From what I recall, Stiglitz's basic "logic" was this....
Russia went capitalist, before "the people" were "democratic". This buys into the old claim that I used to hear from one of my graduate school professors in the early 1990s, namely that over 200 years "The Russians never knew democracy" where democracy was orthodoxy liberal capitalism. In China, people were empowered politically (presumably because of socialism) AND THEN went capitalism - hence, capitalism "worked better" in China by the early 2000s, than in Russia where the people "never knew democracy".
It was all very self-righteous liberal rubbish... I mean people at the World Bank (specifically) would tell me in 1999 that "reform" was needed in Egypt, "because it is largely a socialist state". The argument and specific example that was submitted was that students had ONE thing in mind during university - to get a job in government. That was presumed to be out of order.
The World Bank was and probably remains a very strange place. My big moan about them at the moment is that they are very quiet, now that "the American model" that they have sought to export over the past 20 years has come apart so horribly. My sense is that they are marking time for the any new orthodoxy to take shape.
As an aside, we, on the left, are unbelievably quite at the moment, in any formal sense. I think we could/should, perhaps through the WSF, be making representations/proposals for a different order, instead we are standing by an letting the same thieves and villains who brought us into the current mess determine what happens next.
Ismail Lagardien
Nihil humani a me alienum puto
________________________________ From: John Gulick <john_gulick at hotmail.com> To: lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Cc: John Gulick <john_gulick at hotmail.com> Sent: Thursday, 18 August 2011, 20:28 Subject: [lbo-talk] Gorbachev: I Should Have Left the Communist Party Earlier
ISMAIL
I happen to know that this was Stiglitz's position at the time
JOHN
Well, if by "democratization before privatization" in China Stiglitz means that small private businesses were legalized before (some, not all)
commanding heights enterprises were privatized, and that crop-selection decisions were put into the hands of individual peasant households before
this privatization occurred as well, then he's right. I don't know what else he could mean, frankly. Because nothing much that a liberal centrist like
Stiglitz would label "democratization" has occurred under the reform-era CPC, save the direct election of town and village party chiefs (with all the
candidates being vetted by the CPC in advance).
Adios
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