I agree with much of Ed's analysis. I wonder though what would have
happened if the USSR had responded to the spending of "star wars" by
declaring that they would unilaterally disarm. What would the US military
industrial complex have done? What would have happened to the US economy?
And the stock markets?
Of course the USSR had its own military-industrial complex and there were
many more forces at work as Ed notes. But what if they hadn't tried to meet
the spending on arms, but just said, we declare unilateral disarmament? How
would things have developed?
Arthur Cordell
-----Original Message-----
From: Ed Weick [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: May 5, 2001 10:23 AM
To: Brad McCormick, Ed.D.; Magic Circ Op Rep Ens
Cc: futurework
Subject: Re: Musings on the FTAA
> Magic Circ Op Rep Ens wrote:
> [snip]
> > I think the only reason that the Soviet Empire collapsed was that they
got
> > spent under the table.
Brad wrote:
>
> This seems to me to be one key aspect of Anglo-American anti-Communism
that
> was so cleverly implemented (or was it truly an unwitting effect of
> the agent-less agency of The Invisible Hand, thus showing, yet again,
> that, as Hegel wrote: The history of the world is the world history
> of Reason???) -- this capitalist strategy was so cleverly implemented
> that nobody seemed to notice it at the time, neither the Soviets
> and their apologists, nor the "revisionists" here in The West (e.g.,
> D.F. Fleming). Or maybe the Soviets *did* realize it, but they also
> realized that there would be no useful point served by saying they did?
>
I don't think it quite happened this way. My understanding is that the
military-industrial sector of the Soviet economy, including the space
program, was relatively efficient even if compared with the advanced
economies of the west. It was the rest of the economy which wasn't working,
and which would likely have ground down even if there had not been a cold
war. The absence of a market based price mechanism meant that the terms of
exchange for almost all goods and services had to be determined by a huge
central planning bureaucracy. The bigger and more complex the economy
became, the bigger and more complex this bureaucracy had to be. I believe
that much of the very rapid growth of Moscow from, say, about 1920 to 1980,
could be accounted for by the growth of this bureaucracy. Moreover, except
in the military and aerospace sectors, there was little concept of, or
incentive toward, innovation and efficiency. If a tractor or oil drilling
rig broke down because of old age, the bureaucracy simply replaced it with
another one of identical design, though only after a considerable delay
while all of the transactions within the various planning bureaus were
completed.
The emphasis on heavy industry was another factor. Generations of people
had to put up with scarce and shoddy goods, including housing, simply
because so few resources were being put into building up the consumer
sector. People were forever being told to wait, things would be better
tomorrow, but they eventually got tired of it. Agriculture, operating as
huge state farms, was notoriously inefficient, meaning that even foodstuffs
were scarce. When I was in Moscow a few years ago, very little of the
clothing available in the huge GUM department store was Russian made.
Almost all of the T-shirts or sweatshirts had New York Yankee or LA Dodgers
logos on them. I looked in vain for a T-shirt with MOCKBA on it for my
daughter.
The root cause of the Soviet collapse was ideology, the belief that a fully
planned, non-market economy could meet the needs of a complex and growing
society. The Soviet Union was simply too complicated, too forced and
ultimately unworkable. The collapse might have come much sooner if the
Soviet Union had not had its eastern European satellites to prop it up.
For those of you who might be concerned about the "data" I have in support
of the foregoing, I have quite a number of books on the Soviet Union on my
shelves, and I have read them. I also undertook an intensive one month
study tour in Russia in 1995 at a university level institution. Notes from
that tour can be found at: http://members.eisa.com/~ec086636/moscow.htm
Ed Weick
