[PEN-L:7405] Harvey, Leibniz & Marx

["J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <rosserjb@xxxxxxx>]

     This is in response to some of Louis's
replies to me yesterday.
     When I mentioned the possibility that elements
of capitalism may have existed even in the ancient
empires, and been a possible source of the class
structures and resulting ecological damage associated
with that initial separation of the town and the country,
Lou dismissed this by citing Ellen Meiskins Wood's
view that by capitalism is only the modern M-C-M' kind.
I thought I was helping Lou out on his argument here, as
there certainly was a lot of ecological damage and
destruction happening in some of those ancient empires,
whatever one thinks about the Mayan collapse case.
To stick with the ancient core, I would not the soil erosion
that turned the "fertile crescent" into the desert it is today.
Wasn't that Marx's big shtick, decline of soil quality?
     (BTW, the issue of to what extent there were "markets"
in the ancient empires is an old and hotly contested question.)
     Jumping to the more modern era there is another problem,
although this is an old chestnut we have been around on many
times before.  What about the Soviet Union and other "socialist"
economies and their treatment of the environment more generally
and urban-rural relations in particular?  Now, I am not going
to say that socialist planning rules out environmental quality, no
way.  And I think that we know that the lack of democratic input
into those planning processes was at least part, but not all of,
why there were so many environmental disasters in those
states (I shan't bore folks with a list, we all know it is long).  I
understand also that Lou believes that there were some good
planners in the USSR who were possibly more ecologically
sound but whom Stalin removed.  Maybe.
        Of course another response is to say that the USSR
was not "socialist," although I know that Lou does not buy
into the "state capitalist" arguments.  I think that he is more at
home with the old Trotskyist formulation of "deformed workers'
state," although in our currently borderline overheated state I
should be careful not to characterize Lou's views.  I think it
was socialism of some sort, clearly very imperfect, and perhaps
of a "bureaucratic" sort to quote Jim Devine.  Certainly there
were a lot of reasons for ecological disasters, and I believe
that this issue was debated at length in the past on this list.
      However,  I would like to raise the question of urban
planning and its relation to the countryside in the USSR and
similar states.  We have been around on this before also, but
I would note that an interesting source on this is an essay by
Larry Sawers, "Cities and Countryside in the Soviet Union and
China," in _Marxism and the Metropolis: New Perspectives on
Urban Political Economy_, ed. by William K. Tabb and Larry
Sawers, 1978, Oxford University Press.  This book also has
an interesting piece by David Barkin on, "Confronting the
Separation of Town and Country in Cuba."
       A theme running through both of these essays is the
desire to reduce the dominance by very large cities, to
redistribute population and economic activity more evenly
across the countryside, and in both the USSR (once Khrushchev
was in) and in Cuba to develop and maintain greenbelts around
urban areas.  Now all of this was well and fine and by and large
I'm for it.
     In China under Mao,  of course, the approach was to have decentralized
industrial development in the rural communes (initially
in the Great Leap Forward) and to actively prevent people from migrating to
urban areas.  This eventually laid a foundation for the future development
of the TVEs.
      Barkin is fairly rhapsodic about what was happening in
Cuba, with the growth rate of Havana being limited to the
overall population growth rate of Cuba (but not reduced).
     In the USSR,
Sawers found that that over the longer term, it became difficult to
keep to the goals that had been established by Khrushchev
(Stalin, of course, did not give a foo about any of this and
was all for building up the cities with heavy industry, although
with some concern about regional development and having
industry in cities throughout the USSR).  Over time there
came to be an increasing tendency for industry to become
located and grow in Moscow and Leningrad and a few other
large cities, and for the greenbelts to become degraded.  Some
of this reflected the fact that those cities, especially Moscow
remained above other areas in living standards and that
migration to them was limited, something still going on even
now.  This led to the famous "Moscow Does Not Believe in
Tears" syndrome (provincials doing anything and everything
to get there), and with pressure to develop new industry so
that relatives of powerful Party types could move there.
     One difference between the Soviet and Chinese models
was that of a greater emphasis on having main city centers in
the USSR with more decentralization within urban areas in
China.
      There is now an interesting literature on what has happened
during the transition in these places with respect to urban
structure.  Increased income differentials are of course now
leading to greater neighborhood differentiations.  In Moscow
in particular there had been a peculiar stasis of land use,
partly tied to the lack of "Schumpeterian creative destruction,"
namely that producing facilities tended to remain in
place once they were established.  This led to a rather peculiar
belt of major factories partway out from the center of the city.
This belt is now quite distressed.  Also, the tall and badly
built apartment buildings in the far suburbs are now in very
bad shape and sharply declining in value.  In turn there has
been major real estate speculation and rebuilding downtown.
      Well, this has wandered rather far afield, so to speak.  But
a central point I would make is that although some interesting
and useful things were done in the socialist periods in these
places, in no way do I see any of this leading to any kind of
serious elimination of the split between the country and the
city.  I don't see any movement to have "night soil" be taken
out of the urban areas to fertilize the fields (although I gather
there has been some of that recently in Cuba, but more due
to shortages of petroleum).  I am all for urban planning, and
think that capitalism constantly tries to circumvent it (I have
just heard from my wife, currently in Madison, WI, Cronon's
hometown, that Repug Gov. Tommy Thompson is trying to
get rid of all the uban and land use planning in the state; so
much for "sewer socialism," bah!).  But, I do not see anything
really fundamental in this regard having happened during these
socialist episodes.  This problem runs very deep, and as I have
said before, that plank in the _Communist Manifesto_ is one
of the few places where Marx and Engels appear to descend
into rank utopianism.
Barkley Rosser