From: yodaiken@chelm.cs.umass.edu (victor yodaiken)
Newsgroups: ne.politics
Subject: Re: Industrialization
Date: 7 Jan 93 13:57:21 GMT
Organization: University of Massachusetts, Amherst

In article <20698@ksr.com> cher@ksr.com (Mike Cherepov) writes:
>This concept has penetrated my head a long time ago.  Methodologically,
>I do not see that much difference between us: each thinks that the
>other one misinterprets the evidence because of an ideological slant.
>While I don't have a "demon" theory of communism, I think that one
>gets on an ideological tightrope (high beam, perhaps) trying to
>disentangle its successes from its failure and crimes.  Someone
>pointing out that Mussolini made trains run on time, and Hitler
>stopped inflation faces similar problems vis-a-vis fascism.

I'm not sure that such a disentangling is possible. But, it's reasonable
to ask what economic/historical conditions motivated Stalinism so that
we don't reduce the study of history to remarks about the ideological and
personal foibles of individuals. Stalin's policies were, in part, 
motivated by his attempt to rapidly industrialize the SU. The rapid
industrialization threw the economy out of balance, as the urban
centers suddenly required a massive wealth investment. Since the SU
had no access to foreign wealth and had a minimal existing capital 
supply, Stalin simply stole from the peasantry with forced requisitions
and "rationalizations" that assured some food supply to the cities. 
The horrors of Stalin's agricultural policies are well known. But, if we
look at how the US and GB went from agrarian to industrial nations, we can
see some interesting parallels. The english peasantry had, over the 
centuries, won certain rights to the use of commons and small plots.
During the early phases of the industrial revolution in the UK, this
subsistence economy was forcibly destroyed as peasants became landless
laborers or went, destitute, to the cities to seek work. Similarly, 
the semi-rural craftsmen found their customary rights over control of
the wool and textile industries being abrogated. The Luddites, were not
the irrational machinery haters of popular literature, they were 
craftsmen who found themselves facing massive reductions in wages and
working conditions. Thus the wealth that had previously been tied up
in supporting the living standards of peasants and crafts workers was
freed up to support the establishment of the factory system. 
The US a very small peasantry, but certainly the development of a machine
industry in the US was facilitated by the wealth stolen from 
slaves and the shipbuilding industry also benefited from both slave labor
and the logging of the forests which had previously been the source
of living for the Indians. From this, I propose (unoriginally) that
rapid industrialization requires some source of investment, and that
it has often been found convenient to take the investment out of the hides
of the agrarian labor force. Suppose that Lenin's train had overturned and
that the Bolsheviks had never siezed power. Faced with the weak Russian
economy and cognizant of the sharks circling around, would it not have
been tempting to any Russian government to push a rapid program of
industrial development? And who would have paid? Even if there had
been extensive foreign loans, someone would have paid the debt service.


>The argument from ignorance in case of Germany is not convincing.
>If the German and Austrian industrialization-time crimes were
>"horrible", we would know.  The trusty Columbia History of the
>World, edited by Garraty and Gay, written by a bunch of Columbia
>professors, Harper and Row, copyright 1972, dull respectability
>reified, mentions no horrible crimes.

I should point out that the Columbia history department has a traditional
political point of view that was most clearly articulated by 
Richard Hofstader in the 1950's and that the deparment has never fully
recovere from a 1917 purge in which all those not willing to wholeheartedly
endorse the US entry into WWI were summarily dismissed (including
some the most respected scholars of the period). The chances that someone
questioning the party line on the industrial revolution would have been
offered a job at Columbia in the 1960's were about equal to the chances 
that a follower of Hayek would have been offered a post at Moscow University
during the same period. 
You should check 
another source, perhaps the Oxford histories or the Penguin histories.


-- 


yodaiken@chelm.cs.umass.edu
Newsgroups: ne.politics