Re: GLOBAL KEYNESIANISM

At 12:43 AM 4/28/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>
>One can posit all manner of things using counterfactuals. What if the
>Soviet Union had not been the victim of capitalist encirclement? What if
>the United States had not organized Cold War? From the very beginning the
>capitalist states stood against the Soviet Union, leading a multinational
>invasion shortly after the revolution and keeping up the pressure all the
>way though. (And these events were real.)

I certainly will not deny that. How can I? That did happen, and that
doubtless did shape Soviet policies. If there hadn't been any capitalist
encirclement, perhaps the Soviet state wouldn't have engaged, repeatedly, in
auto-genocides without parallel in democratic capitalist states.

Re: counterfactual scenarios. I feel very strongly that counterfactual
scenarios, treated with the proper care, can be quite useful in exploring
not only how history unfolded but why it did so. I do not feel that my
counterfactual scenario is lacking in plausibility -- it's certainly good
enough for a first approximation. 

I repeat: What grounds would you or anyone else have to suspect that central
Europe was incapable of achieving the same level of prosperity as western
Europe, given capitalist or social-democratic systems? I ask this
particularly in the like of the historical experience of many western
European states, such as Spain, Italy, and Finland, which very quickly
ascended to the level of the rest of Europe and stayed there, even though
these states lacked the abundant resources of many of the state-socialist
states (East Germany, Baltics, Czechoslovakia). 

I feel that the above is a reasonable scenario, and that it deserves serious
consideration and exploration.

>The states discussed are a selected bunch. I had in mind Cuba, Vietnam,
>etc., as well. Every country that was in the bottom third poorest
>countries in the world before revolution, and these were at the bottom of
>that bottom third, were able to move into the middle-class of nations. In
>what respect? This is according to World Bank and IMF data, using quality
>of life and inequality measures. Even by bourgeois standards these
>countries outperformed the capitalist periphery and were equal to but a
>handful of the richest capitalist countries. If one compares Cuba to
>France, Britain, especially the United States, then the island is not
>going to come off so well.

I agree with you on that. As I stated elsewhere, on the whole Third World
communist states did do a better job than Third World capitalist states at
improving basic living standards.

The case of Kerala brings up an interesting consideration, though. Kerala's
socialist economic policies were heavily modified both by the secure
situation of democracy in Kerala and by Kerala's inclusion in India, by
almost any definition a capitalist state. To me, that at least suggests that
it might well have been possible for capitalism in the Third World to have
been modified so as to achieve Keralan standards of achievement in a
basically capitalist framework.

I agree with you that, on the whole, Chinese socioeconomic modernization has
been much more successful than that of India. Still, there was an appalling
high cost of lives in the course of China's modernization due solely to
political reasons that simply wasn't present in India. India never suffered
through a Great Leap Forward, nor did it suffer a Cultural Revolution. India
must be credited that, at least.

To an extent, I find the trumpeting of Cuban achievements as a bit odd. Yes,
Cuban literacy rates, fertility rates, life expectancies, are significantly
better than those of almost every other Caribbean state or quasi-state that
I can think of. But before the Castro revolution, Cuba was one of the
wealthiest states of Latin America, comparing well with Argentina. Under
Castro, Cuba _has_ managed to achieve enviable standards of living, at least
in theory, for its population. But per capita economic output seems to have
stabilized at very low levels, perhaps only 15% that of Argentina, though
it's probably higher.

>The question is on balance, taking the
>world-system into consideration, not carefully selected countries and
>counterfactual speculation, were people living in these places better off
>before or after? I don't think that is a difficult question to answer.

I raised the point about the relative achievements of
capitalist/social-democratic Europe versus state socialist Europe in order
to demonstrate that while state socialism may have proved useful in
achieving the socioeconomic modernization of relatively poor countries, it
could do very little to enhance standards of living in First World
countries, that indeed it performed quite poorly relative to the opposing
ideology. Estonia has lagged far behind Finland, Cuba behind Argentina, the
Czech Republic behind France.

State socialism may have worked in relatively poor countries, but it does
not seems to have worked as well in relatively rich countries. That suggests
to me that state socialism -- at least in its commonly accepted form,
associated with political authoritarianism or totalitarianism, with a
repressive sociopolitical hierarchy -- has a limited scope relative to
capitalism or social democracy. 

For my money, I'll take social democracy over state socialism any day.

>Andrew Austin
>Knoxville, TN

Randy McDonald
Charlottetown PE
Canada