From: yodaiken@chelm.cs.umass.edu (victor yodaiken)
Newsgroups: ne.politics
Subject: Re: State Socialism (last one, for sure)
Date: 1 Jan 93 17:26:43 GMT
Organization: University of Massachusetts, Amherst

In article <4280@mitech.com> gjc@mitech.com (George J. Carrette) writes:
>In article <58131@dime.cs.umass.edu>, yodaiken@chelm.cs.umass.edu (victor yodaiken) writes:
>>>What was it about the Communist systems that made it possible,
>>>convenient, or otherwise available to kill millions of people in order
>>>to effect these "massive changes?"
>> 
>> And what was it about the capitalist system that made it possible to
>> enforce the enclosure laws, use human beings as property, ...
>
>But the communists in the USSR were killing their own people!
>
> Why can't you *address* the difference between -importation- of people
> into a country (southern USA, slavery) and the massive destruction
> of human capitol inside a country?

I'm not sure why you think this difference is so important. Industrializing
America had a shortage of labor, industrializing China, USSR, and England
drove indigenous peasants off the land and into the cities. Seems to me
to be a factor of previous history, not of how the industrialization was
managed. 

>
>[Slavery killed millions during capture and shipment. But once arrived
> in the US those slaves had economical value and were not in general
> destroyed in the wholesale manner that Stalin destroyed people.]
>
>[Comments about my supposed ignorance of US history, totally ignored.
> For example, do you have a book that shows the -auction- value of slaves
> in various places in the US over a period of about 200 years?
> I think not. But if you did you would see that slaves were never cheap, 
> and never had the negative value (worth more dead than alive) that 
> the "majorityites" (translate that into Russian please) in the USSR
> obviously placed on millions of lives].
>In other words, pretend that I don't care at all about the humanistic
>value of life. 

I'm completely unable to figure out what your point is here. It seems
that you are arguing that it is somehow less wrong to be a slaver who
makes a profit from slaving than to be a jailer who just earns a salary
from running a labor camp. But that is truly a grotesque arugment, you
must mean something else. Do you mean to argue that slavers treated their
human property relatively better because they were of market value? 
This is a bizzare argument, and one which requires a ludicrous and
meaningless comparison: is someone who is condemend to a life of chattel
slavery and to have her children used as commodities better off than someone
who is sent to labor and starve in a Gulag? I don't think that there
is much to be gained from such comparitive criminology.


>
>  Just explain why industrial development in capitalist systems
>  tended to import labor and/or increase population while
>  the great development programs under communist systems seemed
>  to need to destroy their own people?

Read something on the industrialization of England or France. Neither
relied on imported labor. Is it your contention that under capitalist
management, industrializing China would have *imported* labor from
abroad rather than from the countryside? 

>
>---------


-- 


yodaiken@chelm.cs.umass.edu

Newsgroups: ne.politics