FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Civilization, Prophecy

THE THIRD WAVE

divorce of production from consumption. They, too, needed a market (albeit not necessarily a profit-oriented market) to reconnect producer and consumer. They, too, needed raw materials from abroad to feed their industrial machines. And for these reasons they, too, needed an integrated world economic system through which to obtain their necessities and sell their products abroad.

Indeed Lenin, at the very same time he attacked imperialism, spoke of socialism’s aim “not only to bring the nations closer together but to integrate them.” As the Soviet analyst M. Senin has written in Socialist Integration, Lenin by 1920 “regarded the drawing together of nationsas an objective process which . . . will finally and ultimately lead to the creation of a single world economy, regulated by … a common plan.” This, if anything, was lie ultimate industrial vision.

Externally, socialist industrial nations were driven by the same resource needs as capitalist nations. They, too, needed cotton, coffee, nickel, sugar, wheat, and other goods to feed their fast-multiplying factories and their urban populations. The Soviet Union had (and still has) enormous reserves of natural resources. It has manganese, lead, zinc, coal, phosphates, and gold. But so had the United States, and that stopped neither nation from seeking to buy from others at the cheapest possible price.
From its inception the Soviet Union became part of the world money system. Once any nation entered this system and accepted the “normal” ways of doing business, it immediately locked itself into conventional definitions of efficiency and productivity—definitions that were themselves traceable back to early capitalism. It was compelled to accept, almost unconsciously, conventional economic concepts, categories, definitions, accounting methods, and units of measurement.

Socialist managers and economists, exactly like their capitalist counterparts, thus calculated the cost of producing their own raw materials as against the cost of purchasing them. They faced a straight “make or buy” decision of the kind capitalist corporations confront every day. And it soon became apparent that buying certain raw materials on the world market would be cheaper than trying to produce them at home.

Once this decision was made, sharp Soviet purchasing agents fanned out into the world market and bought at prices previously set at artificially low levels by imperialist traders. Soviet trucks rolled on rubber bought at prices that were