Those who wanted a capitalist system struggled for centuries against
feudalism to achieve a system where capitalist commodity production
for profit and a political system that would enhance that would dominate
the world. Along the way there were many false starts, zig-zags,
half-steps, failures, partial successes, and stunningly successful
revolutions---varying from Cromwell to Napoleon to the development of
modern medicine, internal combustion engine, plant hybridization to the
U.S. Civil War to the cotton gin to the African-American slave trade to
King Leopold's massive genocide against Africa to the U.S. Constitution,
the French Revolution and so on. Along the way, there was no shortage of
failures, and there was certainly an abundance of brutal killings, not
just of soldiers, but of civilians by the millions.
Marxism has been around for about 150 years. Its activist endeavors
include support the abolition movement, the Paris Commune, development
of the labor movement, Soviet Revolution, destruction of the Nazis, and
the Chinese Revolution. The rest of Eastern Europe, Cuba, Vietnam
remain problematic as to just how marxist they were, although there were
some remarkable reforms. Vietnam was a classic national liberation
struggle. Keep this in mind the next time you lament the proliferation
of poor people and cots on the streets of Vietnamese cities:
About 90% of the property in Vietnam currently is in private hands.
Doesn't sound too much like communism to me. Why blame marxism for the
cots on the street?
In any case, why be surprised that the Marxist experiment, basically
80 years old, could not consolidate its gains? I would agree that it is
one-sided to see the collapse as primarily the result of U.S. external
pressure. Internal developments are the main issue. In the USSR,
consider that from the start, even BEFORE Stalin's era, the Bolshevik
party was making major concessions to capitalism. While it was much,
much more egalitarian than the Western capitalist countries, there was,
nevertheless, privilege for party members institutionalized into Soviet
life from the beginning. Combine that with the struggle to
industrialize, the conflict between short term fixes, material
incentives, etc. versus longer run social incentives, and add into the
mix that of the millions of Soviets who died in World War II, this
probably included a disproportionate number of those with the most
"communistic"--i.e. unselfish, anti-elitist outlooks---those who faced
down Nazi tanks with home-made Molotive cocktails while others were
safely far from the front---, and one should not be overly surprised
that these first attempts at an egalitarian economic/political system
was not consolidated. By the 1980's, there were thousands of
millionaires in the USSR, while others still struggled
in economically difficult circumstances. The working class people could
not be motivated with the communist dream of "sacrifice now to build a
better world for themselves and their children"---not with Brezhnev
riding around in a Mercedes. And they couldn't be motivated by the tried
and true (short run) motivating power of "here's an extra dollar if you
work harder." One foot in communism--one foot in capitalism: capitalism
won. A dispirited population just cast about to see who might cut them
the best deal. The collapse of the communist party's hegemony was not
because of a mass, popular uprising. The military stood with the
pro-Yeltsin bunch, and the rising upper middle class saw a chance to
enhance their wealth by breaking the monopoly power control of the
communist party, and also by selling off the various state-owned
enterprises to themselves.
Interestingly, in Rumania, a major reason for the impoverishment was
because the so-called "communist" regime was dutifully paying off the
IMF for loans. Rumania had been a favorite of Nixon, despite a
particularly brutal, corrupt, family-dominated regime. The uprising was
probably more a classic uprising of the "masses" against imperialist
caused poverty than it was an uprising for democracy.
=======================
Someone wrote: "In the core, capitalism won?"????? One of the most
useful things about world-systems analysis is that it looks to the
interconnections among different parts of the world economy. You know,
the Silk Road, and all that fascinating stuff.
So when people point to, for example, the mass death in
Cambodia/Kampuchea during the regime of Pol Pot, you would think that
they MIGHT think to mention that the U.S. War against Vietnam may have
played a role in destabilizing the region---perhaps forcing hundreds of
thousands of people to the cities where mass starvation may have killed
many more had they not migrated again to the countryside? Not to excuse
the killings of any innocent people. No, not at all. But how about a
sense of perspective. That forced migration (for better or worse) might
well have been carried out by a capitalist government attempting to
stave off mass starvation. (And by the way, with all this talk of War
Crimes, viz. Bosnia, etc.--how soon people forget Vietnam, not just the
well known massacres, but the tortures of prisoners, the chemical
destruction of the forests, the napalming of civilians, the tossing of
suspects out of helicopters, etc. Doesn't any of that go up on the
"Capitalist" side of the balance sheet? The silence is deafening.)
But back to the interconnections issue. Is it not just slightly
possible that the prosperity of the US, Britain, France, Germany,
Scandanvia, Canada, etc. has something to do with the impoverishment of
the "periphery?" Maybe, perhaps, the CIA-led coup in Iran against a
relatively popular liberal capitalist regime, in order to install the
Shah, maybe that protected the extraordinarily profitable oil businesses
in the U.S.? In other words, to the extent that the U.S. has been
prosperous, how much of that is because of military enforced
exploitation of other countries? Call this rhetoric if you like, but
adress the evidence rather than dismissing it like a 1950's
anti-communist high school teacher. And what of a hundred other places,
from Venezuela to Victoria Falls? How can some people concerned with
"World Systems" have such a narrow historical and geographic
understanding of these processes? Why the deafening silence about
economic devastation and truly fascist repression in places like
Indonesia, Chile, El Salvador, Peru, or the U.S.-France proxy wars in
Central Africa that have recently killed perhaps a half-million. Even
Taiwan, that "miracle"--it was admitted that the Taiwanese govenment
slaughtered some 6,000 union organizers in the early 1950's---that'll
get you the labor peace you need to help U.S. business prosper!
And if the prosperity in the U.S. is based in large part on
international profits, what happens when those profits shrink because of
competition from Germany, Japan, and dare we imagine it....Brazil, Iran,
China with its hundreds of millions of low paid workers? We will see
more "Gulags" in the U.S. As I mentioned before, the standard of living
of the median family in the U.S. has basically declined in the past 30
years, especially for the lowest 20%. Prison population has doubled in
ten years. As those interested in political economy, RATES OF CHANGE
should be considered pretty important markers. The Welfare Reform Bill
will not only further impoverish millions, it will create a cheap labor
pool that will drive down the wages of tens of millions more. This will
produce rebellion and the state will respond with repression. The police
really do run a police state now in many parts of many U.S. cities.
Really. Raids on high schools, forced searches of hundreds of students.
But the real question is which way the future seems to be going.
Alarmist rhetoric devoid of substance does no one any good. But is it
devoid of substance?
Reasoned questioning of what happened in the USSR is very important.
Reasoned questioning about which way the future of the post-Soviet world
order is also important. A sense of perspective is essential.
Alan Spector