Re: Meet The Secret Rulers of the World
The truth about the Bohemian Grove
June 15, 2001
Below is an interesting paper about the alleged "cardinal sin" of the late Soviet Union --the centrally-planned economy....
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PLANNING AND THE DEMISE OF THE CENTRALLY-PLANNED ECONOMY
Gary Fields
Introduction
How did an economy of state central planning come to represent the project of twentieth century socialism and why did this project founder? This essay casts its sights in the direction of the past in seeking answers to this question.
Fifty years ago E.H. Carr, one of the most influential historians of this century and arguably the world's foremost scholar on the Soviet Union, wrote: "The economic impact of the Soviet Union on the rest of the world may be summed up in the single word, 'planning'" (Carr, 1947: 20). The Soviet planned economy to which Carr referred, was perhaps the most compelling experiment in economic engineering ever attempted. What made this endeavor unique was the fact that the Soviet regime, in establishing institutions for the achievement of planned economic outcomes, virtually eliminated the market and the price system of allocation as the foundation for economic activity. While the prelude for this project is to be found in the economic policy debates of the 1920s in the USSR and the political ascendancy of Josef Stalin in 1928, the ancestry of this project is traceable to the nineteenth-century utopian critique of early European industrialization (Benevolo, 1963: xii; Hall, 1988). Embedded in this critique were the initial stirrings of a merger between the ideals of socialism and the idea of planning. This merger spawned a powerful tradition within the political economy of the socialist movement in which planning represented the means for overcoming a market system seemingly incapable of fulfilling its original
Enlightenment promise. For the Soviets, as heirs to this tradition, creation of a planned economy constituted the key policy component for guiding the transition from capitalism to socialism that the Soviet regime believed, rightly or wrongly, was its political mission and historical destiny.
With the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991, the planning experiment reached an abrupt and ignominious conclusion.
[snip]
From:
ist-socrates.berkeley.edu
Now, I for one would reformulate the last sentence as: "With the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991, the planning experiment reached an abrupt and ironical conclusion... as global capitalism morphed into polycentrally-planned capitalism". Indeed, with the likes of Microsoft, Boeing, Nestle, DaimlerChrysler, GM, Exxon-Mobil, Airbus, Vivendi-Universal, Bechtel, Citigroup, etc. dubbed "corporate Godzillas" by pundit Kenichi Omae (in his last book, The Invisible Continent), world capitalism can no longer claim to be a fair, market-driven process. And the very fact that the powers-that-be do convene on a regular basis (Davos, Bilderberg, European Round Table, Bohemian Grove, etc) shows us that the maintenance of global capitalism needs a coordination of sorts --at the highest corporate/political level. |
