COLUMN LEFT / ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Russia, the New Latin America of Economies : Outside the core of the West, capitalism brings only an extreme rich/poor split.

This year I wrapped my Christmas presents in pages from an October, 1962, edition of the London Times that I found in a drawer. The world seemed to have many familiar problems on its mind. Harold Macmillan presented to the House of Commons his case for Britain entering the European Common Market. There was discussion of what sort of weapons should be shipped to the new Baathist regime in Iraq. The Times’ Washington correspondent discussed reports reaching the State Department of food riots in the Soviet Union, following 30% rises in the price of meat and milk.

But the pages making for the saddest reading were a special section of the Times celebrating the independence of Uganda. Article after article, replete with expert analysis, suggested that Uganda, in common with other former African colonies embarking on nationhood, faced a prosperous future.

We are now so accustomed to thinking of most of Africa, and particularly Uganda, as a landscape of economic and social despair that it takes something like that benign supplement to remind us how large the earlier hopes were. It also reminds how great the defeat has been for ideologists of capitalism, preaching merits of their faith to the poorer portions of the globe.

In 1960, Walter W. Rostow, adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, published “The Stages of Economic Growth,” subtitled “A Non-Communist Manifesto,” in which he charted the American way to economic prosperity. In Rostow’s uplifting vista, “undeveloped” nations passed virtually inexorably--so long as they shunned the communist contagion--from tradition-bound poverty to the joys of mass consumption and prosperity.

Thirty years later, the verdict is in. The U.S. vision of Third World industrialization and “development” has failed. Against a tiny number of “economic miracles” must be set an overall pattern of disaster. In 1960, average per capita GNP in Latin America stood at just under 17% of the per capita GNP of what the economist Giovanni Arrighi (who developed these figures) calls the “organic core” of the capitalist world--the United States and Canada, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand. By 1988, per capita GNP in Latin America had nearly halved, relative to the organic capitalist core, to 10.6%.

Across the world, the fall has been similar. In 1960, per capita GNP in sub-Saharan Africa was 3.6% of that of the advanced capitalist core; in 1988, 1.6%. The figures for south Asia are identical. At an increasing velocity, the rest of the world has fallen behind the standards of wealth set by the West.

From this perspective, consider the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and what was the Soviet Union.

The great mistake, promulgated most vehemently by the old communist leaders, was to think of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as economic rivals of the richest nations of the West. But one must compare the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the time of their revolutions to countries at an equivalent stage of development, so the parallel is not with the United States but with the likes of Brazil. And here, as Arrighi points out, the communist countries did about as well as other middle-income countries that did not break away from the global circuits of capital. They lost ground relative to the spectacular capitalist successes and they gained ground relative to the very poor.

But if the Soviet Union did no better than its Latin equivalent in the bid to catch up with the wealthy West, there was one very important difference. The mass of the population of the Soviet Union did far better in terms of nutrition, health and education than the mass of the population of Latin America. The wealth, such as it was, was more equitably distributed.

In the end, the economic weight of the West prevailed, even as the inflated pledges of the communist leaders infuriated a well-educated population. The old Soviet Union and its former Eastern European satellites now face “reconstruction,” but on Latin American rather than West European lines. The elites will get far more, the masses far less.

So the world somewhat complacently depicted in my ’62 edition of the Times has gone. Much of the world is poorer. Soviet communism has collapsed. Capitalist “triumph” has come, but only to a tiny elite of the world’s population, dependent for its prosperity on the escalating exploitation of the remainder. Such a victory can never be stable, nor will it long endure. The collapse of Soviet communism coincides in the minds of many with the beginning of increased economic instability and anxiety in the West, cruelly refuting the promises of that “Non-Communist Manifesto.”