>CB: Stiglitz is a liberal and anti-communist.
No doubt (using the USA meaning of liberal).
He is not a neo-liberal, and that has been his main battle on the world stage and why he has been progressive.
He is playing to anti-Communist prejudices in referring to market-Bolsheviks but isn't he touching on a point that is relevant even if he puts it badly?
It may be easier to see Russia's trajectory in contrast to China's. In China the emphasis has been expanding economic freedom for market relations while restricting pressure for moves towards western bourgeois democratic norms, especially the two party system.
(In fact China has been making democratic initiatives particularly at the local level, but without fostering the two party system).
In Russia there was a strong tendency to try to embrace the market but to keep political power centralised. Putin is a reassertion of that centralising tendency. What happened in Russia was not so much market Bolshevisim, as socialist gangsterism, with large chunks of a previous state centralised socialist system going over to the oligarchs and a new mafia.
Under the pressure of global finance capitalism, the contradiction in each country is the speed of reform to accomodate a neo-liberal political agenda of atomised human rights, alongside pressure to adopt a unstructured undefended economy vulnerable to the most rational exploitation by global finance capital. The two trends are not always in step.
Stiglitz seemed to me to be referring startlingly to this in the Soviet Union, but rather superficially and without analysing where the line of genuinely democratic economic and political resistance to the demands of global finance capitalism, can lie.
Instead he just wants a more caring sharing World Bank. *That* reform can be accommodated over the next ten years, without fundamentally challenging the onward march of finance capital's global agenda.
Chris Burford
London