Genocide and affixing blame

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Tue May 19 08:59:19 PDT 1998


At 10:40 AM 5/19/98 -0400, Charles Brown wrote:
>but also potato famine in
>Ireland, collectivization in the US, or the various "development" policies
>directly and indirectly forced by the IMF, Washington, etc. Here the
>criterion 'for whose death'beacomes really fuzzy indeed.
>
>Charles - I believe you mean SU ? This is an important point you make.

Of course. Sorry for the typo.

Commenting on your argument using auto deaths to count the human cost of an economic policy. I think it is a good point, although I initially did not think of going that far. The reason being is that we need to establish some meaninful criterion to separate deaths that are 'accidental' or "unavoidable cost of modernization" to deaths that are coused by system-specific factors.

To use your auto deaths example -- we can reasonably expect a ceratin number of accidental deaths linked to transportations, cars crash, trains derail, people fell of horses (or bicycles) for that matter. So we need to seprate the following: the ceteris paribus change in death rates attributable to the mode of transportation (e.g. rail versus automobile), and the ceteris paribus deaths attributable to bending rules, cutting corners etc. The Pinto example you cite is surely a result of capitalist profit making, but we can find similar examples in the x-USSR attributable to a variety of causes from conscious risk taking to win the race with the "West" (i.e. Chernobyl) to local managers or workers cutting corners to steal the resources.

That has quite important implications for our evaluation of large scale policies. I guess the bulk of the deaths that US propagandists attribute to either 'communism' or personally to Stalin resulted from the famine that followed collectivization. The hypocrisy of that thinking becomes immediately apparent when we realize that none of those harvard or yale educated 'luminaries' would consider a similar argument applied to the potato famine in Irealand (1.5 million deaths) and blame Westminster and its policies; or the mass starvation in Africa and linking it to 'structural adjustment programmes' failed development intitiatives, rivalries between superpower, etc.

But rebutting anti-communist drivel is only one aspect of the issue. A much more important problem is how do we account for human and social cost of development/modernization? I think answerting those questions have enormous implications on how we evaluate the effectiveness of capitalism vs alternative system. At the present time, people look at the success of the G-7 couintries and say 'capitalism works' - but they forget that capitaluist does not work as advertised everywhere else. However, if we were able to establish the cause-effect connection between the G-7 success and theThird World disasters - that might alter the picture of capitalism's 'effciency' quite dramatically.

The key behind capitalist success story is its ablity to externalize the cost while keeping the profit - both economically and cognitively - so the destruction of the environment and Thirld World societies are not counted as 'cost.' As I see it, deconstructing that myth of capitalist efficiency could be very helpful in promoting alternatives. And part of that deconstruction must involve the role of the US academic establishment, the Harvards, Stanfords, Yales and Johns Hopkins, in spreading propaganda disguised as 'objective science.'

To illustrate, take a common trick on the neo-con/neo-lib propaganda list: invalid comparisons. Thus, countries like Cuba are judged as 'inefficient' by implicit comparisons with the standards of living in the US or WEstern Europe. This is like comparing a bicycle to a bus. A more valid comparison would be Cuba-Haiti, or Cuba-Guatemala , because these countries are similar in many respects (ceteris paribus) - geographically, demographically or culturally, but differ mainly in their political regimes. Yet that comparison would contradict the pre-made conclusion of Harvard or Yale 'experts' on the evil effects of communism - it would actually show that communism can lower (but not eliminate) teh human/social cost of modernization. Consequently, thee luminaries of bourgeois 'critical' thought turn to invalid comparisons just to prove their point.

As Stephen Jay Gould showed in his book _The Mismeasure of Man_, these practices are nothing new, bourgeois social science was (paraphrasing John Kenneth Galbraith) frequently manufacturing the needed conclusions to those in the position to pay for them.

PS I do not mean to summarily condemn the US academic estabslishement which, IMHO, is less ideologically driven in most cases than, say, its Eastern European counterpart. All what I am saying is that the most visible part of that establishment - experts, pundits, policy wonks and 'talking heads' - can be summarily dismissed as propaganda drivel without missing much of its actual content.

Regards,

Wojtek Sokolowski



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