Galbraith: communism undermined by failure to adapt

John Kenneth Galbraith told an Orono audience Wednesday that communism had failed because, unlike capitalism, it didn’t adapt to a changing world.

The distinguished economist, professor emeritus at Harvard University, prolific author and political activist was at the University of Maine as the first speaker in the Sen. Margaret Chase Smith Lecture Series on Public Affairs.

Smith, who was in the audience at the Maine Center for the Arts, was praised by Galbraith and Dale Lick, president of the university.

“All women everywhere are in her debt,” Galbraith said of Smith’s precedent-setting political career.

Galbraith spoke about perspectives on a changing Europe. “We live in a changing world,” Galbraith said. He said that this wasn’t a particularly novel way to start a speech, but that such a statement was seldom more justified.

“Nothing like the recent change in Eastern Europe was predicted and nothing of its magnitude was imagined,” he said.

Galbraith said that communism had been founded during a period when the future of capitalism was in doubt. At that time, capitalist economies were characterized by great inequalities in income, exploitation of the economically vulnerable, old age without income, and recurring bouts of severe depression.

But, he said, capitalism survived because of its major merit of achieving great productivity, and because it became “modified, humanized and stabilized.”

The less-attractive effects of classical capitalism were modified by things like unemployment compensation, Social Security and child labor laws, and because government assumed a role in lessening bouts of recession and inflation, Galbraith said.

Many of these changes occurred because industrial society had created a group of people with “expressive talents that couldn’t be shut up,” Galbraith said. “They were all determined to be heard … and they mellowed the hardships of the primitive capitalist system.”

Communist societies, on the other hand, failed to change and failed to provide basic consumer goods and services and encountered continual problems in maintaining agricultural production, Galbraith said.

The professor said that communism suffered from “bureaucratic sclerosis,” which existed in the United States but not as severely as in the Eastern bloc.

In Communist countries, Galbraith said, bureaucracies created their own truths, which usually weren’t true. “It defined as truth things that served its structure,” he said.

Eventually, the system broke down when it didn’t provide its people with basic necessities. Galbraith said that this was particularly true in places such as East Germany, where West German television continually showed its eastern neighbors the riches of the West.

Now that Eastern European economies are experiencing freedom, Galbraith said, there is a danger that they will equate it with hardship unless the governments move quickly to release consumer goods to the market and provide access to the factories where they are produced. He said the state also should provide loans and make moves to establish an effective banking system.

And until there are plenty of goods, necessities shouldn’t be subject to big price movements in the market, Galbraith said.

Galbraith said that given the ideological restraint of strong opposition to new taxes, the United States wasn’t in much of a position to help.

“We have found ourselves on the sidelines,” he said. President Bush has offered “presidential speeches as a substitute for serious actions that would cost money,” Galbraith said.

Galbraith said that communism failed because it was stuck in ideological constraints. “That’s our lesson,” he said, warning that the United States should be wary of letting itself become too ideologically rigid.