Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Contributors
- PART I Theoretical Framework
- PART II The Industrialized Democracies
- PART III Internationalization and Socialism
- 7 Stalin's Revenge: Institutional Barriers to Internationalization in the Soviet Union
- 8 Internationalization and China's Economic Reforms
- PART IV International Economic Crisis and Developing Countries
- PART V Conclusion
- Notes
- References
- Index
7 - Stalin's Revenge: Institutional Barriers to Internationalization in the Soviet Union
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Contributors
- PART I Theoretical Framework
- PART II The Industrialized Democracies
- PART III Internationalization and Socialism
- 7 Stalin's Revenge: Institutional Barriers to Internationalization in the Soviet Union
- 8 Internationalization and China's Economic Reforms
- PART IV International Economic Crisis and Developing Countries
- PART V Conclusion
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
Our economy is supercentralized, overcentralized, and the outcome is a paradox. The whole world is striving to push borders outward. Thus, Europe is planning to open everything up in 1992 and create a single economic system. That is fundamentally correct. Why then are we here in the Soviet Union seeking to divide up into regional economies?
– Adviser to striking coal miners in the Kuzbass region of western Siberia, February 1990
(Mandel 1989–91: 7)Western Marxists have long argued that the central paradox of unions is that they arise to defend workers' interests as defined by the capitalist system. It has proven extraordinarily difficult to persuade workers to define their interests in terms other than those set by capitalism – that is, to adopt a revolutionary rather than a reformist strategy. The same paradox holds true for workers under socialism: their interests are defined by and within the structure of the old economic system.
– Peter Rutland (1990: 322)Among the major economies, the Soviet Union in the last decades of its existence was by any measure the least “internationalized.” Even taking into account the problematic nature of Soviet economic statistics, the general picture is striking. In 1988 – at the high point of its international economic activity – the USSR's foreign trade represented a mere 1.7 percent of total world trade, even though, as the world's second or third largest economy, it produced 13.6 percent of world Gross National Product.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Internationalization and Domestic Politics , pp. 159 - 185Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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