Nowhere is this shadow war more between the two systems more pronounced than in the global arena of production of rare earths elements (RREs), where China currently holds a de facto monopoly, raising concerns from Washington through London to Tokyo about what China might do with its hand across the throat of high-end western technology.
In the capitalist West, as so convincingly dissected by Karl Marx, such a commanding position is a supreme and unique opportunity to squeeze the markets to maximize profits.
Except China apparently has a different agenda, poking yet another hole in Marx’s ironclad dictums about capitalism and monopolies, further refined by Lenin’s screeds after his Bolsheviks inadvertently acceded to power in 1917 in the debacle of Russia’s disastrous involvement in World War One. Far from squeezing its degenerate capitalist customers for maximum profit (and it’s relevant here to call Lenin’s dictum that if you want to hang a capitalist, he’ll sell you the rope to do it), Beijing has apparently adopted a “soft landing” approach on rare earths production, gradually constricting supplies whilst inveigling Western (and particularly Japanese) high tech companies to relocate production lines to China to ensure continued access to the essential commodities.
Read more: oilprice.com/Metals/Commodities/Chinas-Rare-Earths-Monopoly-Peril-or-Opportunity.html
China’s Rare Earths Monopoly - Peril or Opportunity?
Date: 5 October 2011
Source: http://oilprice.com/
The prosperity of China’s “authoritarian capitalism” is increasingly rewriting the ground-rules worldwide on the capitalist principles that have dominated the West’s economy for nearly two centuries.