A brief comment on inequality.
On Wed, 21 Jan 1998, Andrew Wayne Austin wrote:
> How is making this claim not cheerleading? Capitalism has not reversed the
> trend towards increasing inequality. Capitalism put increasing inequality
> into overdrive. Grudgingly accepting this "fact" makes for even better
> propaganda, sort of the reverse of the good intentions fallacy.
>
> It was "behind" only a few countries in the "west," assuming that you mean
> by that term Britain, US, W. Germany, etc.. Only the richest capitalist
> countries had better *overall* levels of quality of life. But USSR
> challenged the richest countries on many of these measures. And USSR did
> not have the deep poverty pockets of the richest countries, nor the level
> of inequality. Compared with middle-range and lower-range capitalist
> countries, covering the vast majority of the world's population, the
> Soviet Union and the socialist world system were superior.
> Andy
In continuation of the argument, regarding levels of inequality, there is
a tendency to only look at income or econmoic inequality. For many of us
in the third world that is only one of the problems of inequality. How
about equality of opportunity, non-class forms of inequality (caste etc),
gender, education etc. On each of these the USSR achieved remarkable
success in a short period that it was no wonder countries like India, in
the post independence era strived to set up "socialist" systems. One just
has to compare figures of the UNDP Human Development Index to understand
the increase in inequality on these scores in the USSR before and after
the fall. Other figures pertaining to women's participation in public
life before and after show the same results. These kinds of inequality
have always been much more difficult to root out (because of human
nature?!) and it testifies to the power of both socialist and capitalist
systems that they were able to set up and dismantle egalitarian systems
in a short time in the USSR.
D.Parthasarathy