On Tue, 30 Sep 1997, Dennis R Redmond wrote:
> 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 has sorted out the pluses and minuses quite aptly. For
some people in some ways life is better in the former Soviet bloc. For
other people in other ways, it's not. By the same token Stalinism was in
some respects a liberation--from the Tsarist order; and in others a
nightmare of paranoia and genocide. So it goes. But the point is that
Tsarism, Stalinism, and the current mix of "IMF sado-monetarism" and
gangster-capitalism and bourgeois democracy all belong to the era of the
modern world-system. Russia was part of that system in the 19th century
and Russia is part of it today. It is a system. When Dennis talks about
"somehow" finding ways of democratizing it, a system that is inherently
and ineluctably exploitative and undemocratic, he implies that we can
tinker with it and make it work for everybody the way it should. I would
argue that this is like hoping we can turn an elephant into a giraffe. If
world-system theory means anything, it means that the only ultimate
remedy for the inequities of the capitalist world-system is the wholesale
replacement of that system by another one, by a democratic and socialist
world-government. Pigs will fly before megacorporate boards abandon the
bottom line or sovereign states lay down their guns.
Cheers,
Warren
W. Warren Wagar
Department of History
Binghamton University, SUNY