Louis,
Not too long ago there was a discussion on your list (Marxism) about why
the Soviet Union fell apart.
I would like to suggest that the real reason was the Lada.
I guess that all of you who have been to Cuba or Finland, the former Soviet
Union, or for that matter Canada, have seen a Lada. And the Canadians,
Australians, and Europeans amongst you may even own one.
How about it Nestor, any Ladas in Buenos Aires?
The Lada is "the" car of Russia. Like Ford once upon a time in the USA, VW
in Germany, Renault in France, Fiat in Italy ... only more so: more than
70% of the cars produced in Russia now are Ladas.
Lada was born in 1970, when the USSR made a deal with Italian imperialism -
justly famous at the time as the low tech leader among the imperialist
countries - to build a giant car factory producing 1960’s design Fiat 124’s.
The Fiat 124 was a lovable piece of shit. I owned one, and spent many
enjoyable hours drinking beer and fixing it. It was underpowered, ugly, and
prone to break down, but - fortunately - it was easy to fix.
I ran into Ladas when I first came to Colombia. At first I thought the new
Ladas were old Fiats.
In the 30 years or so that Ladas have evolved since the first ersatz Fiat
124s there have been many changes. A new generation of Soviet born
automotive engineers have redesigned the cars, retooled the factories, and
produced a new generation of Ladas. (Although up until 1996, and maybe
beyond, updated 124 clones were still rolling off the production lines.)
The Lada Niva, a little four wheel drive vehicle, and the Samara - a small
family sedan or station wagon, are the two principal models available
today. And both are in the tradition of low tech, underpowered,
prone-to-break-down cars. No electronic distributors in these babies, and
California emission standards? Whoo-wee, they couldn’t get passed the
border guards of that state even with a good coyote.
The poor quality of Autovaz products (the name of the company that produces
Ladas) is a standing joke in the automotive world outside of the USA.
(Where the Yugo stands in for the Lada, see NYT poll on worst cars of the
Millennium - Yugo came in first, even beating out the Pinto.)
But this poor quality is not for want of trying hard. The USSR, and now
Russia, has spent a lot of effort, talent, and hard-to-come-by foreign
exchange in the effort to become a competitor in the global car market.
Exports mean hard currency. Ladas are usually the cheapest cars you can
find in the markets where they are sold.
Ladas did make a dent in the world market, before the Korean invasion. The
Koreans pushed them out - with equally cheap, but much better quality,
exports of their own.
Now what do Ladas have to tell us about the fall of the Soviet Union?
That Soviet engineering in consumer durable goods was shoddy, behind the
times, unable to compete.
That soviet engineering was low-tech, unable to fully enter the "new
economy" -especially the miniaturization of electronics and the
introduction of electronics into other areas of technology like automobiles
... and weaponry.
And, what does this tell us about other aspects of Soviet technology, like
weaponry?
Soviet weaponry in the Middle East was wiped off the map by US-Israeli
weaponry - for the same basic reasons Lada’s can’t compete with Hyundais.
(Of course there were other reasons for the defeats suffered in the Middle
East against Israeli/US power - but weaponry was one of them.)
The qualitative aspects of Ladas - and Soviet technology in general - not
only have their global economic and military consequences, they have their
social consequences.
Here in Colombia, owning a car is a big deal. It is a social watershed.
Workers almost never own cars, factory parking lots are small because they
don’t need to be big. The petty bourgeoisie - and those above - own cars.
In Bogota - a city of roughly seven million people, there are about 800,000
private cars.
Here, as in California and probably the rest of the world as well, there is
a complicated social hierarchy of car ownership [those of you who think
talking about car ownership is irrelevant to understanding capitalist
society probably tuned out earlier, but if not I am sure that secretly you
understand what I am talking about]. At the top the bourgeoisie drives
Mercedes, BMWs, and once in a while a Buick. The social climbing yuppies
drive Honda Accords, Nissan Sentras, and an occasional Volvo. The
conservative upper petty bourgeoisie drives Peugeots, and Mazda 626’s. The
petty bourgeois masses drive other Mazdas, Renaults, and Chevrolets. The
new entrants drive older models of these cars, plus various Korean cars and
Skodas. More or less.
At the bottom of the car hierarchy are old Renault 4’s, Simcas, and Ladas.
This country has a lot of cultural and human interchange with Cuba. There,
as you may or may not know, people commonly refer to the local bureaucracy
as the ‘Ladacracia." Because owning a Lada is a big deal there. It is a
social watershed, a privilege - like owning a car is here.
(I know this is common sense ... )
What happens when Cuban Lada owners come here, to the country with -
according to most of the world press - the worst problems in the Western
Hemisphere? They see their peers driving Peugeots, Toyotas, and Hondas. And
they are envious.
The same happened on a much bigger scale in Europe during the 1970’s and
80’s vis-à-vis the USSR.
So far I have only touched on the qualitative aspects of Ladas, but the
quantitative aspects are important, too. I am not talking about horsepower
here, but production statistics.
The current annual production capacity of all automobile factories on this
planet is about 70 million cars. Total automobile production in the Russian
Federation has hovered at just about a million cars for the last few years.
[I don’t have figures available for the Soviet era, but would be interested
if someone were to provide them.)
In other words the productive capacity of the Russian automotive industry
is somewhere between 1 and 2 per cent of world capacity.
The ten biggest car makers in the world are:
Automaker Country 1997sales
General Motors U.S. 8,776,000
Ford U.S. 6,943,000
Toyota Japan 4,843,089
Volkswagen Germany 4,260,000
Daimler-Chrysler Germany/U.S. 3,997,229
Fiat Italy 2,864,800
Nissan Japan 2,832,000
Honda Japan 2,316,000
Peugeot-Citroen France 2,106,400
Mitsubishi Japan 1,911,980
Source: Seattle Times; May 10, 1998
Or looked at another way, by cars produced in a country without regard to
the base country of the corporation, in 1998 the ranking was
USA 5,573,430
Japan oops
Germany 4,869,430
France 2,603,021
Spain 2,216,386
UK 1,735,037
Canada 1,488,846
Italy 1,373,424
Brazil 1,244,463
Belgium 951,196
Mexico 950,255
Source: Mavel Autostat www.autostat.com
(sorry, Japan was cut off the screen)
I bet that even taking into account the enormous declines in production
since the end of the Soviet epoch, this is a good estimate of the USSR’s
share of automotive production at the end of its existence.
I also bet that this is a good estimate of the share of world productive
capacity for all Russian consumer durable goods production. [Again, I would
be very interested if someone else were to throw a few statistics into the
pot.]
I think it is interesting to compare Russia to Brazil and Mexico.
True the shape of Russia’s economy is skewed away from consumer goods to
military production - unlike Mexico and only sort of like Brazil. And,
Russia produces more producer goods than either of the other two countries.
Nevertheless the unmistakable conclusion is that Russia is in the same
league - industrially - with these non-imperialist countries - and is not
in the same league with the major imperialist countries.
To check out this idea, I looked into Russia’s share of the machine tools
market - both production and consumption.
Here’s what I found.
The top ten producers of machine tools in 1998 were
1. Japan $8,9 billion (US)
2. Germany $7.5 billion
3. USA $5.4 billion
4. Italy $3.6 billion
5. Switzerland $2.0 billion
6. Taiwan $1.7 billion
7. China $1.09 billion
8. Spain $969 million
9. UK $952 million
10. France $800 million
South Korea is number eleven, the Czech Republic is number 14, Turkey is
number 20, Croatia is number 28....
Russia is number 22 with $117 million worth of machine tools produced.
The top ten importers of machine tools, by country and in this order, are -
1. USA
2. Germany
3. Italy
4. Japan
5. China
6. France
7. Taiwan
8. Canada
9. South Korea
10. Spain
The UK is eleventh, Brazil twelfth, and Russia 20th. Mexico is 27th.
The gap is even bigger when you look at how much each country purchased:
the US purchased $7 billion worth of machine tools; Russia purchased $192
million.
(source: Gardner publications. 2000 World Machine Tool Output Survey.)
Clearly these figures are not completely representative of where the old
Soviet Union stood before the rising flood waters of imperialism overtook
it - but they still give us an idea of the different magnitudes involved.
The productive capacity of the Soviet Union was never more than a small
fraction of that of the United States - and a much smaller fraction of the
combined productive capacity of the imperialist powers and their industrial
offshoots in the rest of the world.
Of course this La-di-da analysis only looks at why the Soviet Union fell
apart from one angle - the drivers seat of a Lada. Another interesting
angle to check out is the view along the Chinese border.
What?
The Soviet Union’s economy was always so heavily skewed towards military
production - for good reasons like Star Wars and the Chinese army - that
consumer durable production was stunted.
Another interesting view is ....
But, those views I will save for the next time I have time to write.
Thanks for posting this anywhere you feel like. Keep running four miles a
day, we may have to live a long while if we are to have any chance of success.
Anthony
=====
Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
