from "Lifelines from Our Past" by L.S. Stravrianos

Stavrianos, L.S. Lifelines from Our Past: A New World History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1989.

142 - A few Third World countries--Taiwan, South Korea, and Brazil--have advanced from being export platforms to becoming integrated, self-generating, industrialized national economies. In fact, their products have developed to such a point that Brazilian steel, Taiwanese textiles, and Korean autos have provoked protectionist demands in First World countries. But these exceptional successes have not been and are unlikely to be repeated on any significant scale in the Third World as a whole. Brazil is unique in the richness of its natural resources, while South Korea and Taiwan (along with Japan) received massive American financial and technical aid and preferential trade privileges--almost the equivalent of an Asian Marshall Plan--during the Korean and Vietnam War periods. Between 1951 and 1965, the United States pumped about $1.5 billion of economic aid into Taiwan, and much more into South Korea--about $6 billion between 1945 and 1978.

In the rest of the Third World, export platforms have yielded few lasting benefits because the semiskilled and unskilled jobs they generate do not provide the technical training needed for local de-

143 -- velopment, because the low wages they pay offer no way out of a domestic market inadequate for local industrial development, and because the multinational do little more than the former colonial powers to encourage the development of a local industrial base. [. . .]

The gap in average per capita income between what we now call the First and Third Worlds was roughly 3 to 1 in 1500. Since then it has widened exponentially: 6 to 1 by 1900; 14 to 1 by 1970; and an estimated 30 to 1 by 2000 [ NOTE TO SELF: check what gap is now]. Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein con-

144 - cludes that the great majority of the human race at the base of the global economic pyramid is worse off today than in precapitalist times:

Without any attempt to romanticize the nature of a peasant's life in the Middle Ages, either in Europe or anywhere else in the world, let me offer this brief analysis. If you compare similar strata of the population of the world-economy as a whole, with 70-80% at the bottom, this "bottom" appears worse off today than they were 500-600 years ago, and the top 20% is unvevenly spaced geographically throughout the world, and live primarily in such countries as the United States, France, Britain, Germany and Japan. Those who make up the top 20% of thw world population may comprise up to 50-70% of the population of those industrial countries. Consequently if someone from one of those countries asks, "Are we better off than our ancestors were 500 years ago?" their answer is not only "yes," but obviously "yes." But that is because those countries have a high percentage of the world's upper strata. 41

255 - 41. I. Wallerstein, "The World-System: Myths and Historical Shifts," in E.W. Goldolf et al., eds., The Global Economy: Divergent Perspectives on Economic Change (Westview Press, 1986), pp. 20-21

209 - Not only hasthe USSR failed as a socialist model--whether judged economically or in terms of gains in social freedom--but so have the numerous other socialist societies that emerged in Europe, Asia, and Africa following World War II. If the destructive side of capitalism has created immense problems for the world, socialist attempts to restructure societies have spawned even more serious and immediate problems in countries like China, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and Ethiopia, as well as in the Soviet Union itself. Two general factors stand out as primarily responsible for the difficulties experienced by these widely scattered socialist societies.

The first is their uniformly underdeveloped and impoverished historical origins. Marx has assumed that his long-awaited revolution would occur in the devloped industrialized countries before it did in their colonies. Instead, post-World War II revolutionary socialism emerged mostly in the underdeveloped, poverty-stricken former colonial or semicolonial areas. Socialism everywhere (with the partial exception of eastern Europe) has appeared on the historical stage as a substitute for rather than a successor to capitalism. 21 [I didn't record citation -- JH]

215 - The reference to the American New Left is significant because like them the Soviet left inteliigentsia represents only a small minority of its country's people. This raises the crucial question of the views of Soviet workers and peasants who comprise the overwhelming majority of the total population and who appear to be deeply ambivalent about developments, perhaps because their status is, in fact, highly equivocal. On the one hand, they have plenty of firsthand kowledge of the corruption and cronyism that characterized the preceding Brezhnev regime. On the other hand, they have enjoyed a secure and comfortable niche within that regime, including guaranteed jobs, as well as food, housing, and medical care that have been subsidized and ceap, even though of mediocre or poor quality. The Soviet people as a whole have learned to accept their socialist society as a national insurance policy, whose security is generally welcomed and popular. What is not popular is the quality of the goods and services provided, especially as more information

216 - is received on the high-quality goods and services available in the West. [. . .] The ideal arangement for most Soviet citizens would involved an improvement in the quality of goods and services together with a continuation of the existing lifetime security polices. [. . .]

So the USSR of the 1980s resembles in certain ways the USA of the mid-1930s--the same unrest, anxiety, dreams, nightmares, and impatient social experimentation that is at once exhilirating and sobering.

220 - The historical experience of England provides a good example of the difference between past and present industrialization. During the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, English workers were severely exploited because medieval guilds had atrophied and trade unions were not yet legalized. Hence, the machinery-smashing by Luddites and the 1819 "Peterloo massacre" of rioting workers. After 1850 the "trickle down," so talked about in the Third World today but which so rarely materializes, did actually occur and did benefit the British working class, resulting in industrial peace and general prosperity. But this was possible only because British industry enjoyed the unique advantage of a monopoly of world markets. [. . .]

Developing countries today have no such broad avenue beckoning to the future--no such foreign markets open to their products. Instead, world price levels for their raw materials continue steadily to decline, while their few industrial exports (textiles, steel, shoes, and clothing) enounter increasing demands from the already industrialized world for "fair trade"--the most recent euphemism for protectionism. Equally serious for Third World countries aspiring to climb up the economic ladder has been the inelasticity of their own domestic markets. Native industries not only have problems of access to foreign makrets but also are fettered by inadequate purchasing power at home, the two phenomena being, of course, linked.