From Free Life, Issue 21, November 1994
ISSN: 0260 5112

DEAD LIBERTIES

Gems Old and New From the Collectivist and Statist Mind

Selected by Chris R. Tame

They're Still At It

"Chris Bramall has written a very important book [In Praise of Maoist Economic Planning: Living Standards and Economic Development in Sichuan Since 1931, published by Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993.] He shows how well central planning works, how a strategy of development based on heavy industry is essential for poor countries (and not just for poor countries), and how successful the dictatorship of China's prole- tariat, led by the Chinese Communist Party....

'The evidence on Sichuan leads only to the conclusion that planning was remarkably successful in achieving the objectives laid down by the Chinese Communist Party.' These objectives including raising living standards (though not at the expense of everything else), creating a nuclear deterrent against aggressive powers, especially the USA, and building an industrial base able to survive a limited nuclear strike.

Socialist countries are not allowed to build socialism in a vacuum. As Bramall notes, 'much of the remaining 'achievement gap' reflects the strategic threat posed by the West which forced these countries to devote a large proportion of low per capita levels of Gross Domestic Product to defence....

China's rapid growth met the people's needs....

Life expectancy for the Chinese people is far better than in countries at comparable levels of income per head....

(Bramall dismisses) all the lies about bad harvests produced by collectivised agriculture....

The clear messages of the book are that socialism works; planning

works; heavy industry is indispensable to progress; collectivism works."

Anon., "How Chian Planned its Way out of Chaos", The Worker (Communist Party of Great Britain Marxist-Leninist), Vol. 26, No. 2, 10 January 1994, p. 3.

Higher Logic

Some brilliant logic from the pages of Militant, the Marxist Labour Party faction:

"Despite all the propaganda that the free market would develop all the world's societies, Africa stands as a tombstone testimony to its utter inability to develop the productive forces and with it culture and democracy.

If capitalism was a progressive force then today we would have the United States of Africa. Instead we see the continents's descent into potentially 1,000 states and tribalism."

Anon., "Worldwatch: Free Market or Free Africa?", Militant, 22 April, 1994, p. 12

Violence

"[Andrew] Marr [of The Independent] makes a grubby and familiar attempt to smear the SWP as somehow equivalent to the fascists. 'Its supporters', he writes, 'are not quite so rigorous about 'assaults' as one might suppose....

[W]e challenge The Independent to cite a single instance when we have ever attacked anyone, even verbally, never mind physically on the basis of their race (or nationality, gender or sexual orientation)".

John Molyneux, "What Do Socialists Say?: No Platform for Nazis", The Socialist Worker, 7 May, 1994, p. 9.

No Platform for Men

The wisdom of feminism continues its advance through the world of mainstream journalism:

" ...[M]any of the evils of the planet (General Cedras and the atrocities of Haitian politics, for example, or the slaughters in Rwanda) undeniably arise from a brutal, uncivilised, masculine side of the human character."

Lance Morrow, "Evil Is Not Impressed for Very Long", Time, 3 October, 1994, p. 42

BLAST FROM THE PAST

Not Thorough Enough!

"Thought control in capitalist democracies is by necessity more thorough than in tyrannies.... The big old lie that only capitalism is good for you is carried by a media - advertising and public relations - whose technology gives it transcendent powers of manipulation....

I can't think of a single British writer who has addressed the new brainwashing ..."

John Pilger, "Beauty is in the Eye of the Manipulators", The Guardian, 26th September, 1991.