State socialist economies outperformed comparable non-capitalist and regional peers
Evidence
On its own terms, the economic performance of most of these countries was actually not bad. The Soviet Union did double its living standards in the quarter-century after the war and made further gains in the next decade, up to 1980; the number of people with more than a secondary education rose from twelve million in 1960 to over forty million by 1985, and the number of trained scientists exceeded those in Western Europe and Japan together. People in several of the Comecon countries lived even better than those in the Soviet Union. China started with a far more backward industrial base and infrastructural development than India, but its subsequent performance has been incomparably superior both in terms of aggregate accumulation and in the material security of the vast majority of its people. Cuban performance has likewise been better than that of comparable countries in the Caribbean and Central America – all this with no imperialist loot, no Marshall Plans, and under conditions of extreme duress. But none of these countries is ever judged on its economic performance in relation to its own past, its inherited environment, its regional location: China is not compared with India, Cuba with Haiti, Bulgaria (once a periphery of the Ottoman Empire) with Turkey (the central formation of that empire). What matters is that Vietnam has failed utterly to become a Singapore, China simply is not Japan or California, Cuba is not Miami. In other words, it is the superior power of the material productions of advanced capitalism which sets the terms of comparison, in war and in peace. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 44
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the deferred comparison with India vs. China development debates familiar from the reader’s knowledge of comparative political economy. — connects to: Soviet economies grew substantially despite censorship of performance comparisons. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 115; Worker control of production proved viable in socialist experiments. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 789
- QUESTION: Worth chasing the claim that Soviet trained scientists exceeded Western Europe and Japan combined by 1985 — a striking, checkable statistic.