[lbo-talk] Reactionary Platitudes (Was Re: Marx, Brenner, Technology )

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Mon Sep 22 11:12:06 PDT 2003


The point as I
> see it is that if there
> had been successful communist revolutions in the
> places you cite, South
> Korea would've resembled North Korea (huge minus),

NK's special because of its isolation and commitment to "juchem" probably would have been quite diff had the North conquored the penninsula.


> Taiwan and Hong would've
> resembled China (fairly big minuses),

There never was a communsit movement in Taiwan. China, hwoever, is huge, an absolutely gigantic plus -- despite the Great Leap Forward and the inanities of the CR, the improvement in life for ordinary Chinese even under Mao was incalculable.

and Singapore
> would look like Vietnam
> at best (fairly big minus) or North Korea at worst.
>
> > And when the issue of comparison arises with
> putting food on
> > the table, educating people, eradicating disease,
> and
> > extending life expectancy, the 3d world Stalinist
> > nations beat the capitalist colonies in a walk by
> five
> > hundred miles. There was Cambodoa, but that was an
> > outlier --
>
> Just an outlier? An overly dogmatic commitment to
> collectivization quite
> directly led to some pretty horrendous consequences
> in the SU and China as
> well.

If you want to look at capitalist disasters and famines that rackedup higher body counts, check out Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts -- among other sources.

jks

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