[PEN-L:450] Re: Fw: Re: Kagarlitsky responds to Hiatt

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 8 Oct 1998, Frank Durgin wrote:

> 	Oil and gas accounted for between 40 and 50% of Soviet exports.
> And that accouinted for a little over 31% of domestic production of oil
> and gas. 7.4% of Soviet output of tractors was exported (considerable
> number's of Soviet made "Belarus" tractors were exported to the US) 32%
> of Soviet output of paper making machinery and equipment was exported.
>  29% of its output of textile machinery,
> 10.4% of its ouput of equipment for producting chemcials,
> 11.7% of its printing equipment, somre 6% of its  of machine tools
>  28.4% of its production of automobiles 36.5% of its cameras, 27.8% oif it
> clocks and watches.
> Source; narodnoye khozyastvo SSSR v 1990

Yes, but we're comparing apples and oranges here. I'm not arguing, as the
Right does, that Communism was this colossal failure; certainly no other
Third World country managed to industrialize while surviving two titanic
world wars and the global hostility of the American Empire. But the Soviet
economy was not geared towards exports; most of the above machinery ended
up in Eastern European markets, and never had to face the test of world
market competition (which is a good thing, otherwise they *never* would've
industrialized in the first place). Exports to world markets, on the other
hand, pretty much stagnated; the IMF's trade figures show that the Eastern
bloc made up 1-3% of global trade in the Seventies, a figure which
gradually declined as the East Asian countries began their export drives
and China stepped up to the plate. The Soviet Union had a respectable but
quite limited industrial base, mostly confined to low and medium-tech
industries, though they did have the occasional high-tech gem (e.g.
aerospace, high-energy physics gadgets) as well as some of the finest
scientific personnel on the planet. If the Russian Left was serious about
taking power, they're going to have to deal with this reality, and come up
with an export-platform strategy which keeps imports to a minimum and
encourages worker-owned firms to export to those juicy EU markets. With an
appropriate amount of help from a social democratic EU, Russia could
blossom to become, along with southern China, the Japan of the 21st
century.

-- Dennis