The Germans (since you mentioned them) like the rest of the European peoples, trace their lineage back to the constantly moving tribes and federations of tribes, large and small, in search of better land. The Germans have a word for this historical process that led to the formation only relatively recently of large stable unified nation states: the “Volkerwanderung�, the “Wandering of People�.

In the 30 years war (1618-48), between a third and half of the German population died from pillage, famine and disease and Church endorsed murder of people said to be witches. During this time, the manly exploits of Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Croat, Flemish and French soldiers profoundly changed the racial composition of the German people. The trauma, destitution and humiliation suffered then sowed the seeds of great philosophies and political movements which first voiced some of the secular ideologies that still have enormous influence and resonance today.

As to what world economic strategy I think viable? In a nutshell, one based on ecological rationality, democratic control and planning, social equality, the dominance of use value over exchange value, an interdependent, co-operative global division of labour and production based on the most best use of resources and people.

What’s the alternative? A 1000-Year Reich of neo-liberalism?

I certainly don’t agree with the main message of this post. The analogy with Lenin is so grossly unfair, it hardly worth commenting on, and the author knows this. Are there any similarities between Yeltsin and Levin? Of course there are, like there are probably similarities between any two persons who ever lived. However in their essential qualities these leaders were radically different, one being a violent dictator who physically crushed all and every dissent, while the other was the first democratically elected leader in Russian history, who championed freedom of speech and has never jailed a single journalist.

As a widely respected Russian economist and commentator Evgeny Yasin said recently, history will remember Yeltsin as a leader who accomplished three tasks:

1) Presided over the largely peaceful dissolution of the Soviet empire. He counts war in Chechnya as Yeltsin’t biggest mistake (I would say crime). However even this horrible war pales in comparison with what would have happenned if disentgration followed Yugoslavia style, with Russia trying to keep it together by force. Note that Gorbachev wanted to preserve the failing empire (he would, wouldn’t he) and still considers Yeltsin responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union. What a great empire that can be dissolved by a gang of three persons?

2) Oversaw transition to market economy. Many words have been said how distorted that process was, and I am not here to defend it or to argue with those who think it was too radical or too fast or too slow. I will simply say that those who think that it could have been an orderly and painless process do not know the true state of the economy at the time when Yeltsin took power. Food supplies were so low the threat of hunger loomed big. It required radical measures and a bold leader. Russia was fortunate to have Yeltsin at the time. Note that Gorbachev was very afraid of any serious market reform and rejected even very modest proposals in that direction.

3) Presided over the transformation from the totalitarian state into a democracy. As Yasin pointed out , in this department his achievements were not conclusive, and the failure to establish democratic institutions is haunting us now at the time when Putin is shamelessly rolling back democratic reforms. Of course, it is true that this is partly the result of Yeltsin’s failure to build strong institutions. But does anyone thinks it is really possible to build such institutions from scratch overnight? BTW it is only in this deparment that Yeltsin followed in the footsteps of Gorbachev. However even here suggestions that Yeltsin somehow was authoritarian in contrast to deomcratic Gorbachev are comepletely off the mark. Gorbachev was a theoretical democrat. He never subjected himself to a popular vote, preferring to be elected by the Supreme Soviet.

So does all this mean that Paul Norton does not have a point? No it doesn’t. Yes, Yeltsin had some totalitarian tendencies. Most notably in 1993 when the parliament had been elected when Russia was a state within the Soviet Union, voted to impeach the democratically elected president, and some members of Parliament attempted to organise an armed rebellion. Yeltsin responded with force. It is really unfortunately that he was unable to find a peaceful resolution of the crisis. He tried, going for a referendum and getting a popular mandate. But he was unable to resolve it peacefully. This was tragic. But I don’t think we can call a person who regularly submits himself to a popular vote an authoritarian.

Now 1996. I do not quite know what was so undemocratic in that process, except for some fairly strong media manipulation. Yes, the media ran a scare campaign telling the voters that Zyuganov will take them back to the years of Gulag. What’s wrong with that? I do know that cronies Yelstin’s popularity was very low and cronies (eg the head of presidential guard Korzhakov) were begging him to abandon the electon. Yeltsin resisted and eventually sacked Korzhakov and his allies. Grigori Yavlinsky, a seasoned opponent of Yeltsin (and his market policies) told an interesting story. Before 1996 elections Yeltsin called Yavlinsky to his office in attempt to pursuade him to withdraw his candidacy in exchange for a high post in the government. It was a reasonable offer for Yavlinsky stood no chances in the election, but Yavlinsky refused, saying politely that is voters will not understand this. They argued for an hour and then Yavlinsky said good bye and began leaving. When he reached the door, Yeltsin called him back. You are not withdrawing, he asked again. Yavlinsky said ‘No”. “Right”, said Yeltsin. “I would not withdraw either”.

Was Yeltsin a democratic leader by the standards of western democracy? No. But he was more democratic than any other leader in the history of Russia and far more democratic than Russia could have dreamed for, so soon after liberating from totalitarian oppression. Get real!

For these reasons I consider a comparison with Lenin to be fundamentally inappropriate and insulting.

No matter what the future holds, history will remember Yeltsin as a collossal figure who alongside Gorbachev dismantled what remained of the communist system, presided over peaceful dissolution of the empire, implemented radical market reforms and gave Russian people freedom and (incomplete) democracy, if only for a short while.

Jason I don’t think the tag “once a communist always a communist� is fair

It’s certainly not fair, and it doesn’t vaguely resemble an argument either.

Nigeria and DR Congo are impoverished mostly due to internal factors like tribalism, poor governance and corruption.

But let’s not forget that multinationals can share some of the blame:

The case of Shell in Nigeria is the best known. In Africa’s biggest oil producing country, whose people are still among the poorest in the continent, the manna extracted by the western oil giants has for decades helped tyrannical elites and their corrupt clients to get rich and hold on to power. Benefiting from a system in which Shell held the lion’s share, some amassed considerable fortunes (1). In the early 1990s the oil-rich Niger delta became the scene of violent confrontations between the local ethnic minorities, who accused Shell of damaging their environment and their culture, and the Nigerian security forces who had orders to protect the oil installations.

And in Congo.

Brice Makouso of Justice & Peace, an organisation from Congo Brazzaville talked about the mystery which they have been investigating for several years ” how come his country is the third largest producer of oil in the Gulf of Guinea region, but it remains one of the poorest countries in the world whilst pumping hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil”. He described how the Congolese government took advances from Total to fund arms purchases and now finds itself in debt to Total and to various international financial institutions. Despite being in dialogue with Total and with the French government, it seems that ‘confidentiality clauses’ in the contract between Total and the Congolese government block access to any hard information about revenues, production, payments, etc

Naughty, naughty.

Let’s a have a warm round of applause for Japanese imperialism, the Mapuche millionaires, and small city states.

On the other hand, revolutionary Left schemes like forced collectivisation of farmers and the elimination of free enterprise and private poroperty rights have killed and emaciated countless millions.

It is also worth pointing out that “we” in the West are not the sole cause of third world poverty. Many countries that have been colonised have become wealthy- South Korea, chile, Taiwan and Singapore for example. This shows that it can be done.

In regards to the African slave trade, this existed both before and after European colonisation. Africans can thank the British for destroying the mostly Arab Muslim slave trade that had immiserated so many black Africans for centuries.

Resource rich countries like Nigeria and DR Congo are impoverished mostly due to internal factors like tribalism, poor governance and corruption.

The West has contributed to third world poverty through the use of trade barriers and because of the shocking behaviour of the IMF (read Joseph Stiglitz for details).

In summary, the reality of third world poverty is far more complex than Bridie’s cartoonish Marxist meanderings would suggest.

I think it not accidental that your country and mine which were both founded on forms of genocide and extermination of the native population, land theft (e.g. Mexico) and the use of slave or indentured labour, has meant that we both have ongoing legacies of racial “difficulties� and all that entails for a civil society.

Mmmmph.

Is there a single country in the world that wasn’t founded on genocide at some point? It doesn’t make it right (and I’m definitely NOT doing a ‘those children weren’t stolen’ thing) but attributing this sort of unpleasantness solely to Western Europeans is naive. And incorrect.

“Pragmatic politics usually translate as ineffectual, gutless politics.”

On the other hand, revolutionary left-wing politics almost always translates into mass death and destruction: Kim’s North Korea, Mao’s China, Lenin’s Russia, Pol Pot’s Kampuchea and on and on we go. The only exception I know of is Cuba, yet even that country is an oppressive police state where ordinary people are ocassionally imprisoned, bashed or killed if they offend the Marxist ruling elite.

Would it be overly presumptuous of me to assume that a factory hand in Sweden, an oil rigger in Norway and a seamstress in Finland are far better off in the boringly pragmatic heartland of Social Democracy than any “liberated” proletariat?

As a result of reactionary thinking such as yours, the Marxist movement throughout the West is now an irrelevant rump that could comfortably fit into a shoe box.

ps. Women also use the jocular term “brain fart”. Please avoid sexism as I find it offensive.

Actually, I think you’re the one who’s flipping the ‘historic/ahistoric’ switch on and off at your convenience, to suit whatever ideological mold you wish to fill at a given moment. ‘Historical’ examples can be selected, tailored, or selectively ignored, to flatter just about anyone’s taste. The Germans live pretty darn well in their land mass, and have done so for quite some time. Who did they steal Germany from, the… Germans? You claim that the US ’stole’ land from Mexico, but who, I wonder, did the Mexicans steal it from? I reckon the Paiute, the Hopi, the Navajo and the Comanche would be sort of astonished to learn that all along, they were all ‘really’ Mexicans. I always marvel at how in your ideology, Europeans, alone among peoples, seem to be space aliens who exist outside of the rest of human history, and it is their misdeeds alone which are unparalleled. An example par excellence of ’stealing’ a resource-rich land mass would have to be the theft of Anatolia by the Turks; and in return, humanity was treated to five or six centuries of war, aggression, jihad, pillage, oppression, looting, and slavery, throughout Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. I’m still waiting for some clever archaeologist to show us the early Ottoman websites and electric can-openers, which at least woulda made the whole escapade worthwhile.

“It is impossible to conceive what any of these countries, which in their current form are essentially artifical European constructs, might have been able to achieve economically if their territories had not been dismembered and sliced off from larger geographic entities that would have been far more viable.”

You’re quite right there, it is impossible to guess. But I don’t know why you’d assume that they were busy doing one thing rather than another, before they were so rudely interrupted. (And interrupted by whom, by the way? The raiding and destruction of African and South Asian societies was gleefully undertaken by Arabs and Muslims long before Europeans could even find the Congo on a map.) Left to their own devices, they could just as easily have spent their time on pointless border wars and tribal bloodletting, which is what humanity at large seems to have a habit for, much or even most of the time. Ask a Carib and an Arawak what they were busy doing before Columbus bumped into them — killing and enslaving each other, or working out the theory of special relativity. Ask a 10th-century Ulsterman and you’ll probably get a similar answer.

None of my sarcasm proves a damn thing, naturally, in a positive sense, except to underscore that you aren’t proving much with this line, either. You’re wearing a set of ideological goggles, and that’s fine, something brilliant may in fact come from it; but you should at least recognize that that’s happening, and you’re being selective about things.

Some of the other things you’re saying are I believe quite interesting, and I’m going to have to think further about them; thanks for that. (Some are simply too far out of my intellectual ball-park for me to have any useful opinions of them.)

On a different note, since you seem not to have a very sanguine view of growth models for improving impoverished societies, what do you think is a more viable strategy?

Yeltsin’s name is indelibly linked with Russia’s faltering experience in trying to create democracy in a country which had known centuries of authoritarianism. He was given strong support by western governments who feared a return to communist rule but confused personality with process. They frequently overlooked Yeltsin’s mistakes and encouraged him to bring in a constitution that concentrated massive power in the presidency rather than achieving a reliable system of checks and balances.

In September 1993 Yeltsin’s patience ran out. He ordered the dissolution of parliament and sacked his vice-president, Alexander Rutskoi, even though he had no constitutional right to do either. Scores of MPs decided to stay in the building and resist eviction. There were strange ironies in that Yeltsin was now the man putting pressure on the same building and the same MPs that he had been defending only two years earlier during the 1991 coup.

Instead of having a referendum on five years of Yeltsin’s rule, his advisers managed to turn the [1996] election into a referendum on the abuses and atrocities of the communist past. When Yeltsin had been elected president in 1991, the two national TV channels were divided. One supported him. One opposed him. The fact that five years later, voters were subjected to a less open democratic process was a sad reflection on Yeltsin’s failure to build on the foundations that Gorbachev had left for him.

The manner of his departure from power fully confirmed the description of Yeltsin which had been given some years earlier by Pavel Voshchanov, his first press secretary. Voshchanov called him “a battering-ram”. In the days when destruction was on the agenda he performed a powerful role, undermining the Communist party and defeating the August 1991 coup. In government, he was less impressive. He did not have the political skills to reconcile opposing views or search for consensus. He was not a dictator, but he was authoritarian. He accepted the broad rules of democracy, provided that he could manipulate them sufficiently to remain on top. He tolerated widespread corruption, and though he frequently sacked ministers, it was never because of their dishonesty or because of their ties to the new economic oligarchs.

Fertility control that excludes the use of abortion for large numbers of women over a lifetime has not been achieved in any country in the world - for complex reasons. Women everywhere continue to use it even where other forms of contraception are freely available and cultural norms technically give women the personal freedom to exercise reproductive control. The lack of freely available abortion does translate into very bad outcomes for women though, for all the well-known reasons.
If an institution as powerful as the Catholic Church opposes abortion and contraception then it is setting in train a set of social inevitabilities that create the sort of patriarchal societies that are by definition inefficient,inequitable and oppressive.

The essential problem with your overall argument is that it is timeless, non-materialist and ahistoric. The advantages that resource rich nations with large productive land masses have over those without these is just one reason that some countries, e.g. the US, Australia, Russia, China are far ahead of others economically and have been able to advance relatively quickly, or recover, in the modern post-industrial era.

You mention Bangladesh, Mali and Mexico as examples of nations that are not pulling their economic and social weight and you imply that it is the fault of these nations for not doing so, which simply ends up in a form of racialism which is objectively false, self-defeating and morally repugnant. It is impossible to conceive what any of these countries, which in their current form are essentially artifical European constructs, might have been able to achieve economically if their territories had not been dismembered and sliced off from larger geographic entities that would have been far more viable. And all in the name of nationalist ideology – another European construct that has disproportionately benefited the West and designed so.

I think it not accidental that your country and mine which were both founded on forms of genocide and extermination of the native population, land theft (e.g. Mexico) and the use of slave or indentured labour, has meant that we both have ongoing legacies of racial “difficulties” and all that entails for a civil society. One offshoot of this is that a significant proportion of the population of both countries tend to hold the views you describe about other races and peoples, who do not have anywhere near the standard of living we have because of a combination of structural factors.

And I haven’t even mentioned unequal exchange, debt, expropriation, protectionism, the use of Third World countries as quarries, dumping grounds for toxic wastes, the centuries long distortion of local economies by imperialist economic policies (just study the history of India in its relationship with Britain and so many of the Latin American and African countries and their relationship with their respective imperial, colonial overlords).

But we are way off topic and I intuit the axe is about to fall. And if my mind was in danger of imploding, if that is what your crass male humour term means Melaleuca, ‘twould’ve happened a long time ago.

I’ll try and answer your question as best I can, but I should point out that my work was in talking to immigrant workers in California and Texas, who mostly came from rural Mexico, but I didn’t live in Mexico myself. We were primarily interested in collecting health-related data; but we asked a lot of work- and family-related questions to indirectly get the info we needed, and it painted an interesting picture, though that wasn’t our main purpose.

From what I understand, the abortion program there is only in the D.F., and only available to residents (i.e. you can’t travel from outside to have one) so its impact is probably more in the way of a pilot program. I don’t know where it will lead, but I think that in their society, abortion is not directly relevant as a method for population control, I think the issue has far more to do with the overall “outlook” on life that people have. A friend of mine recently put it best, in a pithy little paradox: “The only realistic way to solve the problems of Mexico, is to make Mexico rich.”

That sounds silly at first, but I think it’s true. The problem there, strictly speaking, is not population in absolute numbers, but population in relation to what you can support or sustain, and prosper. Mexico is a large country, and it has all the ingredients for a prosperous society, so it *should* be prosperous (it’s slowly getting there, but it’s taking a long time). But it has a lot of problems with internal attitude and outlook, as well as a ruling class that is crooked and incompetent. And it has a lot of problems with racism, and its economy is based in large measure on wrong-headed assumptions. It shouldn’t have millions and millions of people constantly wandering into other countries looking for work; it should be able to give them work at home.

Actually to be more precise, (and to cop a line from Rousseau) we shouldn’t make Mexico rich (we can’t do that), we have to force them to make themselves rich. If you see what I mean.

One of the things that always strikes me as strange about Latin American society (and it’s so obvious that one tends not to notice it, but I do) is how many euphemisms and slang expressions they have in Spanish that basically mean “vast numbers of unbelievably desperate, hopeless poor people.” They seem to take poverty almost for granted, as a simple fact of life, but of course they shouldn’t. Think of the words you use to denote the Little Guy, in English: the punters, the battlers, etc. It doesn’t sound so hopeless and resigned. (These days, when we say “the masses,” we’re either joking, or else we’re talking about somebody else’s country.) That’s a much healthier way of looking at things, and it’s an indicator of a certain kind of difference.

I think that attitude is slowly changing, too, but there’s still a long way to go. There are certain policies we could adopt that I think would prod them in the right direction, but this isn’t the place to discuss them. But in the end, the goal is for people to live prosperous, satisfying lives, not to de-limit their numbers arbitrarily. The holistic approach (one that understands the ways those things are, and are not, related) is probably the one with the best chance of success.

The city of chaos is broken down,
every house is shut up so that none can enter.
There is an outcry in the streets for lack of wine;
all joy has reached its eventide;
the gladness of the earth is banished.

Isiah 24:10-11

Thou art my battle axe and weapons of war: for with thee will I break in pieces the nations, and with thee will I destroy kingdoms;

And with thee will I break in pieces the horse and his rider; and with thee will I break in pieces the chariot and his rider;

With thee also will I break in pieces man and woman; and with thee will I break in pieces old and young; and with thee will I break in pieces the young man and the maid;

I will also break in pieces with thee the shepherd and his flock; and with thee will I break in pieces the husbandman and his yoke of oxen; and with thee will I break in pieces captains and rulers.

Jeremiah 51

“J-p-z, as long as we insist on artificial idealised rigid nation states that carve up, privatise and monopolise the world’s productive wealth in inherently inequitable ways, then it will always be the case that people from poor countries will want to migrate to richer ones.”

If you keep thinking this way, Bridie, you’ll have a massive brain fart and end up like Rob and John Greenfield; that is, you too will become a bitter and twisted ex-Red.

However, if I may, I would be interested in asking your opinion of the situation in Mexico, drawing on the firsthand experience you mentioned you have had there.

Why do you think it has been so difficult to control population growth there; what do you think about the recent legalisation of abortion in Mexico City; and what political and social ramifications do you think it will have?