John Lloyd

Eastern Reformers and Neo-Marxist

Reviewers

Peter Gowan has written an ambitious article.1 In it, he aims to show

that the Group of Seven major industrial states (g7) and the interna-
tional financial institutions (ifis) have, with a good deal of success,
sought to impose at least an economic imperialism over the post-com-
munist states in Central and Eastern Europe and in the former republics
of the Soviet Union. They have done this, he claims, by promoting Shock
Therapy (st) as the strategy of economic transformation which these
states must adopt as a precondition for qualifying for imf, World Bank
and other loans. This action has impoverished these states by ruining
their industrial structure—a necessary step if, as is the g7–ifi intent,
they are to be rendered into passive markets for Western products. Shock
Therapy, he writes, was developed by the Harvard economist Jeffrey
Sachs who has functioned as its main ideologist and promoter—assisted
in the last of these by writers, including the anonymous correspondents
of the Economist, Anne Applebaum and Michael Ignatieff in Foreign
Affairs and, in the Financial Times and the London Review of Books, by
me—the reason for my reply.

His proposition is extraordinary in two main ways. If true, it is an enor-

mous scandal: for the wealthy states, which have boasted of their com-
mitment to promoting democracy and the free market, have in fact been
acting in the most cynical and mendacious fashion, pursuing their exclu-
sive interests at the expense, not just of the economies of the states they
profess to assist, but of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of
human lives who, on Gowan’s account, have prematurely perished from
the side-effects of Shock Therapy. In other words, the imperialism which
he imputes to the g7 is of the classic kind—rapacious murder cloaked in
the guise of enlightenment and improvement.

Second, the article marks the emergence of full agreement, by a Marxist

economist in the world’s major Anglophone Marxist journal, with the
basic tenets of the case made out in the past four years by the Communist
Party of the Russian Federation (cprf), Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic
Party of Russia, the recently formed Congress of Russian Communities
(Lebed) and many other Marxist–Leninist and nationalist groupings in
1 Peter Gowan, ‘Neo-Liberal Theory and Practice for Eastern Europe’, nlr 213.
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Russia, in the former Soviet Union, and a few rather smaller and less
influential Marxist and far-rightist groups in Central and Eastern Europe.
It thus points to an embrace by at least a strain of Western Marxism of the
Eastern Marxist-nationalist analysis of the reform process of the last half-
dozen years, and a rejection of the strategy of the refashioned and renamed
communist parties of, for example, Poland, Hungary and Lithuania,
whose periods in power—and indeed in opposition—have been and are
marked by an explicit acceptance of the main planks of what is called
Shock Therapy, even where they claim to be softening its social impact.
Given Marxism’s marginalization to the academy—and even, to an
extent, within the academy—this is presently of minor importance. But
it may be more so in the future, if there is any kind of Marxist revival.

Yet there are major—and welcome—differences. Gowan’s account is of

course devoid of the anti-Semitism and other racism which habitually
accompanies the more robust presentations of the Western imperialist
thesis. It is rather more coherent and knowledgeable. Some of its con-
tentions are true. However, the greater sophistication of argument is also
less direct and straightforward than the Eastern Marxist–nationalist
case: where the cprf, Zhirinovsky and others openly and loudly accuse
the West of imperialism, Gowan slides the point in below a cloak in the
last paragraph. There can be no doubt about what is meant, but the
meaning has to be reconstituted, like soup from a bouillon cube.

Limited Choices for Post-Communist Governments

Further, its overall perspective is one of assuming that those who formed
the governments of the post-communist states had wide, even limitless,
scope to choose between a range of possibilities, from neo-liberalism to
the ‘communism without the party’ which the leaders of Belarus, and
some of the Central Asian states, now essay. Almost wholly lacking is
any sense of the crises which faced the post-communist governing
elites—especially those in the former Soviet states, confronted with the
collapse of an empire, a trading system, an industrial and economic
structure and a ruling party. This is not to deny that political choices
were made and that these were both conscious and decisive. Gowan,
however, implicitly denies the overwhelming importance of the pres-
sures of particular crises on the decisions that were made. For example,
the fact that many post-communist governments sooner or later raised
prices, usually to or near to market-clearing levels, pointed to the com-
mon crisis of subsidization—a crisis which had long existed under, and
sapped the remaining strength from, the communist regimes, but which
they had been unable to radically reform because they rightly feared that
their hold on power was too fragile to withstand the demand for a gen-
eral belt-tightening. Those which did not so raise prices have subsidized
basics as a more or less explicit indication that their governing elite will
retain the powers and privileges of an authoritarian state, granting cheap
minimal upkeep as such a state’s traditional concession to the populace.
In Gowan there is no recognition of such a crisis, nor of the trade-offs its
resolution demands: in his account, choice is a matter of good and bad
alternatives, almost—at times—between good and evil. In fact, ‘Shock
Therapy’ was much more than a series of desperate efforts to stem the
total collapse of state finances than a cocktail of measures freely chosen
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from a menu.
Nowhere is this duality between good and evil more apparent than in
Gowan’s brief excursion into Russian politics—that is, his use of the
conflict between Boris Yeltsin and the Russian Supreme Soviet in 1993
as an example of the legitimate protest by a democratic institution
against the effects of Shock Therapy, and its ruthless backing by
unbridled presidential power. In this passage, he most clearly chimes
with the views of the cprf and the Russian nationalists. It is not false to
say that their opposition to economic reform did in part come from
below: many of the Supreme Soviet deputies’ constituents—and it was a
partly democratic assembly, however much Yeltsin and others might
seek to portray it as wholly unrepresentative—were suffering from the
huge hike in prices which the January 1992 and subsequent price liber-
alizations had ushered in. But that was far from the limit of their opposi-
tion, or even the most important part of it. Absent from Gowan’s
narrative are the following facts:
In April 1993, fifteen months after radical reform began, both
Yeltsin and economic reform were backed in a popular referen-
dum.
The alliance of Supreme Soviet speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov and
Vice President General Alexander Rutskoi had continually reneged
on agreements made with Yeltsin.
The constitution which governed the Russian Federation, a
patched-up version of the Soviet-era Russian constitution, in effect
prescribed a struggle for power between the different levels of
authority in the trackless political desert which was post-commu-
nist Russia—since it did not endow any one level with a coherent
set of rights and duties.
The Supreme Soviet had not simply been asking Yeltsin to surren-
der—which Gowan denies they did—its leadership had been
actively pursuing his impeachment, and this months after the main
architect of Shock Therapy, Yegor Gaidar, had been dismissed by
Yeltsin and replaced by Victor Chernomyrdin.
The Supreme Soviet leadership had openly sought to build up an
independent armed force which, as the confrontation between it
and the President deepened, came under the leadership of self-
declared fascists.

The sins of the account are not only those of omission. Gowan says of
Yeltsin that he ‘responded to a march on a radio station with a military
assault on the Parliament building’. The ‘march on the radio station’ was
an armed attack, explicitly ordered by General Rutskoi, on the Central
Television station, following an assault on one of the buildings of the
Moscow mayoralty opposite the Supreme Soviet. I was a witness to all of
these events. There is a reasonable dispute as to how far the Supreme
Soviet deputies who remained in the building after it had been dissolved
by Yeltsin—unconstitutionally, as Gowan emphasizes—were deliber-
ately tempted by the pro-Presidential forces into armed insurrection. I
do not believe there is evidence to say that this was so: both Jonathan
Steele in Eternal Russia and Bruce Clarke in his recent An Empire’s New
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Clothes believe there is. But there is no dispute that the central feature of
the day, before units of the Russian army mounted an attack on the
White House, was not a ‘march on a radio station’.

Finally on Russian politics: Gowan slips naturally into the Gorba-

chev-good, Yeltsin-bad interpretation of the past decade, which
bedevils an understanding of its events. That Gorbachev was a libera-
tor—beyond his intent, though apparently in tune with his dominant
instincts—is clear: that he, or those acting in his name, ruined the
Warsaw Pact, Comecon, the Soviet Union and the Communist Party
with only the last-minute assistance of Yeltsin is, or should be, be
clear also; indeed, that was the major content of his liberation. There
were left to his successors none of the levers of gradualist decompres-
sion of communism which Gowan, elsewhere in his article, calls for.
They were in a quite different and much worse position than that of
the Chinese communist leadership—who, of course, are commended
by Gowan for their canny gradualism without the indivisible totali-
tarian side-effects being recognized, or even mentioned. That Yeltsin
has struggled with this legacy in a manner which ranges from enlight-
ened to murderous is clear: that the legacy was and remains one of
unprecedented complexity for a government with improvised instru-
ments of power is, or should also be, clear.

Cargo Cult or Rational Choice?

The treatment of the new governing elites is similarly lopsided.

Essentially, from the reference in the ‘Themes’ section to Shock Therapy
as a ‘cargo cult’—the nlr’s formulation, to be sure, not Gowan’s—the
image conjured is of credulous and ignorant natives worshipping before
a mysterious theory bestowed upon them by deified beings from a differ-
ent land, to Gowan’s belief that the new governments were induced to
accept Shock Therapy or be damned to a loan-less g7 purgatory, the view
proposed is of pawns manipulated from Washington, London—and
Harvard. Only in one curious phrase, ‘it could also be said that official
opinion, at least in the Visegrad states continued . . . to be resolutely com-
mitted to the Shock Therapy course, and that this was not only due to
Western structural power and pressure’, is there an apparent admission
that the new elites have a will of their own.

This treatment of the new governments as local Quislings for an alien

and hostile force is bound up with the treatment of Sachs. He is made
into an all-powerful figure, at once a proselytizer for Western interests,
a creator of the ideology which serves these interests and a manipulator
of the post-communist elites into a position of subservience to them.
There is no question that Sachs has carved for himself a position no
other economist has been able, or has cared, to do—a position so pub-
licly visible, so openly proselytizing, so, at times, frankly confronta-
tional, that he has long been seen by others less visible in his profession,
by his allies and most of all by his many enemies as a man whose wings
are bound to melt. The key advisor to the government of Bolivia during
its successful stabilization, he consulted in the late eighties with others
of the Latin American governments who were then bringing in their
own versions of Shock Therapy. His most public démarche was as advisor
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to the post-communist Polish Solidarity government where, working
with deputy prime minister Leszek Balczerowicz, he helped organize
imf support for the January 1990 stabilization programme which,
according to Gowan, has had disastrous results. Invited to consult with
the last Gorbachev government and one of the main American econo-
mists to work on the Yavlinsky–Allison ‘Grand Bargain’ concept which
both the g7 and Gorbachev rejected in August 1991, he was a frequent
and high-profile presence in Moscow in 1992 and 1993, advising, at
different times, acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, privatization
minister Anatoly Chubais and deputy prime minister for finance Boris
Fyodorov. He resigned from his advisory post in January 1994, follow-
ing parliamentary elections the previous month which saw large suc-
cesses for the Zhirinovsky ldpr, and an apparent turn to the Left in
economic policy.

Far more than any other Western advisor or institution, Sachs during the
years 1992–93 called for massive g7 assistance, opposed any attempts,
including these of the imf, to hold the rouble zone (the former Soviet
states) together, launched public and vitriolic attacks on those officials
he thought were opposing reform—most particularly Victor Gerash-
chenko, chairman of the Russian Central Bank from mid 1992 to
October 1994—and berated the communist, nationalist and other par-
ties in the Supreme Soviet for their efforts to oppose the reform measures,
especially privatization. He was a central figure in any narrative of these
years. But he is not what Gowan seeks to make him.

He did not invent Shock Therapy, though he contributed to it. Besides

his work in Bolivia and elsewhere in Latin America—where the main
initiators of reform were the economists and politicians of these coun-
tries—the most important instance in the development of the collage of
techniques which goes under that name was the puncturing of Israeli
inflation in the mid eighties. In this, the key figures were the then chair-
man of the Israeli Central Bank Michael Bruno, now chief economist at
the World Bank; and, as advisor, Stanley Fischer, then of mit and now
first-deputy managing director of the imf. Both, especially the latter, are
much more institutionally powerful than Sachs, and independently held
roughly similar views—though there were disagreements on instances
and details, and Bruno at first believed that gradualism in, for example,
trade liberalization was possible, changing his mind with more exposure
to the realities of the problem. The Thatcher government’s privatization
programme of the early eighties and beyond was also an influence—
though as it later transpired, it was of limited practical value to govern-
ments who wished to privatize most of their economy, compared with
the 3–5 per cent that Thatcher achieved.

Indigenous Shock Therapy

Thus Shock Therapy, never a precise description, came to be the name

applied to a range of measures which would typically include price and
trade liberalization, stabilization, privatization and convertibility: the
sequence of these would be determined by events, but they would nor-
mally be implemented as simultaneously as possible because of the need
for a swift transition. The need for swiftness was determined, in the case
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of the post-communist states, by the window of opportunity given by
the election or appointment of reforming governments, able to use popu-
lar support to call for temporary sacrifices of anyway illusory relative
well-being in pursuit of a more surely grounded base for future prosper-
ity. Above all, it has to be emphasized against Gowan’s silence, the
1980s saw the development in many of the communist states of semi-
clandestine groups of scholars, mainly economists, who read and dis-
cussed Western liberal economics. Most were also attracted to
democratic, non-socialist politics. Long before Sachs came on the scene,
or before the ifis had set up any kind of stall in the region, these young
scholars read Hayek, Friedman, Kornai, Fischer and Dornbusch,
Bruno...as well as Sachs; networked with each other; attended what
seminars they could organize; and in some cases—as that of Gaidar dur-
ing the Gorbachev glasnost period—sought to have an influence on pol-
icy-making through journalism. They came to the conclusion that the
gradualist measures which were endlessly proposed and endlessly sup-
pressed during the 1986–91 period were bound to fail, and thus devel-
oped programmes—Yavlinsky’s ‘Grand Bargain’, a development of his
and Shatalin’s ‘500 Days’ strategy, was the best known—which sought
to jolt the command administrative economy into capitalism in record
quick time.

Gowan appears to believe, though he offers no evidence, that Sachs was

responsible for the collapse of Comecon, and that this was orchestrated
by the g7. As far as I am aware Comecon was essentially killed at a meet-
ing of its member states in Sofia in January 1990, when the Russian side,
somewhat to the surprise of the Central European members, many by
that time with non-communist governments, conceded that the organi-
zation move to hard-currency operations—a move which made its col-
lapse inevitable, since, once the political raison d’être was removed and it
took the form of a relatively transparent trading organization, its disad-
vantages both to the Russians, trading valuable oil and gas for sub-stan-
dard equipment, and to the Central Europeans, locked into a series of
low-technology trading relationships, became starkly obvious. The
Central European governments were then moving strongly away from
the Soviet Union and from the trading system they saw as its imposition
and the largest cause of their relative technological backwardness: they
were in no mood to be told by anyone that they should remain within the
Soviet sphere of influence for a moment longer than they had to, the
more so since popular revolts against Soviet domination had brought
new elites to power. This view, with regard to Russia rather than the
Soviet Union, persists and remains popular in the Central European
states—and in the Baltic, as well as the Western parts of Ukraine and
Moldova. The position in the Caucasian and Central Asian states, espe-
cially Kazakhstan, is more complex: it is the main cause for the clamour-
ing of the Central Europeans and the Balts to become part of Nato—
Gowan sees any future extension of Nato eastwards as simply ‘necessary
to consolidate the absorption of East-Central Europe and assure us lead-
ership’. Here again, the views of these countries’ governments, in this
case, above all, strongly backed by popular opinion, play no role, and
they will be balked of membership only if the many sceptics in Western
Europe succeed in slowing down the process to a halt—a desirable out-
come, but one which presently seems less rather than more likely.
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It may indeed be true, as Gowan says, that Sachs was ‘naive’ in assuming
that the g7 states would deliver on their stated intention of pumping
money into the post-communist world in order to assist it on the road to
rapid transition. Certainly, many officials in the imf and the World
Bank, including those sympathetic to Sachs’s general line, believe that
had the $6 billion stabilization fund that Sachs recommended at the
beginning of the Gaidar government been made available, it would have
been spent without trace of improvement, since the systems and the con-
sensus necessary to attempt a stabilization of the economy were not in
place. The imf, the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruc-
tion and Development (ebrd) have all complained that it is much harder
to find viable projects to which to lend money in the former Soviet
Union than to get the clearance from their head offices to lend—in large
part because of the initially complete absence of a banking and finance
network after the collapse of the communist regimes, another burden on
the new governments of which Gowan makes no mention. However, if
the charge of naiveté is true, it puts Gowan in a contradiction: he cannot
at once represent the g7 governments as determined to enforce Shock
Therapy on the post-communist states to further their imperialist
designs, and at the same time deny the means to make sure of these
designs’ success. Nor can Sachs be represented as a demonic force when
he is simultaneously described as a man whose pleas are lost in the
swamp of Washington’s indifference.

At times, he passes beyond being caught in contradictions to wilful mis-

understandings. Criticizing an ‘extraordinary piece’ by Michael Ignatieff
in Foreign Affairs 2 he accuses Ignatieff of having ‘contempt for the “for-
mal democracy” of electoral results’ and advancing ‘crude proposals for
bureaucratic interference in the socio-political life’ of the post-commu-
nist states. In fact, any rational reading of the Ignatieff piece, a review of
the late Ernest Gellner’s Conditions of Liberty, would show a largely
descriptive account of the Gellner book which contained a few general
suggestions for Western states to use aid money to help strengthen the
institutions of civil society, such as the press, universities and trade
unions. Ignatieff can no doubt fight his own corner if he feels so moved,
but I cannot find in his piece the hint of a suggestion that the ‘democracy
of electoral results’ should be ignored nor that a bureaucratic assault be
made on the societies of Central Europe to force them to be civil. Indeed,
the point, which seems relatively uncontroversial, is little more than that
the institutional forms of electoral choice are hardly the alpha and omega
of a society which claims to be democratic.

The Success of Shock Therapy

However, the largest puzzle about the Gowan piece is the fact that its
central contention appears to be, not just weak, but almost wholly
wrong. At the core of his intent is a desire to show that Shock Therapy
has wreaked most damage where it has been most slavishly followed. In
fact, those countries which have instituted some or other brand of it have

2 Michael Ignatieff, ‘On Civil Society’, Foreign Affairs, March–April 1995.

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done, and are doing, best. This has been said, of course, by Sachs, by the
Economist, by the ft and by others who have commended the strategy, as
one would expect. Gowan says that this is mendacious propaganda. But
it is impossible to understand on what basis he makes this claim.

First, he says that gradualism produces better results than Shock Ther-
apy, contrasting the cases of Hungary and Romania: ‘Romania’, he says,
‘has revived far more strongly than wide-open Hungary or the Czech
Republic’. This is simply not so. On the latest figures, the ebrd’s—
which are an amalgam from the statistical authorities of the countries in
question, from the imf, the World Bank, the oecd and the unece—
Romania’s gnp over the years since 1990 shrank by 6, 13 and 10 per cent
to 1992, revived by 1 per cent in 1993, 3 per cent in 1994 and 4 per cent
in 1995. Hungary’s shrank by 4, 12, 3 and 1 per cent up to 1993, then
grew by 2 and 3 per cent in 1994 and 1995. In 1995, Romania’s gnp
stood at 81 per cent of what it was in 1989, while Hungary’s stood at 86
per cent.3 This does not show that Romania revived ‘far more strongly’
than Hungary.

In fact, the premise of the comparison is also debatable. Hungary has been
generally seen as—until the past year, under a government composed
mainly of former communists—balking many of the necessary stages of
Shock Therapy. Its privatization process only really went into gear last
year, trade restrictions were retained, though reduced, wage controls con-
tinued to 1993. Yet even leaving this aside, and treating it, as Gowan
does, as a prime example of Shock Therapy in the raw, it is clear that there
is no outcome of the kind he advertises. Hungary declined by signifi-
cantly less than Romania, and is growing insignificantly more slowly.

Second, he says that it will take the Central European countries twenty
years to return to the living standards of the last years of communism. We
should first remember that the last years of communism in Hungary and
Poland saw the regimes borrowing desperately to keep up consumption
levels, while the hard-line regimes of Czechoslovakia, East Germany,
Albania and Romania simply snapped—in differing ways—like the rigid
structures they were, once they were challenged to deliver higher stan-
dards. We should also note that, in all post-communist economies, the
official figures are distorted in two ways which have a similar result: the
gnp and consumption data were distorted upwards in the communist
period to show compliance with the plan and for propaganda reasons.
After communism, they tend to be distorted downwards, since much pri-
vate activity does not appear in statistics for tax-evasion reasons—this is
especially true in Russia and other post-Soviet states, and partially
explains why, when the gnp has more than halved, consumption, though
declining, has not followed it so sharply downwards. But these points
aside, the ebrd data show that Poland’s gnp in 1995 stands at 97 per cent
of 1989 levels, the Czech Republic’s at 85 per cent and Hungary’s, as
above, at 86 per cent. Even were the high (5 per cent plus) rates of growth
predicted for them not to materialize, they would recover 1989 levels by
2000, or a year or two after—five or six years from now, not twenty.

3 Transition Report 1995, ebrd, London.

126
These states, says Gowan, have, as further evidence of their prostration,
been reduced to sucking in imports because of the Western-sponsored
destruction of their own industries. Leave aside the fact that to continue
to deprive citizens of what they now suppose to be free countries of at
least some part of the range of goods available in a West to which many
of them now travel would doom any government to defeat; or that, if the
structure of imports is biased to capital goods—Gowan does not break
down the figures—an import surplus is a good thing. Even then, reality
is far from the ‘import bonanza’ which Gowan says Western manufactur-
ers are enjoying. On the latest figures (1994), the Czech republic has
strongly increased the rate of growth of exports over imports, Poland’s
rate of export growth is double that of import growth in the same year,
and only Hungary, whose exports, and imports, grew strongly in the
first years of the nineties, is showing a loss of growth, especially in
exports.

The Misery of Fast and Slow Reform

Finally, Gowan rightly highlights the misery visited upon the popula-
tions of the post-communist countries—with declining incomes and
standards of health, and rising unemployment and mortality rates. These
are certainly strongly present in the former Soviet Union, where male
mortality, having been near the mid-sixties a decade ago, is now at the
low figure of fifty-nine—the female rate is much higher, and indeed is
comparable with that of developed countries. This is the most poignant
and affecting part of the article for here, it seems, is the core of the mat-
ter: the West’s desire to slash and burn the post-communist economies is
so fanatically pursued that it results in the premature deaths of hundreds
of thousands of people who would otherwise have lived longer, more
healthily and more fully.

But, as far as one can tell, this is false. The countries which have not
undergone radical change, or which, like Russia, have begun it but not
followed through, prolonging an agony while delaying its relief, show
the worst results, in the social as in other spheres: those which have taken
the shock are now improving, and doing so strongly. Again, the latest
evidence ‘indicates that those countries that have moved most firmly in
transition and stabilization have suffered the lowest costs in the process
and are starting to see the rewards. These rewards have not come
instantly but they can and do begin to appear within two to four years of
decisive transition measures being implemented. While living standards
will take some time to recover, in historical terms four years must be
regarded as a remarkably short period for the returns on such a radical
economic and social change to begin to emerge. The arguments for fur-
ther advance of reform for countries in early stages of transition are now
observable and powerful’.4

And, directly to the social point, another passage from the same source:
‘all of the late and slower-reforming countries... have experienced a dra-
matic deterioration in social indicators since 1989. Far from improving

4 Ibid, p. 7.
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these dimensions of the standard of living, it is clear that low or post-
poned market-oriented reform has been associated with a sharp deterio-
ration in indicators of social development. This superior performance of
the faster-reforming countries is of great significance. It translates into
large improvements for the population in social development in those
countries relative to [the slower movers].’5

For much of his argument, though not all of it, Gowan appears to accept
that the goal is and should be some form of capitalism: his argument
appears to be with the method chosen. There is thus no fundamental dif-
ference of view between him and those he criticizes as to eventual out-
comes: his concern is to reduce the costs, both to the industries and to the
population.

He appears to suggest, by the fleeting use of the Chinese parallel and by

the tone, rather than the facts, of his argument that a transition could
have been painless had it been better organized, more gradual and less
ideologically neo-liberal. But the cases of the Ukraine in the recent past
and of Belarus in the present directly contradict this: in both states,
efforts were or are being made to open up the economy gradually while
preserving living standards: after a short period in which it seemed the
trick would work, the evidence has mounted that it is making matters
worse. Second, as above, these states—unlike China—faced across-the-
board collapse, political, economic and social: in the case of the former
Soviet states, they did so after more than seventy years of the most totali-
tarian politico-economic system the world has seen, in which agriculture
had been comprehensively degraded—again unlike China—and where
most employment was in state-owned industry—unlike China. One of
the many arguments for Shock Therapy is that it got the pain over
quickly rather than spun it out: but that there would be pain, there is no
argument.

Other issues raised by Gowan—most of all, his assertions that economic

nationalism, rather than increasingly internationalized global produc-
tion and marketing, is the trend of the future—are worth refutation but
are incidental to his main point. That point, that a terrible infamy has
been visited upon hundreds of millions of fellow Europeans by cynical
cargo-cultists and their camp-followers from the world’s richest states,
cannot stand.

5 Ibid., p. 24.
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