Activity

Heavy industry centres are typified by large, networked, powerful corporations. To cover their overheads these entities must have large outputs and contain their labour costs. This means that local people (mostly wage earners) cannot consume all that the factories are producing. This is why powerhouse economies require a hinterland to generate the necessary demand for their surplus goods. If the exchange rate between the powerhouse economy and the hinterland is fixed, the hinterland will remain in permanent trade deficit

a bold measure in principal which is left permanently in abeyance in practice

Leonard Schapiro, writing on Stalinism, warned us that 'the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade. But to produce a uniform pattern of public utterances in which the first trace of unorthodox thought reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.' [...]