Ireland's OWN: History

 

The failure of socialism? The failure of capitalism! —by Liam O Ruairc (adapted from a letter to the Irish News) Far from making the world a better place, the end of really existing socialism has represented a disaster of massive proportions and a gigantic social regression. A brief glance at some facts and figures included in the UN Report on Human Development will irrefutably prove that all indicators of social developments have dramatically regressed since the end of communism.   Today, Russia's GDP remains almost 30 percent below what it was in 1990. At 4 percent growth per annum, it will take Russia's economy another decade to get back where it was when communism collapsed. By the late 1990s, national income in the ex-USSR had fallen by more than 50 percent (compare that with the 27 percent drop in output during the great American depression), investment by 80 percent, real wages by 50 percent, and dairy herds by 75 percent. Indeed, the degradation of agriculture is in some respects worse even than during Stalin's collectivisation of the countryside during the 1930s. The numbers living below the poverty line in the former Soviet republics has risen from 14m in 1989 (2 percent of population) to 147m in 1998 (over 40 percent of the population), even before that year's financial crash. The market experiment has produced more orphans than Russia's 20 million plus war time casualties, while epidemics of cholera and typhus (eradicated under Stalin) have re-emerged, millions of children suffer from malnutrition and adult life expectancy has dramatically plunged. To this must also be added an explosion of crime, ethnic violence and unemployment. Now, let's examine the malevolent Maoist regime. About the time of the Communist revolution (1952 data), the average Chinese lived essentially on half a kilogram of rice or grains a day, and consumed rather less than 0.08 kilos of tea a year. He or she acquired a pair of foot wear once every five years or so. At the end of the Mao period, the average Chinese food consumption (in calories) ranked just above the median of all countries, above 14 countries in the Americas, 38 in Africa, and just about in the middle of the Asian ones, well above South and South East Asia, except Malaysia and Singapore. Average life expectancy rose from 35 in 1949 to 68 in 1982. In the year of Mao's death, six times as many children went to school as when he came to power. (figures quoted from Eric Hobsbawm, Ages of Extreme, p.470)  With the introduction of capitalism, all those achievements are now endangered. The private sector's share of industrial output grew from 2 percent in 1985 to 24 percent in 1995 to 35 percent today. If agricultural companies are included in the private sector, then the World Bank estimates this sector at 51 percent of the economy. The social consequences have been nefarious. China's income inequality is now similar to that of the USA and is greater than that of India. The richest 20 percent of urban households receive 44 percent of total urban income, the poorest 20 percent receive 6.5 percent. If the Chinese regime goes the same way the USSR did, the social regression will happen in a far greater scale than what happened in former Soviet countries. Page updated 30 Mar 2008 Ireland's OWN Logo by Eamann Website Design and Celtic Background by Míchealín Daugherty Copyright © 2008 Ireland's OWN All Rights Reserved.