Louis,
I would prefer to see a system with zero
unemployment. I don't claim Polish shock
therapy was perfect or wonderful. Only that
in conjunction with (real) Scandinavian
social safety nets and Slovenian privatization
approaches, about as good as one is going
to get from a "transition to capitalism" program.
The Polish farmers were suffering under
Polish socialism. Their problems run deeper
than capitalism, although arguably they were
at least partly due to the failure to follow through
on collectivizing that sector under the Polish
version of socialism, that always held back, at
least partly due to the political power of anti-Russian
sentiment and the strength of the Roman Catholic
Church. Hungarian ag is in much better shape.
One can criticize GDP all one wants, but it
does represent something. Poland is the only
one of the transition economies in Europe to have
clearly moved ahead of its 1989 level of real per
capita GDP, and has done so by a substantial
amount. There are still a lot of people in Poland
who are worse off than they were in 1989, but their
numbers and percentages are a whole lot less
than anywhere else in Central or Eastern Europe,
even probably including my old fave, Slovenia.
They are certainly far better off than the people in
Serbia were under Milosevic.
Barkley Rosser
----- Original Message -----
From: "Louis Proyect" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2001 4:58 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:9379] Re: Re: Re: Re: Serbia after Milosevic
> >Louis,
> > We went through this before. I note that Poland
> >has the best growth performance now of any of
> >the "transition economies."
>
> Growth performance? Is that what we are shooting for?
>
> >Some of its problems
> >have nothing to do with its transition or its version
> >of "shock therapy," e.g. the mess in agriculture which
> >goes back to its failure to collectivize away from the
> >dinky and misshapen private plots that are all over
> >the place.
>
> Polish farmers are bearing the brunt of capitalist restructuring and will
> surely join with the revolutionary movement that capitalist suffering will
> eventually unleash.
>
> >fairly rapid growth, the unemployment rate has come
> >down fairly substantially there.
>
> I advocate zero percent unemployment. The right to a job is a human right.
>
>
>
> Louis Proyect
> Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
>
>
