Policy Tensor je eden najbolj zanimivih portalov, če vas zanimajo strateške geopolitične teme, specifično sedanja vojna med ZDA in Iranom. V zadnjem članku z naslovom Iran still enjoys escalation dominance Policy Tensor učinkovito izpodbija prevladujočo razlago v zahodnih medijih, da Iran s stopnjevanjem napetosti v Hormuški ožini precenjuje svoje možnosti. Po njegovem mnenju cilj Teherana ni prisiliti ZDA nazaj za pogajalsko mizo, temveč ohraniti svoje najpomembnejše strateško vzvodje – sposobnost nadzora nad Hormuško ožino, ki predstavlja ključno geopolitično orožje Irana.

Policy Tensor meni, da številni zahodni analitiki napačno razumejo iransko logiko. Iran naj ne bi verjel, da lahko z vojaško prisilo doseže politične koncesije Washingtona, temveč ocenjuje, da bi izguba nadzora nad Hormuzom dolgoročno pomenila izgubo odvračalne sposobnosti in posledično povečano izpostavljenost ameriškemu in izraelskemu pritisku.

Avtor zavrača tudi tezo, da Iran računa predvsem na Trumpovo politično nepripravljenost za novo vojno. Po njegovem je iransko vodstvo izhodiščno predpostavilo precej širši scenarij: tudi če bi ZDA želele stopnjevati konflikt, Iran nima nobene racionalne alternative, kot da vztraja pri obrambi svojega ključnega geostrateškega položaja.

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This is just pure unadulterated propaganda by The Economist, as is so often the case with their coverage of China (reminder that, if you read The Economist, the Chinese economy should have collapsed more or less every year for the past 20 years).

I actually come from a country – France – where our minorities did actually get squashed, so I have a pretty decent understanding of what that concretely means.

For instance in France our regional languages (Basque, Alsacien, Corsican, Breton, Occitan, etc.) have ZERO official status, cannot be used in government, and – under French law – were prohibited in classrooms under threat of punishment (kids at school were made to wear a necklace of shame around their neck if they spoke their regional language: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha#Fin_du_XIXe_si%C3%A8cle_-_Politique_et_h%C3%A9ritage_de_Jules_Ferry).

The first line of Article 2 of the French constitution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_2_of_the_Constitution_of_the_Fifth_French_Republic) – as amended in 1992 – specifies that French is the exclusive language in France and constitutionally excludes every other language from any official role whatsoever.

There was, in France, an official policy of linguicide. The net result, according to official French statistics (https://ined.fr/fr/publications/editions/population-et-societes/la-dynamique-des-langues-en-france-au-fil-du-xxe-siecle), is that regional languages like Corsican or Breton went from being spoken in 70%-80% of local families at the end of WW1 down to sub-10% numbers by the end of the 20th century. Even Alsacien, the most resilient regional language, still saw its transmission rate collapse from 70% to 18% in just 2 generations.

That, folks, is “squashing.”

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Branko Milanović:

The problem is in essence very simple. Decentralized Western capitalists have been able to squeeze domestic labor for forty years and run outsized profits. But now they are faced by a centralized capitalist (which is in effect the Chinese state) who is even more efficient in squeezing wages and increasing productivity. That centralized capitalist is now running out of business Western decentralized capitalists. This is why the latter have to move the heaven and the earth in order to stop the centralized capitalist from winning. But they have to do all of that while never mentioning the role their own profits play in it.

Leon Liao:

Western capital has spent forty years weakening labor’s claim on productivity growth at home. It now presents itself as the defender of Chinese workers abroad.

Pettis’s repeated accusation that China gains competitiveness by suppressing wages therefore rests on a blatant moral double standard. Western companies are encouraged to maximize margins, raise shareholder returns, automate production, weaken labor bargaining power, and reduce costs. Yet when China organizes production more efficiently and achieves lower industrial costs, the result is described as an economic distortion that other countries are entitled to correct.

There is also a deeper weakness in this explanation.

China’s rising industrial competitiveness does not primarily come from low wages. It comes from the interaction of three structural advantages whose combination is extraordinarily rare.

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Branko Milanović v izvrstnem komentarju polemizira z vse pogostejšimi evropskimi in ameriškimi očitki, da Kitajska svojo industrijsko konkurenčnost gradi na prenizkih plačah, državnih subvencijah in zatiranju domače potrošnje. Njegova osrednja teza je preprosta: Zahod danes Kitajski očita natanko tisto, kar je sam desetletja počel drugim državam.

Kot izhodišče uporabi primerjavo z Afriko iz časa, ko je delal pri Svetovni banki. Afriške države so se pritoževale, da evropska industrija zaradi tehnološke premoči proizvaja bistveno ceneje in jih zato izriva z mednarodnih trgov. Evropski odgovor je bil, da je tehnološki napredek legitimna konkurenčna prednost. Danes pa Evropa od Kitajske zahteva, naj se odpove svojim strukturnim prednostim – nižjim stroškom dela, drugačnemu institucionalnemu modelu in učinkovitejši industrijski politiki.

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Bogastvo narodov nikoli ni nastajalo v tovarnah tankov, temveč v tovarnah inovacij. Evropa je izbrala napačne politične prioritete. Namesto razvoja je izbrala strah. Namesto razvoja je izbrala vojno. Namesto miru in blaginje je izbrala orožje.

Še dva komentarja na sponji članek o Volkswagnovem zatonu in (napačnih) odzivih evropskih politikov na problem.

Volkswagen, China and the breakdown of unequal exchange

The New York Times has a long, mournful piece about how Volkswagen’s troubles “were made in China”. It’s worth reading, because beneath the corporate detail lies the story of an entire imperial economic arrangement beginning to come apart.

For four decades, VW has been a major force in the Chinese car market, and for many years China supplied half or more of the company’s worldwide profits – profits that, as the Times notes, paid for “high salaries and generous benefits” for its workforce back in Germany. Which is another way of saying that a German corporation has been drawing the bulk of its wealth from Chinese labour and the Chinese market, and repatriating it to fund living standards in the imperial core.

This is unequal exchange: the systematic transfer of value from a poorer country to a richer one, even at nominally “fair” market prices.

The arrangement suited the West very well, so long as China remained where it had been assigned, at the lower end of the global value chain – assembling, manufacturing, supplying cheap labour, while design, profit and prestige stayed in the West. What the West never grasped is that China had never agreed to occupy this position on a permanent basis.

The times they are a-changin’. Chinese firms – BYD, Geely, Xiaomi – have overtaken VW not only in China but across Latin America, Africa, and now the European Union itself, VW’s home turf. The company is slashing its model range by half, and reportedly preparing to lay off up to 100,000 workers and close four European factories.

How did China manage this, with no empire to plunder and no colonies to super-exploit? By leveraging the advantages it actually has: those of a vast socialist country with a fundamentally planned economy. The NYT, almost despite itself, lists them – state-controlled banks strategically issuing low-interest capital; local governments backing the new industries; a decades-long, state-directed bet on electric vehicles that Western firms lazily dismissed. This is the patient, planned, production-oriented development that neoliberalism forbids.

That is the real source of the anguish now emanating from the pages of the Western press. It is not simply that Volkswagen built the wrong cars. It is that the mechanism by which the imperial core has been enriching itself at the expense of the periphery is corroding – and a formerly poor, semi-colonised, blockaded nation has shown that the the economic chains of imperialism can be broken.

Keith Bradsher v članku v New York Timesu analizira, kako so se največje težave Volkswagna, nekoč nespornega voditelja svetovne avtomobilske industrije, dejansko začele na Kitajskem – trgu, ki je bil desetletja glavni motor njegove rasti in dobičkonosnosti. Kitajska je Volkswagnu dolga leta prinašala več kot polovico svetovnega dobička, kar je podjetju omogočalo financiranje visokih stroškov dela in obsežnega proizvodnega sistema v Nemčiji. Paradoksalno pa je prav trg, ki je omogočil Volkswagnov razcvet, danes postal največji vir njegovega nazadovanja.

Bradsher kot osrednji razlog za preobrat izpostavlja strateško napačno presojo vodstva Volkswagna glede elektrifikacije avtomobilske industrije. Medtem ko je kitajska država že pred skoraj dvema desetletjema jasno nakazala, da bo prihodnost mobilnosti temeljila na električnih vozilih ter domačo industrijo sistematično podpirala z ugodnim financiranjem in industrijsko politiko, so evropski proizvajalci ostajali skeptični. Volkswagen se je odločil čakati na tržni signal potrošnikov, namesto da bi sledil dolgoročni razvojni strategiji kitajske države. Ko je Tesla leta 2020 sprožila množično elektrifikacijo kitajskega trga, je bilo za dohitevanje vodilnih domačih proizvajalcev že prepozno.

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Bine Kordež

Za vsake volitve je značilno, da stara koalicija želi prikazati solidno stanje javnih financ, opozicijske stranke pa izpostavljajo precej slabše razmere. Kljub slabemu izhodišču pa so v predvolilni vnemi pripravljene zagristi vanje, seveda v dobro Slovenije, in jih s predvidenimi ukrepi urediti. Potem, ko prevzamejo oblast, pa praviloma ugotovijo, da so razmere še slabše in vseh obljub ne bodo mogle realizirati. In podobno je bilo tudi tokrat.

Bivši finančni minister je navajal, kako so razmere obvladljive, da smo s primanjkljajem pod maastrichtsko mejo, kako ima veliko držav večji primanjkljaj, državni dolg pa se relativno zmanjšuje. Opozicijske stranke so v predvolilnih nastopih opozarjale na katastrofalno stanje, a nudile recept kako bodo javne finance z drugačno politiko spravile v red. Ne glede na povečan državni primanjkljaj kot posledica vseh ugodnosti, ki jih je podeljevala prejšnja vlada, so s takšno politiko celo nadaljevali (interventni zakon). A potem pride ura resnice in novi finančni minister bo po tiho verjetno celo vesel, če interventni zakon pade. Trenutna višina presežnega primanjkljaja ter dodatni učinki interventnega zakona na proračun bodo preprosto omejili prostor za vse dane obljube. Ker je manevrskega prostora pri zmanjševanju izdatkov relativno malo, višina zadolževanja pa omejena, bo vse obljube o zniževanju davčnih obremenitev nemogoče realizirati.

V tem duhu bodo najbrž tekle tudi bodoče aktivnosti vlade, ki bo iskala kompromis med obljubami in finančno realnostjo ter krivila staro vlado za neodgovorno politiko. Aktualna koalicija pa seveda kritizirala ukrepe nove vlade brez resnega uvida v morebitne napake prejšnjih politik. In temu narativu bodo sledili tudi  mediji, odvisno na kateri politični pol so nagnjeni. Zato v nadaljevanju predstavljam moj pogled na aktualne javno-finančne razmere z nekoliko drugega zornega kota.

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