Comecon Takes on New Role in Kremlin Plan

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Last month's brief meeting of the COMECON • economic alliance in Bucharest may well turn out to be a turning point in the role of this organisation.

Comecon was set up in the early years of the "cold war" as an organisation nominally to jointly plan the economies of Eastern Europe but in reality to ensure that the wishes of the Soviet bureaucracy were adhered to in the economic sphere.

"National interests' of the various workers' states were formally protected by the rule which said that all decisions of Comecon must be taken unanimously.

In the years of Stalin's monolithic control this created no problems for the Soviet bureaucracy. But in recent years a number of countries, especially Romania, have used the rule to thwart the plan of the Soviet bureaucracy to use Comecon to promote more integration of thé East European economies.

One of the Soviet proposals to the recent session was to abolish this unanimity rule. It was not only the Romanian bureaucracy, however, which Brezhner objected to this proppsed weakening of the position of the individual national bureaucracies. And in the end the USSR had to withdraw the proposal.

This is one of the factors which seems to have led to a change in the whole conception of the Soviet bureaucracy about the uses of Comecon.

It has never been used as an instrument of real international economic planning. But now the bureaucracy's interest in using it even as a weapon of centralised economic control over a group of sattelites has dimished in favour of a conception of Comecon as an instrument simultaneously of "peaceful coexistence" and of the Soviet Union's current political offensive in Africa and other part of the semi-colonial world.

Thus one of the significant decisions of the Comecon meeting was one to increase contacts between the organisation and the capitalist European Economic Community.

Another significant development, was the presence at the meeting for the first time as a full member of Vietnam. This is one of the developments which indicates the increasingly close alignment between Hanoi and Moscow.

Vietnam's membership of Comecon was one of the things used by the Chinese government last week to justify the stepping up of its campaign against Vietnam. Its latest move in an increasingly tense situation is the complete withdrawal of economic aid from More surprising was the presence as observers at Bucharest of representatives of Angola and of the Ethiopian Derg (the ruling military dictatorship). On his return to Addis Ababa the Derg's economic minister claimed that Ethiopia was about to be granted full membership of Comecon.

If this is true it is evidence that the conception of Comecon changing fast. Members like Ethiopia-and indeed Cuba which became a member in 1971-cannot have the same relationship to the organisation as the East European sattelites of the Soviet Union.

In these cases Comecon ceases to be a framework for allocating industries and controlling trade between countries of a geographically contiguous bloc. It becomes a framework for the allocation of economic aid projects and an increasingly important symbol of the spread of Soviet political influence.

Capitalist market

New members or near members like Ethiopia and Angola are still much more a part of the capitalist world market that the Eastern European countries.

But the new looser Comecon also reflects the growing extent to which Eastern European countries in recent years have also developed their trade with the capitalist countries, welcomed investment in their countries by imperialist firms and encouraged the regrowth of a small-scale national capitalist sector.

US delegation

• It is perháps of some significance that it was in the same week as the Comecon conference that Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader chose to announce to a visiting delegation from the United States that Cuba too would soon be offering facilities for foreign capitalist investment.