Mathew Blatchford writes (August 17) that my letter of last week was politically inspired. It was not intended to be, but if dissatisfaction with rhetoric and flabby thinking is ”politically inspired” then so be it.
He seems unable to accept that someone can be committed to ”socialist” values (social and economic equality, individual autonomy, comprehensive human rights) and also believe that Leninist planned economies failed dismally to achieve these.
At the beginning of the 21st century there is no intellectually respectable case for socialism as interpreted in the middle decades of the 20th century. There is a respectable, indeed powerful, moral case for pursuing socialist values. Unless we keep such distinctions clear we shall make no progress whatever.
In our local situation, the problem is that the detailed economic programmes of groups calling themselves ”socialist” have never been published. If Blatchford expounded them somewhere we should all be in his debt. S Archer, Rondebosch
PS. It must be novel for the M&G to see itself styled ”an avowedly anti-communist newspaper”.
Arguing that Stalinism ”restored the USSR to something approaching the power of Czarist Russia”, Mathew Blatchford concludes that ”socialism is not necessarily an inferior economic system to capitalism”. At what cost were these gains? And by what standard does he judge an economic system?
In Death by Government, RJ Rummel records that 61?911?000 people were killed by the government of the USSR (1917-1987), that 35?236?000 were killed by the government of communist China (1949-1987) and that 20?946?000 were killed by the government of Nazi Germany.
All of these systems are founded on a principle: the superiority of the state over the individual. One system opposes this principle: capitalism. Barry Kayton, Cape Town