Re: GLOBAL KEYNESIANISM

At 12:04 PM 4/28/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>
>Andrew--
>
>       By and large, I would have to agree with you.  And these state
>socialist (or I prefer state capitalist) regimes achieved all of this
>despite needing to spend twice as much of their per capita GNP on defense
>as the Western bourgeois democracies, just to attain rough parity in
>their armed forces.  Recently, in my history of utopias course (I teach
>European intellectual history at SUNY Binghamton), I devoted three weeks
>to the utopian thread in Marxism and in the policies, rhetoric, and
>ideological debates of the Soviet era.  Despite all the errors, some of
>them hideous, I find that from start almost to finish, commitment to the
>goal of building a classless society in which all men and women enjoyed
>the same opportunities was widespread throughout the culture.  The USSR
>never became the utopia of its better dreams, but it made a conscious
>effort, and as you say, achieved a standard of living comparable to
>that of many capitalist economies and a significantly higher level of
>social equality than any capitalist country.  Back in 1975, Jerome Gilison
>systematically explored all this in his book, THE SOVIET IMAGE OF UTOPIA,
>and he was in no sense an apologist for the CPSU or the USSR.
>
>       Warren
>
>W. Warren Wagar
>Department of History
>SUNY Binghamton

Dr. Wagar:

Just an interjection, if you don't mind.

The point that I have been trying to argue is that while state socialism did
result in considerable benefits in state-socialist countries -- particularly
Third World ones -- many of its achievements could have been achieved at
less human cost through social-democratic methods. I respect the desire of
so many Soviet citizens to make their country an egalitarian paradise, but I
can't help thinking that they'd be happier if the Soviet Union was a giant
Sweden.

For me, utopia would be a world-wide social democracy on the Scandinavian or
Dutch model. If only both the West and the Soviet bloc heeded their example
much earlier ...