RE: [Marxism] If Marxism is a Science...

[Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis writes: "As I keep pointing out, COMECON transferred capital in
the form of cheap oil from Russia to East Europe, Cuba, Mongolia and
Vietnam. When Lenin wrote about monopolies, it was with an eye to
demonstrating how it was a kind of banditry. What kind of bandit takes
money out of his pocket and gives it to the victim?"

I think one should be cautious in using formulations that suggest the
Soviet Bureaucracy was generously subsidizing the development of a whole
series of other countries at its own or the USSR's expense.

For example, in the case of Cuba, studies in the early 1980's showed
that Cuba traded sugar for oil at an "implicit" market price that
allowed the USSR to save two dollars in NOT having to produce beet sugar
for every dollars' worth of oil that it sent to the island. This was an
arrangement that was equitable, rational and beneficial for both,
because Cuba thereby got a better "price" for its sugar than it could
have elsewhere, but not one that represented a net transfer of value
from the USSR to the Cuban economy. 

It may be argued that the USSR could have gotten a better sugar "bang"
for its oil "buck" by selling the oil at world market prices and buying
sugar at world market prices. This is illusory because the sugar "world
market" was (and remains) a thin remnants market where overproduction is
dumped, where large scale availability of product was uncertain, and
where any additional demand would have pushed prices much higher. The
Soviet bureaucracy could not have relied on it to plan its own internal
level of sugar production, or if it did, it ran substantial risks of
getting gouged and worse, of running short (with the political
consequences this would have entailed internally in the USSR and in
reality in Eastern Europe as a whole). As it turned out, the implicit
price Cuba received was very similar to the internal EU price of sugar,
once CAP subsidies were taken into account.

(The difference between the "implicit price" Cuba was receiving for
sugar in oil, and the world market dumpster price of sugar, is the
origin of the CIA myth that the USSR was propping up the Cuban
Revolution with multi-billion dollar subsidies every year. One could
just as easily have computed how much the USSR was saving by not having
to produce that many millions of tons of beet sugar and claim the
subsidy went from Cuba to the Soviets.)

This does not in any way undermine Louis's basic point that the economic
relations between the USSR and other members of the COMECON simply do
not fit the theses that the USSR was imperialist or even capitalist. And
it does illustrate the underlying economic rationality of planned
socialized production, even with the distortions introduced by a
bureaucratic caste.

Joaquín





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