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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
It was a fascinating system! When I went to China in 1984, my first time behind the bamboo curtain, it was so other worldly to be in a place where money didn't matter. Since it was a shortage economy, there were other means of allocating sought after goods, however.
I can remember buying a ticket for the relative of a Chinese teacher who insisted on accompanying me back to my hotel, as is the custom. As we were about to step into the carriage in her provincial hometown someone materialized out of nowhere to say, "Cadre only."
I thought it would a treat for her to ride in comfort and avoid cattle car myself. Instead I was ushered in she was sent back. The ticket was fully refunded but I'm afraid it scared her, people survived by avoiding such dealings with any type of security personnel.
She dared not come close to the hotel because, again, she would have been told she had no business there. At least I was able to buy the family a carton of Marlboro so they could have the currency of bribes.
If you want to see how it's done, watch "Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days." That's a walk down memory lane for anyone who ever lived under state socialism.
The GDR knew it was collapsing. Hungary knew it was collapsing, Czechoslovakia knew it was collapsing. Poland did not understand it was collapsing and regardless of the Gdansk protests would have toppled soon anyway. Polish communists were never successful for instance in stamping out Catholicism. In the case of Romania, Ceaucescu was even more extreme than the Soviets. He relocated the rural population into cities, outlawed birth control and did a better job than the Soviets at managing the economy. In the Balkans; Bulgaria, Albania and Yugoslavia were treated as strange cousins and since their economies were so non-industrial to begin with, the Soviets for the most part left them alone.
But it's telling that up until the end of the CCCP, the West ALWAYS got it wrong. They always believed that the CCCP was in better shape than it was. During the Kennedy administration the CIA estimated that the Soviet economy was 50% larger than it was and was growing twice as fast as the American economy. Even in the late 1960's official papers predicted that the CCCP would surpass the US economically as soon as 1989.
But in reality the Soviet economy it turns out was never more than 50% the size of the US economy and from the late 1950's onward never grew at more than 1% per year and often went negative. They made the classic Keynesian choice of guns or butter and chose guns.
So no, not everything we knew about Communism was wrong. In fact most of it was right. The problem was there's always been a persistent bunch of fools on both the left and the right who insisted on calling it Communism. It wasn't. It was just another variation of top down corruption and failure
for an excellent article. We need more articles like this.
You busted my bubble. I thought that Reagan told Gorbachev "Tear down this wall. " and that was that.What next,Washington didn't chop down the cherry tree?
Gawd. How mind numbing an explication can be given?
After recovering from my post-article-reading catatonia, I am moved only to say that there was NOTHING revealed about communism/Communism that I was wrong about in my understanding.
That said, I suppose it is fashionable among the hopeless liberals who long for that era in which Western Freedom and Eastern Communism clashed to wish that somehow it hadn't worked out as it did.
It is surprising that these same nostalgics don't have a similar disposition, emotionally speaking, regarding jihadistic Islam.
How totally NOT interesting.
It's easy to understand in the colonial world. Countries were colonized so the colonizer could gain control over their natural resources. Brutal systems of cash-crop agriculture were introduced which displaced indigenous agrarian systems based on communal farmland and repatriated the profits back to the home country. Marxism explained all that and could be meshed with nationalism.
I was recently working on "Honor and Values" in Vietnam which had a lengthy history of repelling foreign invaders. Ho Chi Minh could extent that to the struggle for independence. We weren't even aware of this national narrative used to invoke resistance. And had we been, there was no way to plug anti-communism into it to get Vietnamese to fight on behalf of the Republic of Vietnam (Saigon government).
Well, I just came back from a few days at an all inclusive resort in the Caribbean and can very well see the attraction.
The place was full. Sometimes there weren't enough tables in the restaurant for everyone to sit down, or there was no silverware, or there were no glasses to drink out of. There were no expensive cuts of meat.
But in the end everyone ate well. The food was all fresh. YOu could drink all you wanted, though generic brands only, and drunkenness was hardly seen. People were good tempered and cooperative, they looked out for other people's children, and a good time was had by all.
It probably very much resembled the Black Sea vacation spots of Soviet Russia.
Of course it was capitalism, not socialism, but socialism COULD be that way if we applied our energies and resources to living well instead of to accumulating private goods and exploiting other people.
chiefly, i believe, because of the rabid hatred of the ruling plutocracy for the fundamental premise of communism. western media were relentlessly aghast at the barbarian antics of the communists.
it's worth remembering that the soviet union began under attack from the west and were always conscious of the need for military parity to survive.
considering the abrogations of citizen rights that bush/cheney pushed under the relatively exiguous threat of angry islam, it is not amazing that lenin accepted dictatorship as necessary to survival.
Would that have been in Cuba or Haiti?
Would that have been in Cuba or Haiti?
No, but my point was that everyone who was a member of that community got an equal share of the resources regardless of individual wealth. Because large numbers of people were being fed, great economies of scale made it remarkably cheap relative to eating in individual restaurants, and presumably much more energy efficient than each family cooking its own food. Since everyone had equal access to whatever goodies there were, the problems related more to distribution than to supply.
Sometimes it is very tempting to think that life would be better in communes with everyone specializing in certain tasks, rather than multitasking as, perhaps, physician, cook, housekeeper, and chauffeur, the physicican could just heal and then live socially, and the cook could just cook and then live socially. The physician gets fed and the cook gets medicated.
Of course I realize that in reality the dream of socialism is much harder to implement than it would appear to be in theory, but was this really so apparent to factory workers and impoverished school teachers or coal miners in the 1930's who saw landowners and offspring of inherited wealth living at ease?
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
The Maine fight was supposed to be the dress rehearsal for repealing California's Prop. 8 -- but gay marriage lost
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
Once one obtains Seriousness credentials in the Washington media, they are irrevocable no matter one's conduct.
Salon headlines in your mailbox
