|
|
|
|
Communism Comes to Market |
| Section: CURRENT ISSUES / SPECIAL REPORT--THE GLOBAL APPEAL OF PRIVATIZATION |
| Author: Peter Young |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/1988 |
| Size: 2,622 Words, 16,496 Characters |
|
Over the centuries, humankind has found no more effective measure of work than profit. Only profit can measure the quantity and quality of economic activity and permit us to relate production costs to results effectively and unambiguously. Our suspicious attitude toward profit is a historical misunderstanding, the result of economic illiteracy.
Who said that? Friedrich Hayek? Milton Friedman? Ronald Reagan? Wrong. The correct answer is Nikolai Shmelyov, an economist with the USSR's U.S.-Canada Institute in Moscow, writing in a recent edition of the leading Soviet political journal Novy Mir.
Shemelyov went on to advocate he removal of subsidies, market pricing, a natural level of unemployment, free economic zones for foreign investment, and the creation of a stock market. When Soviet economists start sounding like rabid free-marketeers, it is clear that ideological purity is no longer being maintained in the heartland of socialism.
Matching the privatization revolution in Europe and the Third World is a gradual move toward private-sector solutions in the communist world. While it is easy to exaggerate these shifts, the abandonment of communist ideology has clearly begun.
Socialism doesn't work. That is the conclusion reached by the leaders of the major communist countries. No amount of posters of shiny tractors and exhortations to toil in the cause of building communism will outstrip capitalism. So some capitalist methods must be adopted.
It is less clear whether liberation of the economies of the communist countries is compatible with the retention of power by the communist elite. Communist co...
Read Full Article
...is absence of reform in Albania may not be a bad thing. There is a strong case for preserving at least one communist country as a museum, a sort of late twentieth-century totalitarian horror show, with all the incompetence and social and economic disintegration that observers of communism have grown to know and love. Otherwise people may forget what it was like and be tempted to try it again.
(1,680 of 16,496 characters)
|
|
|
Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
|
The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
