" Regardless of their internal political structure, what these "liberated zones" (USSR, PRC, the Eastern Europe states, North Vietnam for a short time) did was 'remove' their populations from the global "Reserve Army of Labor." Conditions were sometimes not very good in these states -- but without exception they are worse now."
The effect of that removal of those populations from the global reserve army of labor was not only to improve their conditions but it also helped enable workers in the West, especially in North American and western Europe to better their own conditions since this removal lessened the options that capital had for exploiting cheaper labor elsewhere in the world. In a number of respects, the greatest beneficiaries of the October Revolution were workers in North America and western Europe.
Most of the states that Carrol referred to, were, whether they called themselves socialist or not, were developmentalist states. Their regimes attempted to foster economic development through extensive state interventions in their economies. This sort of thing was not a new phenomenon. Avowedly capitalist regimes like the US, Germany, and Japan, had done much the same thing too earlier on. In the US, Alexander Hamilton was a great proponent of the idea that economic development required active government. He proposed a variety of measures like protective tariffs, and the establishment of a national bank, and other governmental institutions to foster industrialization. Later proponents of such policies included the economist Henry Carey and the Whig politician Henry Clay. A young German economist, Friedrich List, who had lived in the US for some time, imbibed the ideas of Hamilton, Carey, and Clay, and brought them back home to Germany, where a few decades later, under Bismarck, they set the tone for German economic policy for many decades to come. Likewise, the modernizers who came to power in Japan following the Meiji Restoration, adopted these ideas too. And similar ideas, would later on influence policymakers in many of the newly independent countries around the world, following the Second World War. As Noam Chomsky, amongst others have pointed out, there is hardly a single example of a country that has successfully developed economically by following the dictates of the Washington Consensus. Nevertheless, the US has not been very keen on the idea of Third World countries breaking with the Washington Consensus and it has been willing to employ any means available to prevent this from happening.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant http://www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math
---------- Original Message ---------- From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Follow Up to Cold War Liberalism and Vietnam Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2016 15:28:15 -0600
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