[lbo-talk] Understanding _Capital_ (Was Re: barbaric)

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Fri Mar 9 07:14:35 PST 2007


On 3/9/07, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Proposition, which I am not going to defend: A major, if not _the_ major
> goal of a socialist regime in any industrialized nation is to slow
> practically to zero the rate of innovation. Given basic needs,
> innovation in products or in production techniques is (except under
> extraordinary circumstances) destructive of human well-being.

There is much to be said for focusing on simple technology, cheap to make, reproduce, distribute, and maintain, especially in the poorest countries, and some of the Soviet inventions fall into this category. The best example of them, ironically, is AK47s.

But any socialist country -- especially one that emerges from a middle- to high-income cluster of countries -- in the world of capitalism is unlikely to be able to focus on only that. One of the reasons that state socialism has largely come to an end is that state socialism educated citizens very well but did not necessarily produce the kind of work and culture that its best educated citizens felt they deserved. They compared themselves with their counterparts in the West and found their lot wanting. The Islamic Republic of Iran today finds itself in part in the same predicament, except there is less welfare and more freedom in the Islamic Republic than in state socialist countries. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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