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Introduction: Communism and Capitalism: How can they meet?
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16607 |
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SPECIAL SECTION
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11 / 1989 |
1,091 Words |
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Incredible as it may seem today, with the world dominated bt Western-style economics, a great debate was conducted in the immediate postwar period as to which economic system was best for war-ravaged Europe and Asia. Economists from the East insisted that only a centrally directed economy could make the necessary allocations of resources that would produce an egalitarian prosperity. Economists from the West argued that the market system, with its continuous process of discovery and adaptation, was best suited to improve the people's well-being.
A definitive answer was delayed for years as the Soviet Union, People's Republic of China, and other communist nations reported the triumphs of various five-year plans, while many Western nations, with the obvious exception of the United States, struggled to regain their economic footing. Despite clear signs like the catastrophe of China's Great Leap Forward and Eastern Europe's ever more urgent requests for Western loans, communism's abject failure as an economic system was not acknowledged by East and West until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power.
Ever the realist, Gorbachev confessed to the world that he had seen the socialist past and it had not worked and that the Soviet Union's economic future had to be different. Several years before, China had already begun a process of economic liberation, while Eastern European nations like Poland and Hungary declared that they wanted to replace central economic planning with market economies.
Today, another great debate engages both public officials and private citizens, both East and West: Is it possible for communist countries, run by bureaucrats with no experience in the market, dependent upon an antiquated infrastructure, and burdened by debt and weak currencies, to carry out successfully and within a reasonable length of time the necessary economic reforms? In this Special Section, THE WORLD & I offers the best thinking of leading experts about a critical question whose answer may well decide the economic and political future of the world.
Jan S. Prybyla of Pennsylvania State University examines the failure of socialist economics (citing reasons such as technological backwardness, demoralized consumers and workers, internal subsidies, and external debts), dismisses the ineffective hybrid solutions of Yugoslavia and East Germany, and concludes that "socialism cannot be cured, it has to be rejected." In its place must go "the market system--not bits and pieces of it--all of it." While conceding that this will require draconian reform,
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