The late and supposedly great Tony Benn, from 1990, doing that clever philosopher king thing of his. I was thinking the other day about how I recall him in his diaries slagging off Lech Walesa, and thought I'd follow up. Once I got started, I couldn't believe what I was reading.
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/n ... /8105.html
It's absolute rubbish.
Lech Walesa came to London recently and gave a lecture at the Institute of Directors – what I think you would call the National Association of Manufacturers — and his face appeared on the cover of their magazine. Underneath that face it said, ‘Our reforms are your profits.” He was saying, cheap Polish labour for Western capital to exploit.
I remember this from the diaries. Politician in "would like investment" shock. Where was Poland supposed to get it from? Call it "capital" because it makes you sound edgy and clever, if you like.
I think there is no doubt whatever that the development of that type of economy in Eastern Europe will involve its re-colonization by Western capital.
Poland is famously now a poor banana republic. He really couldn't have picked a worse example.
There is a distinguished right-wing professor in Britain with whom I discussed this matter on television the other day. He said that what they need in Eastern Europe is General Pinochet. And I can see circumstances where in order to enforce capitalism in Eastern Europe, you will need the toughness of a military machine to see that it is taken on board.
Silly argument put together on the back of an anecdote about a rightwing crank. Some unpleasant politicians got elected in Poland, but even Law and Justice didn't shoot people because they wanted to move to Dusseldorf.
Every child who was born in East Germany, for example, had proper crèche facilities and proper health facilities. These are going to have to be sacrificed if you’re going to move to a market economy.
No market economy has ever had creches or hospitals. "Proper" though. Yeah, I bet the standard of the health care was tip top across the board, all the latest equipment and drugs.
Best bit coming up.
The effect of all of this is going to be quite considerable on Western economies. We have a huge balance of payments deficit. I know the United States is the biggest debtor country in the world and that the debt is covered in part by inward investment and soon. We have a 20 billion pound deficit, which is $35 billion, the biggest we’ve ever had, and it’s covered now by Japanese and German inward investment But, of course, the Japanese and Germans are not going to put money into Britain when you can get cheap labour in Romania, cheap labour in Hungary, cheap labour in Poland. So don’t underestimate the economic effect of this on the stability of the West.
For someone who bangs on about "capital", he ought to understand something about it. There's not a fixed amount of capital in Japan and Germany or anywhere else. And what matters for capital is the return. Labour can be expensive, but the product very profitable. Investors don't think, fuck that, I'm investing in Romanian agriculture because cheap wages.
Note the absurd view that a capitalist Eastern Europe was a threat to the West too.
Very next paragraph.
Now I think there is another angle of this that needs to be mentioned and I know that some Third World countries are worried about it: Could not this tremendous concentration on building bridges between East and West Europe be interpreted by some as an attempt to correct the damage done to Europe in two world wars when Europeans fought each other, thereby re-establishing European ascendancy in the world?
Hang on, Europe's not going to fall apart now? It's going to be stronger than ever? Third World Countries were worried about what?
I know some people, like our first Black member of parliament (we’ve got four now), feel this way. He sees in this a Eurocentrism that is actually an attempt to recreate European dominance in respect to China, Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Three black members of Parliament were elected together- who is the first? Boateng, Abbot or Grant? Who said this? And more to the point, what did they say? That the Berlin Wall should have stayed up because geopolitical balance?! That's what a lot of this lot thought, but they were usually not so crass as to say it.
In fairness though, he got Europe's dominance of China completely right, didn't he? Ye gods. And Latin America? He's not normally one to let America off the hook. but in this occasion he sees (who? Spain) reasserting themselves belatedly in the region. But surely all this European capital is already tied up in Romania anyway?
I have long believed that the American Empire is in decline
Another great historical call. America basically became like Argentina, didn't it?
Now then the peroration about socialism. You'd think it might be "this repressive shit they had in Eastern Europe wasn't socialism, and nobody should pretend it is". But bizarrely, it isn't what he says.
I must say that when I look back on history, it seems to me that every economic and political and religious system has led to repression it is not confined to the Stalin period … Feudalism was repressive; capitalism has been enormously repressive. We had no political democracy in the 19th century in Britain, during our industrial revolution. In 1832, which is less than a hundred years before I was born, only two percent of the population had the vote: they were all men, and they were all rich, and, of course, they were all white.
Well done Honecker and all the rest of them! When you think about it, they weren't worse than feudalism and Britain in 1832!
So this idea that there is something uniquely repressive in socialism is quite wrong. Imperialism is quite repressive. And of course, to be fair, religion has been very repressive throughout the world, from the Inquisition through to the fundamentalist regimes in the Islamic republics.
And well done to the same people for being no worse than Cecil Rhodes and the Taliban!
So let’s dismiss from our minds the thought that the ideas of socialism are of themselves different in character and repressive in nature. It simply isn’t true.
It's not when you're talking about Attlee, Swedish social democrats etc. But you haven't mention them at all. You've mentioned East Germany, only to say it was great for kids' health. Your defence of repression is "yeah but there are some other bad systems" (which nobody is defending the way you're defending this bad system).
What an odd and fairly alarming piece.
- By Bones McCoy