Re: comrades!

Tue, 30 Sep 1997 16:06:52 -0700 (PDT)
Dennis R Redmond (dredmond@gladstone.uoregon.edu)

On Tue, 30 Sep 1997, Bill Schell wrote:
> Thank you Andrey. The north american cyber-socialist elites have lived
> in comfort and safety so long that they cannot imagine the Stalinist world
> they praise and which they would force upon us in the name of bettering the
> human condition.

Hardly. Most of us Leftists are underpaid university types with three jobs
and student loans and who worry about global human rights, freedom
of the press and environmental destruction as much as
class exploitation. Andrei does, of course, have a point when he
insists that conditions in 1995 are, on the whole, better for many Russian
and Eastern Europeans than 1985. This is true: the old system was a horrid
mess, spent most of its surplus on weaponry and persecuting decent people,
and annihilated the environment, while racking up huge Western debts.
Not so different from the Latin American military dictatorships, really.
Today, cheap foreign imports and a flood of heretofore repressed new
ideas and freedoms have made people's lives significantly easier. Plus,
the European Union has been spending a lot of dough in the East, which has
helped the transition along (yes, multinational socialism, co-financed by
the Kohl Government!). From what I saw of Moscow in 1995, there was a
blossoming consumer culture, people were driving cars around, and small
Russian businesses were already starting to produce their own knock-off
copies of Western goods. This is how Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore got
rich, and noone in their right mind would not want to wish the same
success to the Russians, who've suffered like no other people from the
ravages of the 20th century.

The problem is, the capitalist world-system is indeed cold, cruel and
unforgiving. Not every semi-periphery (which is what Russia is today) gets
to join the metropole. Taiwan made it; Argentina didn't. In many cases,
the World Bank and IMF have pursued nastily contractionary policies to
overindebted Third World countries, and market pressures have done
horrible things to large parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia. Real
wages have fallen and tiny elites have gotten fantastically wealthy from
Rio de Janeiro to Bangkok; and marketized development often has an
ecological price tag as horrendous as that exacted by COMECON, and has
been accompanied by no less draconian Government repression.

Somehow, we've got to find ways of democratizing the global economy,
making it reward the people who really produce its wealth instead of
rewarding greedy share-holders, and giving people a voice to make their
own decisions about what gets produced and how it's manufactured --
something which automatically excludes Party elites, one-party states, and
IMF sado-monetarism as much as Stalinism.

-- Dennis