Re: Capitalism

>WSN,
>
>Is there a point of view emerging out there that capitalist accumulation
>is no longer the central dynamic of global development? I thought that
>with the fall of state socialisms that the world was even more capitalist
>than before.
>
>Andy Austin
>


I sometimes wonder what has fallen.   Was the USSR really communist or
socialist?  My own view is that it was capitalist in the extreme.  One of
its foremost objectives was to build up capital.  Productivity gains, which
were not really as large as we were led to believe, were only grudgingly
shared with the populace.  For the most part, they were invested in the
further expansion of capital.  Of course, all of this was done in the name
of the working class, but the control lay at the top, with the nomenklatura.
With the coming apart of the Soviet Union, a new capitalist class emerged.
Where did it come from?  Why, from the nomenklatura.  These guys had no
problem in switching from one system to another.

But then your reference may not be to the USSR.  It may be to the gradual
chipping away of socialist elements in the west.  We've seen quite a lot of
this in Canada, where the social safety net built up so carefully after WWII
has begun to fray rather badly and even come apart in some crucial ways.
Part of the problem is that our productivity has not been rising as rapidly
as it was within the first two decades following WWII, and we may not be
able to afford as much social programming as we once could.  However,
another element is that our governments, and the politicians and senior
bureaucrats that run them, have adopted a more corporate, capitalist, or
business (I'm not quite sure of how to characterize it) mode of thinking.
They have become far more "bottom line" orientated, and see themselves as
running a government department as though it was a business, and not as
something you run in the public interest.  Cost recovery has now become a
major operating principle.  Many things that can no longer pay for
themselves are either not done or done in a very diminished ("cost
effective") way.  My impression is that it is now far easier to jump from
senior levels of government to senior levels of business and vice-versa than
it once was because the adjustment in how you think and operate is no longer
very difficult.

Ed Weick