Re: What's a life worth?

This is the first of two messages that I'm forwarding from Jeffrey Sommers
in Latvia -- he's having problems posting to the list.

Randy McDonald
Charlotetown PE
Canada

>X-POP3-Rcpt: mcdonald@kiln
>Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2000 10:37:21 +0300
>From: jeffrey sommers <jsommers@latnet.lv>
>Reply-To: jsommers@latnet.lv
>Organization: World History Center <www.whc.neu.edu>
>X-Accept-Language: en
>To: mcdonald@isn.net, wsn@csf.colorado.edu
>Subject: Re: What's a life worth?
>References: <1.5.4.32.20000429000733.0066f288@mailer.isn.net>
>
>Dear Randy,
>
>I think we are still treating socialist and non-socialist systems as 
>discrete
>entities with their own respective development trajectories.  Something 
>Brad
>DeLong favors--although as he recently stated on Pen-L he's a neoliberal,
>rather than the social democrat he's been advertising himself as :--).
>
>We can not say it was "inevitable" that W. Euro, or the US for that matter,
>would have witnessed the rapid growth and wide distribution of wealth 
>following
>WW II without the experiences of global depression, a Soviet
>alternative, and
>catastrophic war.  Your counter-factual on the inevitable rise of wealthy
>western nations, ultimately, is entirely predicated on K-waves, which do 
>not
>determine the size of an expansion, nor how it distributes resources.  An
>A-phase expansion predicated on increased profits from increasing 
>disciplining
>of labor could have easily been the result of an expansion not shaped by 
>the
>forces of depression, war and the existence of counter-models.  Moreover,
>following WW II the global econ. did go into sharp recession, and while 
>some
>govt. spending was made to lift it out of crisis, the wholesale
>revamping of
>global econ. policy towards high growth Keynesianism was only made in
>light of
>global Red agitation and the development of the Cold WAr.
>
>If your logic held, we should be seeing the continued advance of social
>democracy today, and I don't mean neoliberal parties dressing themselves
>up as
>Social Dems.  Instead, neoliberal policy dominates and we see social 
>democracy
>(again, in terms of econ. policy) increasingly in decline, and the clock 
>turned
>back to the late 19th century in econ. policy.
>
>Regarding the Soviets republics, only Russia and Turkmenistan saw
>deficits in
>their trade within the USSR.  All others lived off Russian low price 
>material
>inputs.  As David Kotz has shown, this was a major reason for Russian
>nationalists, and opportunists, such as Yeltsin, to shake off the other
>republics.  Moreover, as Randall Stone has convincingly showed, in
>COMECON, the
>member states often took the Soviets to the cleaners in trade because
>ultimately, they knew the Soviets needed them more than they needed the
>Soviets.  This held as long as they could take as a given that the Soviet
>military would prop up local leadership.  Indeed, these costs may explain
>Gorbachev's lack of enthusiasm for keeping the Soviet bloc intact.  It
>was a
>drain on the treasury.
>
>The Third World is a different matter.  Many nations often reported
>getting a
>raw deal from the Soviets.
>
>In sum, while I appreciate and share your fondness for social democracy,
>I do
>not think it so easy to achieve, and baring a counter model against 
>economic
>liberalism, do not see how social democracy can again rise.
>
>All the best,
>
>Jeff
>
>
>The McDonald Family wrote:
>
>> 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
>
>--
>Jeffrey Sommers
>World History Center
>Boston/Riga
><www.whc.neu.edu>
>
>"Adam Smith started with a view of the forest but his followers lost 
>themselves
>in the woods."
>       --John R. Commons, 1934--
>
>
>