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Simply put privatization lead directly to asset-stripping and capital flight. To
quote Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz:
Quote:
Stiglitz: Put yourself in the shoes of one of these oligarchs who has been given a gift of $10 billion. ...
Alright, pause right here for the moment. The fact there were oligarchs was itself a result of a failed economy that started to privatize as a stop-gap measure, which is what I said. This doesn't address the point at all.
In fact, it's putting the cart before the horse. Let my make my interpretation explicit so you can question it as you like. My position is:
-- The USSR's economy failed in the early 1980s, particularly in the per-capita sense: population was booming but economic growth receding.
-- Capitalism and privatization was introduced after that.
-- The GDP went up, but in terms of almost any material measure, the move to capitalism barely stabilized the economy.
-- In 1991, everything collapsed. Almost every single industry tanked, with oil as an exception.
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This was not an inevitable collapse but a direct consequence of privatization and market liberalization.
It seems to me very silly to say that its its economic crash was the direct result of capitalism, rather than, for instance, the coup that happened right at the same time. Are you saying that was coincidental?
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Quote:
Rather than providing incentives for wealth creation, privatization provided incentives for asset-stripping, with huge movements of capital abroad--$2 billion to $3 billion a month.
Perestroika was indeed ugly, but does its particular ugliness support your point? Why did many industries peak in 1990, even if many of them were still not up to their pre-depression levels a decade earlier? If you want to say that Russia would have been much better off under communism, that's quite fine. I agree with that completely. But you're attributing the 1991 economic collapse to capitalism, which is a much stranger claim that you don't provide any evidence for.
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VorpalNeko
Do you have some Marxist account of why in the US, the crash is a few markets took out the entire economy?
Very much so. In fact Marx has a very explicit quote as to why a credit crisis (which is exactly what the US faces) occurs under capitalism:
The portion immediately following this specifies the issue in terms of regulation. You claimed that it is evidence against Keynes's position regarding regulation, utterly ignoring the fact that the credit crisis is a direct result of near-total deregulation of certain economic areas. Without that, the collapse of the real estate bubble, etc., would not have had such a drastic, global effect on the entire economy. If you want to say that's wrong, either explain why or get some better evidence. In fact, the current situation seems to support Keynes' position over Marx's precisely because without deregulation most of the conditions that led to it would not have happened!
I'll snip the further part, because 70% of just explains what happens in a crash and none of it has anything to do with the disputed stance on regulation.
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I'm glad you asked this because this is an empirical prediction that can be tested directly against the facts. Consider for example how our
trade deficit is fed directly by our credit system. In fact
America's Total Debt Report (which measures public
and private debt ) shows that our credit system has put us tens of trillions of dollars in debt. The underlying cause is trade deficit, the visible cause is a credit crunch. This is just as Marx would have predicted.
What about the prediction you advanced in your OP that it will happen
despite regulation, which does not at all correspond to what actually happened? Because if you want to re-state your predictions without any reference to such factors, you're reducing the relevant prediction to roughly "if you let the monkeys run completely wild, they'll start fling s**t everywhere." That seems to be too true to be good: correct, but too vaguely general to be useful (although anarcho-libertarians don't seem to get it).
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Regulations can of course help with this matter, but that of course is a move to a more socialist/government controlled economy.
In the OP, you implicitly admitted that regulation+capitalism is still capitalism. So what gives here? Regulation on trading does not imply nationalization of actual resources, so that is not socialism.
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Karl Popper (the founder of the falsification principle in science) said the same thing about
natural selection, initially rejecting it as untestable because it was, in his opinion a tautology: ...
Whether Popper was correct about falsificatio ism as a key principle in science is completely irrelevant about what he thought about X, Y, or Z.
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Second, Popper later admitted that he was wrong!
Uh... so? Does natural selection, Darwinism, or evolution have any relevance to this thread? Generally, does Popper's opinion on the status of anything at all? He had an anti-Marxist axe to grind (and an anti-Freudian one), but I don't see why his stance on anything is of any import. There is one and only one issue relevant about Popper, and that is: was he correct in saying falsifiability is a necessary property of science? We can also ask whether it is a sufficient property.
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This is a clear indication of an economic trend of increasing concentration of wealth among the top 1%, a class that would qualify as capitalist. Likewise the relative wealth of the under-classes, which are also the vast majority, has declined. I should note that the law of capitalist development, by definition, applies more strongly the more capitalist a system is.
Now we're getting somewhere. It certainly gives a sense that Marxism makes at least some falsifiable predictions. Then we can move on to whether they are correct--in this particular case, I've no problem with it, but I'm not completely clear on what you constitute as Marxism. For example, it seems to me that many of Marx's original predictions, particularly in regards to social development, were proven already wrong.
More relevantly here, if you really want to identify regulated capitalism with socialism, as you implied previously (although I really can't agree with such an identification), then you admit that Keynes was more right than Marx.
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