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.During this period theneo-liberal strategy was essentially a domestic response to eco-nomic decline, welfare spending and labour militancy.Onlywith the collapse of the state-led economic model in 1989 didthe neo-liberal offensive join with the neo-conservative foreignpolicy offensive to form a unified global economic and militaryprogramme for US imperialism.In its first phase neo-liberalism had three aims.The first wasto reduce wages.The second was to reduce other costs, includ-ing the cost of protecting the environment, by allowing cor-porations to transfer these to public bodies.The third was to cutthe welfare state by reducing funding, privatising services andlowering standards of provision.The conservative regimes of the1980s managed to achieve some of these goals, particularly inthe United States, to a degree in Britain, less so in other indus-trialised countries.But even in the US costs were not lowered toanything like their 1945 levels.There was, for a relatively brief period in the 1990s, a muchexaggerated spurt in the US economy but it was not matched bythe performance of the world economy as a whole.RobertBrenner explains why the US boom made so little difference tothe world economy: before the mid-1990s the US profitability revival not onlyimparted little increased dynamism to the world economy,but also came to a large extent at the expense of the48 US economic power in the age of globalisationeconomies of its leading competitors and trading partners,especially Japan and Germany.This was because, right upto the end of 1993, US producers secured their gains pri-marily by means of the falling dollar and essentially flatreal wages, as well as reduced corporate taxation, but withthe benefit of little increase in investment.They thereforeraised their rates of return by attacking their rivals mar-kets, but generated in the process relatively little increasein demand, either investment demand or consumerdemand, for their rivals products.When the US govern-ment moved in 1993 to balance the budget, the growth ofUS-generated demand in the world market received anadditional negative shock. 23Moreover, as Peter Gowan notes,  the boom has turned out tobe a bubble, and the American bubble has turned out to haveinvolved a great deal of parasitic and predatory activity, actuallyundermining the American productive base, as in the paradig-matic case of Enron.This marks a very substantial setback forthe drive to reorganise American and international capitalism toassure US capitalist dominance through the first half of thetwenty-first century. 24The scale of this collapse was in direct proportion to the hypepromoting the  New Economy at the height of the bubble.TheUS economy decelerated faster than it had done at any timesince the Second World War.Growth in GDP slumped from 5percent in the year ending in mid-2000 to minus 0.1 percentthe following year.Real wages which had been growing at 3.5percent were cut in real terms by 0.1 percent.The short-lived boom had pulled up the international economy,but now  under the impact of plummeting US imports, the econo-mies of Japan, Europe, and East Asia lost steam as fast as the US,while much of the developing world, notably Latin America, wasplunged, after a brief honeymoon, back into crisis.A mutually25reinforcing international recessionary process was unleashed.There is an important point to be made here.Even in thosecomparatively short periods where US capitalism has managedUS economic power in the age of globalisation 49to slow its decline relative to its competitors it has not done soin a way which sustains the global economy.This marks a veryimportant difference between the post-Second World Warmoment of US dominance and the current situation.Then USgrowth, or more precisely US arms spending, was a rising tidethat lifted all ships.Now the reverse is true.Then US-led growthhelped to oil the wheels of US strategic dominance.Now theinability of the US economy to underwrite global growth stokesinternational resentment at US imperial designs.On an ebb tidethere is greater conflict over who will occupy the deeperchannels.The economic heart of EuropeThe most dynamic economy in post-war Europe was the WestGerman economy.Limited in arms spending by the post-warsettlement, it reconstructed its manufacturing sector and orien-ted on export growth.From the late 1940s to the late 1960s itachieved impressive growth rates and it did so not only throughexploiting the extraordinary growth of the world market thattook place during the long post war boom, but by taking anever-increasing share of that market.The deficit spending by theUS during the Vietnam war sucked in German and Japaneseimports to the further competitive disadvantage of the USeconomy.Towards the end of the long boom other European econo-mies, notably the Italian and French, as well as the Japanese,were beginning to compete with German growth.And as thevarious industrialised economies began to catch up with the US,and as the world market itself grew, the effect of US armsspending had a decreasing effect in warding off recessions.Soalthough US deficit spending again pulled the German economyout of the deep oil-crisis recession of 1974 75 it could not doso before it had lost 20 percent of its manufacturing work-force.26 And the other side of the US deficit was a rise in thevalue of the German mark and therefore a tougher market forGerman exports [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]