> Remember: the U.S. doesn't have to intervene to prevent development
> in Vietnam or North Korea: the Stalinist development model they
> inherited does that all on its own, and does that pretty effectively.
Stalinism wasn't meant to trigger development, in the sense of raising consumption levels; it was a defensive-autarkic strategy, meant to enable a peasant economy to wage industrial warfare. Fairly successful, by that limited standard, though irrelevant to the 21st century, where the majority of the people on this planet either live in cities, or villages which look increasingly like cities.
One of the genuine contradictions of neoliberal ideology is, it *needs* an ironclad, smokestack, Old Economy Stalinism as a symbolic counterweight to its weightless, bodiless (and, with Enron, profitless) speculations. Take that away, and suddenly those strange messages from Morpheus start popping up on your email...
-- Dennis