how capitalism cannot meet the requirements of human civilization today, after reading this book one has a clear sense in why the drive for accumulation and growth is incompatible with future life.
This is one of the best and most relevant books I have ever read. It is a model for rigorous political economy in an era when the academic left is attempting to regain its efficacy after decades of cultural studies, literary theory, and general lack of anything concrete to say about political-economic matters. You'll be a better thinker after reading this.
The book is very data-heavy and even has some math, which the average leftist at this time might be unaccustomed to. In every instance, Li does his best with succinct explanations of political economic concepts to make his arguments comprehensible to any curious reader. The data are not overwhelming, but they do produce a cumulative affect to put meat on the bones of the general suspicion that there is a "crisis" ahead. No partisan conviction or vague premonition, Li points to various ways in which this crisis will come about, and indeed shows that it is unavoidable.
China and the global system are reaching serious limits in terms of class warfare, labor supply, declining profit rate, and most significantly declining accessible natural resources and climate catastrophe. As Li calculates it, an economic slowdown is inevitable, but the limits of feasibility are not sufficient to prevent catastrophic climate change threatening human civilization in its entirety (i.e., we're very likely locking ourselves in to greater than 3C average global temperature rise, which means that eventually the planet will be uninhabitable).
Yet this doesn't discourage Li, especially in the final chapter, from a programmatic policy and strategic discussion of what socialism might look like in the 21st century. While we hear a lot of vague talk about how capitalism cannot meet the requirements of human civilization today, after reading this book one has a clear sense in why the drive for accumulation and growth is incompatible with future life.
This is one of the best and most relevant books I have ever read. It is a model for rigorous political economy in an era when the academic left is attempting to regain its efficacy after decades of cultural studies, literary theory, and general lack of anything concrete to say about political-economic matters. You'll be a better thinker after reading this.
April 4, 2020
Minqi Li es un economista chino que era neoliberal a principios de los 90, después de Tiananmen, y se hizo marxista leyendo en la cárcel a Marx y Mao. En este libro de 2015 "predice", utilizando técnicas econométricas y series históricas así como la perspectiva de los sistemas-mundo de Wallerstein, que en la década de los 2020 China sufrirá una fuerte crisis debido a la coincidencia de la caída de la tasa de beneficio y la crisis ambiental. Puesto que China es el mayor productor del mundo y la economía mundial depende mucho de ella, esto implicaría una crisis mundial. En crisis anteriores el capitalismo siguió adelante a través de lo que Wallerstein y Harvey llaman "spatial fix". Esto implica pasar de una zona central de acumulación a otra zona geográfica mayor (por ejemplo pasar de UK a USA en los 20 o de USA a China en los 70-80), ya no hay zonas geográficas nuevas a las que expandirse que sean mayores que China (discute en detalle porque no es probable que sea India). En fin, una lectura muy interesante que además tiene en cuenta cambio climático y la lucha de clases y política en el interior de China.
November 10, 2022
Interesting modern application of Marxist thought. I found myself ultimately skeptical of the actual prediction (i.e., that the world economy will collapse due to environmental and spatial limits on further economic growth), but I think it was well-argued and supported with an incredible amount of data. The biggest drawbacks to me are that some of the assumptions here don't receive enough defense and seem to be taken for granted, like the notion that a capitalist/free market economy must continue to grow or it will fail, the notion that technological progress has reached its peak and cannot further reduce emissions, or of course the notion that a working class will always revolt and turn a government into a communist state of affairs.
September 15, 2023
I found this one to be a bit of a let-down frankly. I've read Minqi Li's work elsewhere (he had a good article in Monthly Review on largely the same topic), but it sort of feels like he just didn't have enough to say to fill up a book-length work. The first half or so of the book was interesting, there was some interesting if brief discussion of contemporary Chinese political economy, but the rest of the book just devolves into a bunch of waffling (and some really sketchy math) about fossil fuel reserves, GDP-to-emissions ratio, and what seems like some pretty motivated reasoning about the inadequacy of nuclear power and renewables.
Take my opinion with a grain of salt because, frankly, I just lost interest and started skimming at some point. But it seems like basically a book-length version of this article:
https://monthlyreview.org/2021/07/01/...
Take my opinion with a grain of salt because, frankly, I just lost interest and started skimming at some point. But it seems like basically a book-length version of this article:
https://monthlyreview.org/2021/07/01/...
January 28, 2023
A stellar example of the power of deductive argumentation in the school of political economy. An important read
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews