RE: Re: Forwarded from Anthony Boynton
Jim Devine wrote: I understand that because the military sector was so important, the Soviet Union was able to get beyond these difficulties in many cases, especially when it came to high-tech weapons. An in-law of mine, who was actually born in Russia, claims that the Russians still have an advantage in some fields of weaponry. Mark, is this valid? I haven't the faintest idea what the truth us, and I've been round Soviet defence plants and talked to lots of people. How do you know whom to believe? Probably the best people to ask are guerrillas living hand-to-mouth and fighting under hard conditions. They say you can strip down an AK-47 in the field, and even if you let it fill up with mud and go rusty it still works fine. That's the kind of Lada-type technology which actually wins wars. Modern British army rifles hardly work at all, apparently; and in Kosovo the British Army radio system was so defective, that British soldiers had to use local cellphones... which worked on a network owned by President Milosevic, who still caved in despite all these apparent advantages, and despite the fact that, as we now know, Nato bombing was a failure. The hero in Bernard Shaw's play Major Barbara is a soldier who keeps a carrot in his holster, because the main problem in a battle is to find something to eat. That's the kind of technological advantage I relate to. BTW, the Lada has an upsloping front floor. A Russian bureaucrat expalined to me that this was actually a design feature which altho it meant your knees are under your chin, also meant you had less far to fall when drunk on vodka. (BTW, I think it's wrong to say that we're running out of oil. You think so? Check this out: http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/web/downloads/whitepaper.pdf Mark Jones http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList
Re: RE: Re: Forwarded from Anthony Boynton
G'day all, Whilst I reckon there's something to Mark's words (below), the fact is they don't really matter like they used to. You can't beat the US strategic might, so you have to beat their resolve (which just about any long war would do, as long as it weren't important enough to tempt Unca Sam to reach for the red button). The US got ahead in electronics via the cold war and got ahead of the SU on wealth via a more dedicated system of international exploitation within their sphere. The SU fell behind in electronics coz they started wrong, again, coz of the urgency of the cold war in 1965. The military were powerful enough in those conditions to demand, not what would one day be better (achievable via domestic RD), but what was then the best available (achievable via smugglers and reverse engineers). That, according to Castells, was the IBM 360, and the SU IT sector (the one that counts when it comes to strategic conflagratiuons) was on a road of follow the leader dependency from then on. They even spaced the bits on their copied chips wrong (1/10th inch was unwieldy in mms), so they couldn't fund their RD with exports (incompatibility problems). Anyway, I reckon the US's big problem is their own brand of Lysenkos - the Wall St (and Fed Bank) economists. 'Trouble is, they're everybody's problem. I reckon 'information society' thinking ignores some big theoretical problems (mebbe Brad and Froomkin's paper on 'The Next Economy' points to stuff more important than some reckon - coz what would a policy boffin do with the news none of the projections s/he needs have legs any more? - ya can't solve everything with Tomahawks! And then there's the problem of uneven development that comes with it - the law of value has more to say on that than Paul Samuelson does.); I reckon there's nothing in economic theory that can do a thing about predicting, preventing or alleviating big crashes, and if that happens, and it's world-wide, we're back to tomahawks again; and I reckon there's nothing economic theory can do about the environment (fresh water is my tip for the first big 'un - Iraq, Australia, Sudan are all already near crisis point, each in their own way), and mebbe we're back to those tomahawks, or at least M16s - there, too). All of that deserves far more thought and explanation than I have either the time or erudition to handle, but thus does my expansive gut feel. Cheers, Rob. I haven't the faintest idea what the truth us, and I've been round Soviet defence plants and talked to lots of people. How do you know whom to believe? Probably the best people to ask are guerrillas living hand-to-mouth and fighting under hard conditions. They say you can strip down an AK-47 in the field, and even if you let it fill up with mud and go rusty it still works fine. That's the kind of Lada-type technology which actually wins wars. Modern British army rifles hardly work at all, apparently; and in Kosovo the British Army radio system was so defective, that British soldiers had to use local cellphones... which worked on a network owned by President Milosevic, who still caved in despite all these apparent advantages, and despite the fact that, as we now know, Nato bombing was a failure. The hero in Bernard Shaw's play Major Barbara is a soldier who keeps a carrot in his holster, because the main problem in a battle is to find something to eat. That's the kind of technological advantage I relate to.
Re: Forwarded from Anthony Boynton
At 10:32 PM 5/10/00 -0400, you wrote: Louis, Not too long ago there was a discussion on your list (Marxism) about why the Soviet Union fell apart. I would like to suggest that the real reason was the Lada. this is a very interesting note (though Mark Jones' criticisms largely seem to be on the mark). I understand the production problem with the USSR was not its technological backwardness. Rather, it was the failure to put the technology into practice, to produce high-quality products. Thus, the Lada. However, I understand that because the military sector was so important, the Soviet Union was able to get beyond these difficulties in many cases, especially when it came to high-tech weapons. An in-law of mine, who was actually born in Russia, claims that the Russians still have an advantage in some fields of weaponry. Mark, is this valid? (BTW, I think it's wrong to say that we're running out of oil. The current high prices are due to an artificial shortage, while the US and many rich capitalist countries are becoming more efficient at using oil, despite the utter wastefulness of SUVs and, for that matter, the car I drive. [Hey, I got it for free!]) I remember having a discussion with some Cubans in Havana in the late 1970s about the nuclear power plants that were to be built [I was on a trip there with the famous Michael Perelman]. I said: you know that the Soviets produce shoddy goods. Do you really want Soviet nuclear power plants. That stumped them for a minute. They replied: but the Soviets produce good military products, so their nukes should be fine. That stumped me ... but this was before Chernobyl (1986). Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Forwarded from Anthony Boynton
- Original Message - From: "Louis Proyect" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, May 11, 2000 3:32 AM Subject: Forwarded from Anthony Boynton Louis, Not too long ago there was a discussion on your list (Marxism) about why the Soviet Union fell apart. I would like to suggest that the real reason was the Lada. There are some things right with this but lots of things wrong. First, Anthony's comparisons of machine tool etc production are with contemporary Russia, not with the USSR. A baseline of the mid-1980s, before the almost total collapse of Soviet production particularly in sectors like machine building, would show different results. Second, Ladas are clunky and old-fashioned and prone to minor breakdowns. But they are rugged and will get you from A to B even when A is in European Russia and B is the other side of the Urals in western Siberia (I know because I've done it). Believe me, when it's -30 deg centigrade outside and there is no auto rescue service or indeed no settlement of any kind for a hundred kilometres or more, you don't set off in a vehicle you don't have some gut faith in. It's not like hopping into your Jeep Grand Cherokee and driving across five miles of boulevards to the mall to pick up a six-pack. Ladas are and were highly serviceable cars in a society which wasn't a slave to the private car and didn't fetishise cars as the only form of transport. In Soviet Russia there were alternatives. Buses, taxis and trains worked; you could fly anywhere for a few roubles (you can't any more). The disasters inflicted by GM on US mass transit systems did not happen there (they are now; Moscow, where more than 100,000 children now live in the streets, has built a six-lane beltway to service its new elites who are building walled, gated new suburbs for themselves). Soviet city-design was ergonomic and eco-efficient. US urban landscapes are a social and ecological disaster and in the era when the oil is running out they will prove unsustainable (I'm not even going to mention the small matter of greenhouse emissions and global warming). The future of genuine mass transit for people living in the fSU lies in the past: with rationally-planned systems in which private cars play an impoprtant but minor part (the number of internal passenger-miles flown has fallen by 90% in the past ten years: in the new era of democracy and freedom to travel abroad, most ex-Soviet citizens are now more like open-plan prisoners than ever they were). That the future lies in the past, is true not only for Russia. Yes, greed and envy are easy to excite; socialism is about winning mass consensus for more livable, humane and collective solutions. Here in London, the car is on the way out; a new Mayor has just been elected by a huge plurality on a ticket whose main theme was beefing up public transport, introducing congestion taxes on private vehicles, and turning central London into a car-free zone. Even in the heart of the beast, facts sometimes speak loudly enough to polluted, asthmatic, noise-infested citizens who spend an average 2.3 hours daily commute on roads where the average speed is now lower (in Central London) than it was in 1920, to make socialist arguments look like second nature and to make the car look like the 'infernal engine' Winston Churchill famously called it. One more thing: I wouldn't be in such a hurry to dismiss Soviet weaponry. What did the Vietnamese use to blast the US out of their land? Whose missile shot down a Stealth fighter over Serbia last year? But of course, Soviet cars might have been better if they hadn't had to spend so many efforts on their weapons industries. Mark Jones http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList
