Re: What's a life worth?

At 07:17 PM 4/28/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>On Fri, 28 Apr 2000, Spectors wrote:
>
>[deletia of points that I have absolutely no disagreements with]

>There is also a problem with the notion of Soviet "colonialism" or
>"imperialism" if by that term we mean the economic exploitation of a
>"periphery" by a "core." In the relations between the core and periphery
>in the capitalist context there is often a flow of surplus out of the
>periphery into the core. Thus the periphery was underdeveloped by their
>relation with the core. By contrast, relations between core and periphery
>in the Soviet system system led to development in the satellites. 

But the Soviet system was unique, inasmuch as many of the satellite states
(East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, perhaps Poland) were more
industrialized and prosperous than the Soviet Union itself. Furthermore,
many of the peripheral republics _inside_ the Soviet Union -- the Baltic
States, Ukraine, and Georgia come to mind -- had greater per capita output
and consumption than the Russian federative republic.

In the case of the Soviet system, the relatively poor but populous and
militarily powerful Heartland was able to subdue and incorporate as
subordinates relatively wealthy but less peopled and militarily weak states
on its fringes. There were net transfers of wealth from the wealthier
republics of the Soviet Union to the poorer ones, and the satellite states
paid for the costs of Soviet military occupation in terms of ecological
damage, stunted economic growth, and COMECON economic policies that sought
to make the satellite states industrial monocultures for Soviet benefit.

>They were, as the capitalist ideologue would have it, propping up their
>satellites. Capitalist have exploited this fact by noting how much former
>Soviet satellites - "propped up by the Soviet Union" - have suffered after
>the "fall of communism." One can hardly claim that the extension of the
>Soviet Union was of an exploitative nature analogous to the relation
>between core and periphery in world capitalism, let along worse.

The exploitation of the central European satellites by the Soviet Union did
hamper their long-term growth, as I have already stated on this list -- if
Poles and Magyars and Czechoslovaks and East Germans had been free to
determine the futures of their nation-states after the Second World War, it
seems likely that they would have been able to join western Europe in
quickly converging with United States standards of living, per capita output
and consumption, et cetera. Inside the Soviet Union, many of the peripheral
republics -- especially the Baltic States, before their annexation
reasonably prosperous by world and European standards -- were likewise
deprived of the chance to converge with the United States and western
Europe. The Soviet periphery -- wealthier than the Soviet core -- suffered
immensely from its fifty-year-long occupation.

And then, there are the Central Asian republics, colonial entities if ever
there were colonial entities. Traditional lands were confiscated; Kazakstan
was transformed into a land of mass Russophone settlement, at the expense of
the Kazak natives -- the latest estimates I've seen suggest that one-quarter
of Kazaks no longer speak the Kazak language, and agricultural and
industrial development was concentrated either in the Slavic north or in
Slavic-plurality cities. Further south, a Russian technical elite settled in
the major cities of historical Turkestan and formed an economically dominant
caste no different, really, than the French of Algeria, or the British of
so-called Rhodesia. Agricultural monocultures were applied there, as well --
Soviet plans to use Uzbekistani cotton fields to grow bumper crops of cotton
are largely responsible for the catastrophic dessication of the Aral Sea,
for instance.

>Andrew Austin
>Knoxville, TN

Randy McDonald
Charlottetown PE
Canada