Still, neo-imperialism carries risks. The achievement of de jure independence eventually fosters expectations of de facto independence. The forms of self-rule incite a desire for the fruits of self-rule. Sometimes a national leader emerges who is a patriot and reformer rather than a comprador collaborator. Therefore, the changeover from colonialism to neocolonialism is not without risks for the imperialists and represents a net gain for popular forces in the world.
30 THE FREE MARKET PARADISE LIBERATES COMMUNIST EUROPE
For decades we were told that the Cold War was a contest between freedom and communism, without any references to capitalism. But with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, U.S. leaders and news media began to intimate that there was something more on their agenda than just free elections for the former “captive nations”—namely free markets. Of what value was political democracy in the former communist countries, they seemed to be saying, if it allowed for the retention of an economy that was socialistic or even social democratic? So they publicly acknowledged that a goal of U.S. policy was to restore capitalism in the former communist nations.
The propaganda task was to treat capitalism as inseparable from democracy, while ignoring the many undemocratic capitalist regimes from Guatemala to Indonesia to Zaire. However, “capitalism” sounded, well, too capitalistic, so the preferred terms were “free market” and “market economy,” labels that sound less capitalistic by appearing to include more of us than just the Fortune 500. Thus President Clinton announced before the United Nations on September 27, 1993: “Our overriding purpose is to expand and strengthen the world’s community of market-based democracies.”4
A few years earlier, in 1990, as the Soviet Union was preparing for its fatal plunge into the free-market paradise, Bruce Gelb, head of the United States Information Agency, told a reporter that the Soviets would benefit economically from U.S. business education because “the vipers, the bloodsuckers, the middlemen—that’s what needs to be rehabilitated in the Soviet Union. That’s what makes our kind of country click!”5
Today, the former communist countries and China are clicking away with vipers and bloodsuckers. Thousands of luxury cars have appeared on the streets of Moscow and Prague. Rents and real-estate prices have skyrocketed. Numerous stock exchanges have sprung up in China and Eastern Europe, sixteen in the former USSR alone. And a new and growing class of investors, speculators, and racketeers are wallowing in wealth.6
Greater opulence for the few has meant more poverty for the many. As one young female journalist in Russia put it: “Every time someone gets richer, I get poorer.”7 In Russia, the living standard of the average family has fallen almost by half since the market “reforms” took hold.8 A report from Hungary makes the same point: “While the ‘new rich’ live in villas with a Mercedes parked in a garage, the number of poor people has been growing.”9
Under the direction of Western policymakers, the free-market governments in Eastern Europe have eliminated price controls and subsidies for food, housing, transportation, clothing, and utilities. They have cut back on medical benefits and support for public education. They abolished job guarantees, public employment programs, and most benefits. They forbade workplace political activities by labor unions. They have been selling off publicly owned lands, factories, and news media at bargain prices to rich corporate investors. Numerous other industries have been simply shut down. The breakup of farm collectives and cooperatives and the reversion to private farming has caused a 40 percent decline in agricultural productivity in countries like Hungary and East Germany—where collective farming actually had performed as well and often better than the heavily subsidized private farming in the West.
The fundamental laws were changed from a public to private ownership system. There was a massive transfer of public capital into the coffers of private owners, and a sharp increase in crime, corruption, beggary, alcoholism, drug addiction, and prostitution; a dramatic drop in educational levels and literacy standards; and serious deterioration in health care and all other public services. In addition, there has been galloping inflation, and a dramatic rise in environmental devastation, spousal abuse, child abuse, and just about every other social ill.10
In countries like Russia and Hungary, as widely reported in the U.S. press, the suicide rate has climbed by 50 percent in a few years. Reductions in fuel service, brought about by rising prices and unpaid bills, have led to a growing number of deaths or serious illnesses among the poor and the elderly during the long winters. Medical personnel in public clinics are now grossly underpaid. Free health clinics are closing. More than ever, hospitals suffer from unsanitary conditions and shortages of disposable syringes, needles, vaccines, and modern equipment. Many hospitals now have no hot water, some no water at all.11
The deterioration of immunization programs and health standards has allowed polio to make a serious comeback, along with tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, dysentery, and sexually transmitted diseases. Drug addiction has risen sharply. “Russia’s hospitals are struggling to treat increasing numbers of addicts with decreasing levels of funding.”12
There has been a decline in nutritional levels and a sharp increase in stress and illness. Yet the number of visits to doctors has dropped by half because fees are so costly in the newly privatized health care systems. As a result, many illnesses go undetected until they become critical. Russian military officials describe the health of conscripts as “catastrophic.” Within the armed forces, suicides and deaths from drug overdoses have risen dramatically.13
The overthrow of communism brought rising infant-mortality and plummeting life-expectancy rates in Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Moldavia, Romania, Ukraine, Mongolia, and East Germany. One-third of Russian men never live to sixty years of age. In 1992, Russia’s birth rate fell below its death rate for the first time since World War II. In 1992 and 1993, East Germans buried two people for every baby born. The death rate rose nearly 20 percent for East German women in their late thirties, and nearly 30 percent for men of the same age.14
With the end of subsidized rents, homelessness has skyrocketed. The loss of resident permits deprives the homeless of medical care and other state benefits, such as they are. Dressed in rags and victimized by both mobsters and government militia, thousands of indigents die of cold and hunger on the streets of various cities. In Romania, thousands of homeless children live in sewers and train stations, sniffing glue to numb their hunger, begging and falling prey to various predators.15
In Mongolia, hundreds of homeless children live in the sewers of Ulaanbaatar. Before 1990, Mongolia was a prosperous nation that had benefited from Soviet and East European financial assistance and technical aid. Its industrial centers produced leather goods, woolen products, textiles, cement, meat, grain, and timber. “The communist era dramatically improved the quality of life of the people . . . achieving commendable levels of social development through state-sponsored social welfare measures,” but free-market privatization and deindustrialization has brought unemployment, mass poverty, and widespread malnutrition to Mongolia.16
Unemployment rates have risen as high as 30 percent in countries that once knew full employment under communism. One Polish worker claims that the jobless are pretty much unemployable after age 40. Polish women say economic demise comes earlier for them, since to get a job, as one puts it, “you must be young, childless and have a big bosom.”17 Occupational safety is now almost nonexistent and workplace injuries and deaths have drastically increased. Workers now toil harder and longer for less, often in sweatshop conditions. Teachers, scientists, factory workers, and countless others struggle for months without pay as their employers run out of funds.18
Even in the few remaining countries in which communist governments retain ostensible control, such as China and Vietnam, the opening to private investment has contributed to a growing inequality. In China, there are workers who now put in twelve- to sixteen-hour days for subsistence pay, without regularly getting a day off.
Those who protest against poor safety and health conditions risk being fired or jailed. The market reforms in China have also brought a return of child labor.19 “I think this is what happens when you have private companies,” says Ms. Peng, a young migrant who has doubts about the new China. “In private companies, you know, the workers don’t have rights.”20
Likewise, as socialist Vietnam opens itself to foreign investment and the free market, “gaps between rich and poor . . . have widened rapidly” and “the quality of education and health care for the poor has deteriorated.”21 Prosperity has come “only to a privileged few in Vietnam” leading to “an emerging class structure that is at odds with the country’s professed egalitarian ideals.”22
Throughout Eastern Europe, unions have been greatly weakened or broken. Sick leave, maternity leave, paid vacations, and other job benefits once taken for granted under communism have been cut or abolished. Worker sanitariums, vacation resorts, health clinics, sports and cultural centers, children’s nurseries, daycare centers, and other features that made communist enterprises more than just workplaces, have nearly vanished. Rest homes once reserved for workers have been privatized and redone as casinos, night clubs, and restaurants for the nouveau riche.
One booming employment area—besides prostitution—is business security. Private police and private armies in Russia alone muster some 800,000 men. Another employer of choice for working-class youth is the immense and repressive state apparatus of secret police, surveillance units, and other state paramilitary security forces which are “now more formidable than that of the Soviet period. Today, this apparatus is numerically superior to the Armed Forces, better paid and better equipped.”23
Real income has shrunk by as much as 30 to 40 percent in the ex-communist countries. In 1992 alone, Russia saw its consumer spending drop by 38 percent. (By comparison, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, consumer spending in the United States fell 21 percent over four years.) In both Poland and Bulgaria, an estimated 70 percent now live below or just above the poverty line. In Russia, it is 75 to 85 percent, with a third of the population barely subsisting in absolute economic desperation. In Hungary, which has received most of the Western investment to Eastern Europe, over one-third of the citizens live in abject poverty, and 70 percent of the men hold two or more jobs, working up to 14 hours a day, according to the Ministry of Labor.
After months of not getting paid, coal miners in far eastern Russia were beginning to starve. By August 1996, 10,000 of them had stopped working simply because they were too weak from hunger. With no coal being extracted, the region’s power plants began to shut down, threatening an electrical blackout that would further harm the nation’s Pacific-coastal industry and trade.24
Eastern Europeans are witnessing scenes “that are commonplace enough in the West, but are still wrenching here: the old man rummaging through trash barrels for castaway items, the old woman picking through a box of bones at a meat market in search of one with enough gristle to make a thin soup.”25 With their savings and pensions swallowed up by inflation, elderly pensioners crowd the sidewalks of Moscow selling articles of their clothing and other pathetic wares, while enduring harassment by police and thugs.26 A Russian senior citizen refers to “this poverty, which only a few have escaped” while some “have become wildly rich.” 27
As the people in these former communist countries are now discovering, the “free market” means freedom mostly for those who have money, and a drastic decline in living standards for most everyone else. A leading anti-Soviet academic, Richard Pipes of Harvard, uncomfortably reported in 2004 that, according to recent surveys, four out of five Russian respondents blame “the country’s widespread poverty on an unjust economic system,” and feel that the inequalities in wealth are “excessive and illegitimate”; 78 percent said that democracy is a façade for a state that is in the grip of rich and powerful cliques; 70 percent want to restrict “private economic activity,” and 74 percent regret the demise of the USSR, believing that life was better under communism.28
No wonder the newly established “democracies” of Eastern Europe are making moves to repress communist organizations and activities. For example, in October 2006 the Czech government outlawed the Communist Youth Union (KSM). The youth group had been leading a well-organized campaign against the building of U.S. military bases on Czech soil. The campaign included a mass petition drive against the bases and for a public referendum. In the June election, the Communist Party’s vice-president and parliament member was viciously beaten by unidentified thugs. Election ballots cast by communist voters were stolen. Around that time, government-sponsored T-shirts sporting the slogan “Fight for peace, Kill a Communist” were widely circulated, even being sold in Czech embassies around the world. The government justified the ban, arguing that the KSM program wants “to replace private ownership of the means of production with public ownership,” a position that “is against the constitution and is incompatible with fundamental democratic principles.”29 Once again, the propagators of free-market capitalism equate it with democracy.
In 1986, when the Soviet Union and the other Eastern European communist countries were still in existence, I wrote:
The U.S. media’s encompassing negativity in regard to the Soviet Union might induce some of us to react with an unqualifiedly glowing view of that society. The truth is, in the USSR there exist serious problems of labor productivity, industrialization, urbanization, bureaucracy, corruption, and alcoholism. There are production and distribution bottlenecks, plan failures, consumer scarcities, criminal abuses of power, suppression of dissidents, and expressions of alienation among some persons in the population. 30
Still I argued that, despite the well-publicized deficiencies, crimes, and injustices, there were positive features about existing communist systems that were worth preserving, such as the free medical care and human services; affordable food, fuel, transportation, and housing; universal literacy; gains in women’s rights; free education to the highest level of one’s ability; a guaranteed right to a job; free cultural and sporting events, and the like.
But to utter anything that might be halfway positive about existing communist countries has long been an unforgivable ideological sin in the eyes of many U.S. left intellectuals, whose greatest passion was—and still seems to be—anticommunism, a totalistic negative view that borrows heavily from the demonized images propagated by U.S. policymakers and mainstream media.
When the communist governments were overthrown, most such anticommunist left intellectuals enthusiastically welcomed it as a great leap forward, a liberation from what they saw as the Leninist aberration and Stalinist monstrosity. A normally verbose group, these intellectuals—some of them quite prominent and prolific—have had almost nothing to say about the post-communist free-market paradise of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
31 THE RATIONAL DESTRUCTION OF YUGOSLAVIA
In 1999 the White House, with other NATO countries in tandem, launched round-the-clock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia for seventy-eight days, dropping 20,000 tons of explosives, and killing upwards of three thousand women, children, and men. All this was done out of humanitarian concern for Albanians in Kosovo—or so we were told. Many of the liberals, progressives, and other leftists of various ideological leanings who opposed President George W. Bush’s destruction of Iraq (rightly so) were the same people who supported President Bill Clinton’s destruction of Yugoslavia. How strange that they would denounce a war against a dictator and torturer like Saddam Hussein yet support a war against a social democracy like Yugoslavia. Substantial numbers of liberals and other “leftists” were taken in, standing shoulder to shoulder with the White House, NATO, the CIA, the Pentagon, the IMF, and the mainstream media when it came to Yugoslavia.
In the span of a few months, Clinton bombed four countries: Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq intermittently, and Yugoslavia massively. At the same time, the United States was involved in proxy wars in Angola, Mexico (Chiap
as), Colombia, East Timor, and sundry other places. And of course U.S. forces continued to be deployed around the globe, with hundreds of overseas support bases—all in the name of peace, democracy, national security, and humanitarianism.
U.S. leaders have been markedly selective in their “humanitarian” interventions. They have made no moves against the Czech Republic for its mistreatment of the Roma (“gypsies”), or Britain for oppressing the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, or Israel for its continual repression of Palestinians in the occupied territories, or Turkey for what was done to the Kurds, or Indonesia for the slaughter of over 200,000 East Timorese, or Guatemala to stop the systematic extermination of tens of thousands of Mayan villagers. U.S. leaders not only tolerated such atrocities but were often complicit with the perpetrators—who usually happened to be faithful client-state allies dedicated to helping Washington make the world safe for the Fortune 500.Why then did U.S. leaders suddenly develop such strong “humanitarian” concerns regarding Yugoslavia?
Yugoslavia was built on an idea, namely that the Southern Slavs would not remain weak and divided peoples, squabbling among themselves and easy prey to outside imperial interests. Together they would compose a substantial territory capable of its own self-development. Indeed after World War II, socialist Yugoslavia became a viable nation and something of an economic success. For many years it had a vigorous growth rate, a decent standard of living, free medical care and education, a guaranteed right to a job, one-month vacation with pay, a literacy rate of over 90 percent, and a high life expectancy. Yugoslavia offered its multi-ethnic citizenry affordable public transportation, housing, and utilities, with a not-for-profit economy that was almost entirely publicly owned, although there was a substantial private sector that included some Western corporations.
Whether Yugoslavia thereby qualified as socialist in the eyes of all left intellectuals is not the question. It was far too socialistic for U.S. policymakers, not the kind of country that free-market global capitalism would normally tolerate. Still, it had been allowed to exist for 45 years, useful as a nonaligned buffer to the Warsaw Pact nations. But once the Soviet Union and the other communist regimes were dissolved, there was no longer any reason to have to tolerate Yugoslavia.
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