[PEN-L:1261] Re: Re: South Korea as model?

[boddhisatva <kbevans@xxxxxxxxx>]

		C. Proyect,


	You surrender the field with typical grace.  I would suggest to
you that we should be concerned with the transition from industrial
capitalism to industrial socialism more than "the transition from
feudalism to capitalism in [newly] industrial England."  If you're content
to re-hash the late nineteenth century, I'll leave you to it.


	I understand that you're concerned with the plight of the immense
number of people who live under essentially feudal conditions in an
essentially feudal economy.  I am too.  I think the industrial economy has
left them behind.  However, their transition will necessarily be vastly
different from the feudalism-capitalism transition spawned by the
industrial revolution. The institutions of industrial capitalism have
already been in place for a hundred years.  Possibly you don't think the
institutions of capitalism have developed in the past century or so.  If
so, your personal focus on history is entirely appropriate.


	I understand that you reject a stagist notion of development as
that seems to you to doom the billions of peasants living to day to repeat
terrible journey into capitalism that the English peasants went through.
I'd suggest two things:  First, their lives are already no picnic and
peasant agriculture is an economy to be blissfully abandoned.  Second, I
would suggest that the best way to smooth the path to industrialism is to
find a substitute for the process of primitive accumulation that made
early capitalism so vicious.  That primitive accumulation was necessary
for development at that time because the institutions of credit and
capital fungibility were not well developed.  When I say "necessary" I
mean that they were necessary for *capitalist* development.  The Soviet
system compared well to *that* system of capitalist capital formation and
that's why it worked well.  That was then and this is now.  Now, the
capital needs of the industrial economy are both more extensive and
complex.  It is entirely historical to suggest that a (Soviet) system that
worked well for the development of basic industry in Russia before the war
might not be adequate now.  That does not mean capitalism is the only
development alternative for modern neo-feudal economies.  It does mean
that socialists will have to find a *better* system for capital formation
than contemporary capitalism employs, just as socialists did in 1917.


	What South Korea means is that capitalists have a better
development answer than Sovietism.  So what?  That doesn't mean they have
a better answer than socialism.




	peace