This is Richard Wolff from Democracy at Work, responding to another
Ask Prof. Wolff question from our Patreon community. This question comes from Mad Marx
(Miloš) and I want to answer Mad Marx's question because it is one that
arises often. I try to choose these questions in the hopes of responding to groups of folks,
not just one, when I can. This question has to do with my comments that I make fairly often
about how in the 20th century the most stunning economic growth story is that of the Soviet Union
and in the 21st century the same is true of the growth of the People's Republic of China,
and I do that to underscore what it was that those two experiments, early experiments in the history
of socialism as it emerges slowly and unevenly from capitalism—and parenthetically let me remind
you—that's how capitalism emerged from feudalism: slowly, hesitantly, backwards and forwards,
trials and errors, etc. before it became the dominant system. And I underscore
that these early experiments with all of their problems and failures and strengths and weaknesses
were stunning in terms of one prioritized goal. And that was: no longer being one of the poorest
countries in the world, which Russia was in 1917 and China was at the time of its revolution
in 1949. And becoming, instead, one of the richer and more powerful economic systems in the world.
That that prioritized goal was stunningly achieved in both societies, let me explain,
and in the case of Mad Marx there's a question also about the statistical sources. Where do you
go to look this up? Mad Marx looked at the Madison Project, that's one place. There are a variety
of statistical efforts (ongoing, in several cases) to measure these sorts of things—major
key economic indices of how economies are doing. These are good projects, but they have (as usual)
enormous technical complexity, because how you gather statistics—what you look at,
how you put them together to make those nice neat tables you can find in the reference works—that's
a big messy project. Lots of assumptions along the way that you have to record (if you're honest)
so that the people using the statistics have some clarity about what the numbers
mean. And here's, of course, where all kinds of ideological considerations can and do come into
play. If you don't like socialism in its early experiments, Russian and Chinese particularly,
well then, you will make adjustments to the numbers, some reasonable, perhaps some not,
that make it look less successful than if you feel positively about these experiments. And we know
from the history of the Cold War how intense these ideological considerations have been and continue,
in many cases, to be. So let me explain. If you look at numbers from, say, 1900 to 2000,
then of course you're looking at a long period of time,
and economic growth is never a straight line. It is higher in some years than in others,
so if you get a timeline that's 100 years old, you're going to have to be averaging
across each of those hundred years to get an overall number. And that can be very misleading,
as anyone knows who plays with averages. My point is the following one when I make the comparisons:
not that there's an easy equivalence between what happens in one country and another—there rarely
is. These are crude, rough numbers, but it's kind of what we use when we can't, or for lack of time,
go into the details. So here's the story with the Soviet Union. It begins the century (the 20th)
as one of the poorest countries in the western world. “The poor man of Europe,”
Russia was often called before World War I, which is the early period of the 20th century.
Already very poor at that time, Russia suffers an extraordinary
series of calamities, catastrophes. It enters and loses World War I.
Immediately upon the latter part of World War I, it experiences one of the world's great
revolutions: the Soviet revolution of 1917. The war had started in 1914. Between 1918 and
1922 (that is, four out of the first five years of the Soviet Union) it was engaged in a devastating
civil war that included the invasions of four armies: British, French, Japanese, and American.
In other words, a very poor, backward country experienced a world war that it lost,
a revolution, a civil war, and a major foreign invasion.
That alone should tell you that, had there not been some extraordinary events,
the Russians, or the Soviet Union as it changed its name during its revolution,
would have been, should have been, expected to be a basket case economically for the rest of that
century, having gotten off to such a terrible, awful, destructive start.
Instead and despite the fact that in the 1930s they had almost another civil war, which we call
the collectivization of its agriculture, and then that the Soviet Union was the major battlefield
in World War II, where the Nazi armies of Germany did the most damage of anywhere in
Europe in terms of property and life destruction, despite two world wars,
despite everything else I've just listed, by the end of this century the Soviet Union was basically
the second superpower after the United States. That was a level of economic growth—recovery
from two world wars, a revolution, and a civil war—that had no equal. If you look at simple
numbers, yes, you can see impressive economic growth in Japan and in one or two other places,
but nothing comparable to what had to happen to the Soviet Union to be what it was
at the end of the 19th century. This was a society that marshaled its economic resources toward one
prioritized goal: economic growth. And that, they accomplished like no one else in the 20th century.
For different reasons and in a different historical context, the same is true of the
People's Republic of China. In both cases when I stress this, it's because I want
people to see, particularly in the audiences that I address, which have a tendency to dismiss
the achievements of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, as if
somehow the criticisms of other aspects of these societies, some of which are perfectly well taken,
somehow entitle you to pretend that what they achieved didn't happen. And that (“quote unquote”)
these experiments in socialism were failures. Even as a summary judgment, unqualified by reference
to what they both prioritized and what they both achieved, would seem to be
inadequate economic analysis at best
and historical dishonesty at worst. This is Richard Wolff for Democracy at Work.