Re: apples, oranges, and political-economic analysis

At 10:32 AM 4/28/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>
>A reply to some comments made by "The McDonald Family"::

Randy McDonald, actually. I do have my own Hotmail account, but I like using
Eudora Pro more (I can actually _edit_ my messages) so there you go. :)

1) Yes, the standard of living in most of Western Europe was higher than the
standard of living in most of Eastern Europe between 1945 and 2000. But:

<<a) how much of that rise in standard of living was the result of
imperialist profits that the capitalist rulers of Western Europe was
extracting from the rest of the world during that time? Certainly Britain,
France, West Germany, Italy, and even Norway, Sweden, & Denmark were able to
accumulate significant amounts of wealth by extracting it often with the aid
of military dictatorships of one sort or another from workers and peasants
in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And some of those profits did, for a
time, dribble down to some of the "ordinary people" in those developed
(imperialist) countries.>>

I follow Bairoch (ref: _Economics and World History_) in arguing that the
colonization of the Third World contributed relatively little to Europe's
economic rise before the Second World War. After the Second World War,
things are different, but not that much. And even those states that were
little involved in colonialism, direct or otherwise, such as Finland, Spain,
and Greece, took full part in the general modernization of Europe.

<<b) on the other hand, the Soviet military machine exacted an enormous toll
on the productive forces of the USSR, especially from 1940 through 1990.
Many of the Eastern European countries similarly had important parts of
their productive capacities diverted to provide military resources for the
Warsaw Pact/Eastern Bloc military alliances.>>

True, and I think that a convincing case can be made that much the same kind
of phenomenon was present in those Western states (mainly the United States
and the United Kingdom) than also spent large amounts of money on weaponry.
Yet, the crisis was much more acute in the Soviet Union, and eventually led
to the complete collapse of the entire Soviet bloc system. 

Why did Western capitalism/social democracy survive while Soviet bloc state
socialism didn't? I'd put it down to the inherent grave weaknesses in the
state socialist system. This isn't to say that the Western economic systems
can't be improved upon -- it definitely can. It's just that for all of its
imperfections, the Western economic systems were much better than its Soviet
counterparts.

<<c) There were clearly political abuses in the USSR, but some of the
numbers of executions, etc. (tens of millions, etc.) are truly difficult to
substantiate. The forced migration of the Chechens may have been unjust and
resulted in the deaths of some innocent people, but there is no way that can
be compared to the systematic slaughter of the Jews and so-called "gypsies"
by the Nazis.>>

I grant you this -- whenever the Soviet Union engaged in mass murder, it
stopped short of complete genocide. That fact is simply proved by the fact
that, after the collapse of the Soviet state, there are still Balts, and
Ukrainians, and Kazakhs, and Chechens. The Nazis were far more zealous at
exterminating non-German minority populations than the Soviet state ever
was. For proof, you need only look at the history of Polish Jewry, numbering
three million before the Second World War and now numbering only three
thousand. I readily agree with you that in that sense Soviet hegemony over
central Europe and its homeland was positively benign compared to a
hypothetical Nazi hegemony. 

I think that you might even argue that in simple numerical terms, Soviet
abuses of power could be compared to Western imperialist abuses of power --
ref: the Belgian Congo. But they differed in one crucial respect: The Soviet
abuses of power not only occurred in the colonial peripheries, but in the
metropolitan areas. For all of their faults, French colonialists never went
to Marseilles or Paris and gathered thousands of Frenchmen at gunpoint to
work as slave labour planting sugar beets, or -- the Commune aside -- never
engaged in wholesale massacre of French citizens. Soviet colonialists did
that. That alone is enough for me to place Soviet-style state socialism
below even Western imperialism -- at least the latter spared _some_ regions
of the world. (Again, I am not arguing that Western imperialism should be
the dominant global ideology, I think that it should be replaced by
something better such as the global keynesian policies suggested elsewhere.)

<<4) Direct comparisons between capitalism and socialism are also difficult
because services provided by the state are not always taken into account.
Cheap housing, public transportation, education, and basic medical care in
some countries might more than compensate for the lower wages workers in
those countries receive, in contrast to workers in other countries which
might have higher wages but considerably higher expenses. That's why,
politics aside for another discussion, the economic standard of living in
Cuba (which in my opinion is not fully a socialist country) is nevertheless
better for "ordinary people" than it is for ordinary people in other parts
of Latin America.>>

I'll grant you that -- the average Cuban probably does have a higher
standard of living than the average Guatemalan, or Ecuadorian, or Peruvian.
But before Castro, Cuba was roughly as developed as the Southern Cone -- was
the average Cuban, even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, actually
better off than the average Argentine or Uruguayan? I'm not convinced that
even with invisible benefits, the Cuban standard of living is comparable
with that of the Southern Cone states.

<<5) The comment about Kerala in India makes the mistake of abstracting one
part of the data, selective sampling if you will. Parts of India might be
doing well. Well, some people in Haiti are making a lot of money also. And
if you statistically separate out the data for black people living in the
U.S., the richest country in the world, you would find in 1960 and 1990 many
of them living BELOW the "regular" standard of living of "ordinary people"
even in such places as Poland. So separating out uneven aspects of different
societies does not make for accurate social science.>>

Your comments about the average African-American and the average Pole are
true -- quite remeniscent of Amartya Sen's arguments, actually. It is proof
that the United States should become a social-democratic state immediately
-- hey, if it worked for West Germany and the rest of western Europe, why
not for the US?

I'm not so convinced by your comparisons of the Kerala-India situation being
similar to that of the upper-class/lower class distinction in Haiti. Kerala
is a distinctive society, including members of all social classes (rich,
poor, middling), with a distinctive Malayalam language, a unique cultural
background and modern history, and distinctive political philosophies. The
statistics that I quoted apply for all of Keralan society, not just a
favoured minority. There are as many Keralans as there are Canadians. 

Yes, I grant you that Kerala is much more strongly connected with other
Indian states than any independent states is with another. There seems to be
a basic distinctiveness, though -- whereas the Congress Party remained the
dominant political faction across India, Kerala regularly elected Communist
party governments from the 1960's on, in direct opposition to national
trends. That suggests to me that Kerala is sufficiently distinct from the
rest of India to bear comparison with many independent states.

>[deletia]
>
>Alan Spector