In addition to ethnical pressure and historically frozen underdevelopment, Tibetans face the same problems as the majority of the population in China: increasing inequality and exploitation, loss of secure income, and the concentration most of the gains of the rapid development in the hands of few.
The article was originally published in In Defence of Marxism .
The original article was published in New Left Review II/15 (May-June 2002).
The European Project especially since the Maastricht Treaty (1992) is reducing the margins of manoeuvre of national economic policies without making a governance of substitution emerge in return at the level of the Union! This self-inflicted mutilation by European States relates to all aspects of economic life and was chosen by the dominant big capital because this was its means to crush the social power that workers in Europe had conquered before.
The political left and mass movement in Latin America has taken up the task to develop theoretical and practical alternatives to neoliberal globalisation. The condition to re-launch the global class struggle is to strengthen the Venezuela-Cuba "axis" as well as the progressive states in the southern continent. The transition to Socialism in the 21st Century can only develop from the popular resistance organised from below.
The capitalist character of market-based development is not determined by the presence of capitalist institutions and dispositions but by the relation of state power to capital. In the Ming and early Qing eras market-based development in China and throughout East Asia remained non-capitalist. The synergy typical of the European developmental path between militarism, industrialism and capitalism was absent in East Asia.
The original article was published in Japan Focus on 10 January, 2008.