Socialist choir in Cuba

[LordChaverly]

Taking the Maddison stats on GDP per Capita for the period and comparing the China with a comparable economy like India, shows China has consistently out performed India:

 

Numbers in International Geary-Khamis dollars:

 

China 1900 - 545 1938 - 562 1956 - 616 1975 - 871 1990 1,871

India 1900 - 599 1938 - 668 1956 - 701 1975 - 897 1990 1,309

 

For the USSR that spans from Europe to the Pacific finding a comparator is difficult considering it was only in 1860 that serfdom had been abolished economically they were pre-1820s UK in terms of GDP in 1913, so whilst I give a comparison with the USA it is more for interest. A fairer comparison would be with somewhere like Venezuala which had similar GDP but a Capitalist economy.

 

Russia: 1913 - 1,488 1980 6,427 growth rate of 430%

USA 1913 - 5,233 1980 18,060 a growth rate of 345%

Venezuala 1913 - 1,618 1980 5,894 a growth rate of 364%

 

In both cases it is far from clear that a planned economy has hindered their economic growth.

 

Data taken from the Angus Maddison Spreadsheet on the Russia page here:

http://www.historicalstatistics.org/

 

 

The statistics you quote above are a classic example of ‘number magic’, i.e. of an assumption that hard figures are an accurate representation of reality. Maddison’s data is dubious in the extreme, for several reasons. Firstly, it assumes that Soviet ‘GDP’ could be measured and compared with the GDP of market economies, with any reasonable degree of accuracy. This is false, because GDP refers to the market value of goods and services produced by a country within a year. But, almost by definition, the Soviet regime did not have markets as such, because it lacked a price mechanism (moreover, in many economic sectors, goods and services freely available in the West were almost entirely absent).

 

Secondly, the Geary-Khamis dollar is based on purchasing power parities and average world prices of goods. But in the Soviet regime many goods were simply not available for purchase, and where they were their prices were heavily distorted by state subsidies (for example, the famous ‘Big Mac’ PPP test would have been impossible to apply to the Soviet Union because there were no fast food outlets). Moreover, Soviet international trade within the global market place was at a very low level (much of its trade was with the satellite countries and was heavily distorted by political considerations). Thirdly, it takes no account of the quality of the product, so you are not comparing like with like (we know for example that the quality of Soviet-made goods was absolutely dreadful, so much so that these goods were simply too poor to be sold on world markets). Madison himself (who, by the way, is not primarily an expert on the USSR or Russia) in one of his published works he has explicitly mentioned the great difficulties involved in measuring Soviet output and in verifying Soviet official statistics (which we now know were based on mountains of lies)..

 

The key problems relate to the definition of what is being measured, i.e. what is meant by ‘product’ or ‘output’, and how can these be valued? Soviet product, for example, consisted in the main of goods of extremely poor quality (with emphasis being placed on the quantity rather than the quality of production). Moreover, it was also virtually impossible to determine how much was being produced with any precision, because of the disjunction between paper production and actual production. In particular, there was a bias towards falsification of statistics from the bottom of the production chain to the top, because of the tendency of lower level staff to exaggerate production levels in order to please their bosses on the next level.

 

Moreover, in the West there was a tendency amongst some Western academics to accept these official statistics at their face value, possibly because they were the only ones available and were seen as better than nothing. The dubious validity of Soviet statistics has, for example, been explained by various academics in the post-cold war era, for example by Wheatcroft and Davies (in a seminal article entitled ‘The Crooked Mirror of Soviet Economic Statistics'), by Nutter (particularly, in 'The Growth of Industrial Production in the Soviet Union') and by Roberts (see his article below, which strongly makes the point that Soviet economic growth was consistently exaggerated in the West).

 

Even before the end of the cold war, leading figures in the CPSU were bemoaning the lack of growth in the Soviet economy (in fact the economy had been in decline for decades) and were making unfavourable comparisons between Soviet economic performance and those of market based systems in the developed and developing world.

 

Moreover, I notice you fail to mention anything about the most important statistics of all, i.e. those relating to human life, because in the case of both the Soviet Union and China the cost of the monumental folly of centrally planned industrialisation can be counted in tens of millions of lives.

 

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/soviet_economy.htm

[Wildcat]

.............

 

Even before the end of the cold war, leading figures in the CPSU were bemoaning the lack of growth in the Soviet economy (in fact the economy had been in decline for decades) and were making unfavourable comparisons between Soviet economic performance and those of market based systems in the developed and developing world.

 

Moreover, I notice you fail to mention anything about the most important statistics of all, i.e. those relating to human life, because in the case of both the Soviet Union and China the cost of the monumental folly of centrally planned industrialisation can be counted in tens of millions of lives.

 

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/soviet_economy.htm

 

And what about China?

 

And when you are making criticisms of soviet GDP what of the problems with working out Western GDP with futures markets and off the balance sheet book keeping that has brought about a series of financial crises including the last one?

 

As for your final point. Industrialisation in the West also brought about millions of deaths. It took the UK 250 years after our regicide to industrialise, the agricultural and industrial revolutions caused countless deaths, and a life expectancy of around 40 and less in some occupations.

 

It is worth noting that Stalin remains popular in Russia despite the numerous negatives about him. To explain that purely in terms of propoganda simply doesn't make sense on its own, a part of his popularity is the revolutionary transformation of a backward feudal society in to an industrialised superpower.

http://www.reuters.com/article/europeCrisis/idUSGEE5B21J6

 

Note I am certainly not saying the Soviets or Maoists got it right. What I am saying however is that it is far from obvious that there is nothing of merit in a planned economy. The evidence of history is that we spent the last few centuries fighting for democratic control over the way industries operate, because it was more than apparent to the participants of those struggles that the market when left to its own devices was not a benefit to the poor. Frequently the market was in direct conflict with humanitarian concerns, whether that be the economics of exporting food during the potato famine, or the privatisation of rain water in Bolivia.

[callippo]

Industrialisation in the West also brought about millions of deaths

 

don't you just love how Communism's apologists are so in love with the notion that Communist countries were in some way some sort of 'workers paradise' that it never even occurs to them that safety for industrial workers in them in the 20th century in Communist countries was totally appalling, much much worse than in the West.

 

I'd like to see some of these dorks do a few 16 hour shifts down a Chinese coal mine in the 1950s and then come back and say that industrial workers in the capitalist countries had it worse.

[Wildcat]

Industrialisation in the West also brought about millions of deaths

 

don't you just love how Communism's apologists are so in love with the notion that Communist countries were in some way some sort of 'workers paradise' that it never even occurs to them that safety for industrial workers in them in the 20th century in Communist countries was totally appalling, much much worse than in the West.

 

I'd like to see some of these dorks do a few 16 hour shifts down a Chinese coal mine in the 1950s and then come back and say that industrial workers in the capitalist countries had it worse.

 

I think you need to look at your history if you think workers were treated any better in Victorian england. After the industrial revolution, things began to change because of workers striking and fighting for their rights and for some democratic controls over their working conditions and the unregulated capitalist economics that made their life expectancy so short and miserable.

[callippo]

think you need to look at your history

 

I think you need to look at yours. Victorian England was in the 1850s. Chinese coal mines are the deadliest in the world right now in the 21st, accouting for 80% of the world's current total of dead coal miners even though they only produce a third of the world's coal. Just last month a blast killed over 100 miners, but you never heard about it because accidents like that happen all the time in state-owned, Communist party controlled Chinese coal mines.

 

The bottom line is that Communist party leaders don't give a rat's ass aout workers' rights and never have done. Why the hell should they. They're totally untouchable.

[Wildcat]

think you need to look at your history

 

I think you need to look at yours. Victorian England was in the 1850s. Chinese coal mines are the deadliest in the world right now in the 21st, accouting for 80% of the world's current total of dead coal miners even though they only produce a third of the world's coal. Just last month a blast killed over 100 miners, but you never heard about it because accidents like that happen all the time in state-owned, Communist party controlled Chinese coal mines.

 

The bottom line is that Communist party leaders don't give a rat's ass aout workers' rights and never have done. Why the hell should they. They're totally untouchable.

 

Errr yes I know perfectly well when victorian england is. I also know when our industrial revolution was, something china is going through at an accelerated rate.

 

I also know of some of the improvements and work going on to improve safety in Chinese mining, from knowing people that work in that capacity:

http://www.labournet.net/world/0512/china1.html

 

His work repeatedly shows those making up the Chinese people have huge resources of good will, humanity and steadfastness in a period of unprecedented opening up. This was shown no better than by the 44 mine rescue teams and the 7 mine medical teams which were on the spot in Sichuan almost immediately after the earthquake in 2008. They saved 1,000 people. As the People’s Republic of China marks its 60th anniversary, the ability to respond to these adversities demonstrates the country’s continuing modernity and ability to adapt.

 

http://ukinchina.fco.gov.uk/en/about-uk/brits-in-china/DaveFeickert

[callippo]

the safety record in Chinese Communist controlled coal mines remains absolutely appalling.

 

China mine blast deaths exceed 100

November 22, 2009

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/11/22/china.mine.blast/index.html

 

that coal mine is 100 years old. China has been mining coal on an industrial scale for all that time and longer.

 

n 2004 alone 6,027 Chinese mine workers were killed -an average of about 16 deaths a day.

 

8 out of 10 of all coal miners killed in the world in industrial accidents are Chinese, even though only 1 in 4 of mineworkers in the world are Chinese.

 

so it looks like your mate has got his work cut out, especially when he realises that unelected, unaccountable officials of violent military dictatorships like Communist China usually respond to anybody complaining about the lack of the kind of accountability and transparency that people like you that sit comfortably in the west take for granted is to throw them into prison as a dissident after a joke of a trial, if there is any trial at all.

[callippo]

He needs to read the ragged trousered philanthropist

 

I read it as a child and a child sounds like what you are now, either that or you are so intellectually lazy you can't even be bothered to spell the title of Robert Noonan's book with capital letters, and that there is more than one 'Philanthropist' in the narrative, which is why it is in the plural in the title.

[Jonathanb977]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies_in_White

 

interesting link to an article about one of Cuba's protest meovements...dissidents' wives and loved ones.

[Wildcat]

the safety record in Chinese Communist controlled coal mines remains absolutely appalling.

 

China mine blast deaths exceed 100

November 22, 2009

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/11/22/china.mine.blast/index.html

 

that coal mine is 100 years old. China has been mining coal on an industrial scale for all that time and longer.

 

n 2004 alone 6,027 Chinese mine workers were killed -an average of about 16 deaths a day.

 

8 out of 10 of all coal miners killed in the world in industrial accidents are Chinese, even though only 1 in 4 of mineworkers in the world are Chinese.

 

so it looks like your mate has got his work cut out, especially when he realises that unelected, unaccountable officials of violent military dictatorships like Communist China usually respond to anybody complaining about the lack of the kind of accountability and transparency that people like you that sit comfortably in the west take for granted is to throw them into prison as a dissident after a joke of a trial, if there is any trial at all.

 

Whilst we had been mining it for to fuel the industrial revolution for several hundred years. Of course that has come to an end now because, Thatcher destroyed our mining communities to get revenge for the part they played in bringing down Edward Heath's Govt. on the pretext of economics... H&S costs money something that China as a developing economy does not have (their GDP per person is around $3,000). US Coal mining produces half as much tonnage as China with just a 1/50th of the workforce. Chinese miners are therefore 4 times more likely to suffer injuries than in the US, largely because of the technological differences and the number of miners involved. To say China is negligent with its workforce is a gross misrepresentation that misunderstands the different economies and the technologies used. If you want something to blame workers deaths on the more obvious place for blame is the way the market encourages cost cutting and like in the UK attacks on Govt subsidies, that allowed for a planned response to our energy needs.