\doc\web\99\14\socfail.txt Date forwarded: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 23:47:48 -0400 (EDT) Send reply to: From: "Albert Himoe" Subject: [Upstream] Julius Nyerere obit-The failure of third world Socialism There is a long obituary of former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere in today's New York Times. The headline reads, "Julius Nyerere of Tanzania Dies; Preached African Socialism to the World", and the obituary is notable for describing the failure of third-world socialism in some detail. http://search.nytimes.com/search/daily/bin/fastweb?getdoc+site+iib-site+ 25+0+wAAA+Tanzania In Dar es Salaam in the late 70's, tales of such willful and miscalculated planning were widely exchanged by the same diplomats who complimented Nyerere for his concern and decency: After a state agency was organized to market fish, fish disappeared from the market because fisherman no longer found it worth their while to go out. Norwegian-backed training project to establish coastal shipping was not permitted to carry cargo so it would not compete with the state trucking company. regulation banning doctors from treating patients privately in their homes after their work in government clinics and hospitals led to the emigration of many doctors. An Italian agronomist developing export crops promoted strawberries, for which there was a strong market in Europe, but a party official declared that unlike beets and potatoes, strawberries were not a socialist fruit. Over the years Nyerere would sometimes acknowledge that Government mismanagement, particularly its abolishment of functioning producer cooperatives, had contributed to sharp declines in staple crops. But he placed much more blame on an international economy in which agricultural prices had dropped sharply while the cost of oil, machinery and other imports had risen. He noted that for Tanzania to purchase a seven-ton truck in 1981, it had to produce four times as much cotton, or three times as much coffee, or 10 times as much tobacco as it had five years earlier. But whatever the accuracy of those calculations, it was also true that farm production was tumbling, with sisal harvesting, for example, dropping to 33,000 tons in 1985 from 250,000 in 1964. Desperately needing credit, Nyerere turned to the International Monetary Fund and in 1980 began a five-year struggle with the fund, resisting its dictates that he divert funds from education and emphasize export crops while allowing domestic food prices to rise. In this skirmishing, Nyerere became the third world's most assertive exponent of the new economic order in which the economic imbalance between North and South would be overcome through international law and obligation rather than through markets or charity. But he was never able to reach an agreement with the I.M.F., and in 1984, when Tanzania could not meet interest payments to the United States, the Reagan Administration suspended all aid but emergency food allocations. ******************************************************** Speaking of the "new economic order", this reminded me of going to a talk by American Socialist Michael Harrington at the U of Illinois, which must have been not long before he died. Harrington talked about the how "moderate" he felt the third world "New Economic Order" demands were, and he bad it was that the US extended so little economic aid to Africa, less proportionally than the Scandinavian countries, for example. [I still don't understand why the Scandinavian countries did this.] Harrington's appearance was sponsored by a Socialist group [A married student couple seemed to be prominent in the organization--they both became lawyers, she was elected to the County Board as a Democrat and served several terms until swept out of office in a big Republican year nationally; he later became the leader of the local Democratic Party]. After the talk, the Socialists had a reception for him which I attended. I wanted to ask him about the "New Economic Order", but I couldn't get close as he was surrounded by admiring disciples, and was holding forth about his experiences in the Canadian prairies among people talking about the wonders of Socialism. It all seemed so unreal--much like Nyerere proclaiming the wonders of African Socialism to the world, and translating Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar into Swahili, while his country falls apart. Albert Himoe --- This is a message from the Upstream mailing list. Visit the Upstream Website at http://cycad.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/ Visit the Upstream Mailing List archives at http://cycad.com/upstream-list-archive To subscribe to this list send email to the address upstream-list-request@cycad.com with just the subject subscribe To unsubscribe from this list send email to the address upstream-list-request@cycad.com with just the subject unsubscribe