For a tew dollars more

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This is part of a five-year joint this position by tempting offers venture with the Hungarian of trade credit from capitalist Last week the Financial Times quoted a journalist as saying:

"What utter nonsense that a piece of clothing, rather cheap and fundamentally democratic elsewhere, has become a luxury article and a class symbol in our country"

The country was Hungary. And the article in question-the Levi blue demin jeans.

The authentic American Levi Strauss company is about to start the machines rolling in a millionpairs-a-year plant which it has established in the Hungarian town of Marcali.

Five-year venture Although the same technology is being used, productivity in the Hungarian plant will be only half of that in San Francisco.

But that is not so important to the Hungarian government because the purpose of the factory is not to produce goods for the Hungarian consumers but to produce desperately needed dollars.

Like other bureaucratic workers' states in Eastern Europe, Hungary has in recent years become increasingly indebted to the capitalist countries as a result of a chronic trade deficit with ine west.

The Stalinist bureaucracy has allowed itself to be seduced into governments trying to solve their own economic crisis.

Now the bureaucracies are searching around for some way of paying up their pound of flesh.

That means exporting moreand specifically more goods of sufficient quality to sell in the increasingly competitive capitalist market.

Exported And that very often means exportin! goods produced with Making Russian Steel capitalist technology back to the capitalist world.

And that is where the Levis come in. 60% of the output of the Marsali plant will be exported straight back to the USA and Western Europe for hard dollars!

Meanwhile the Levi Strauss management do not have to lift a finger except to collect their licence fee, making Hungary in effect the only place in the world where they are guaranteed profit on their activities.

There is also an increasing spread of small-scale private trade and production.

Encouraged

In the Hungarian capital Budapest, for example, the number of private craftsmen operating rose last year from 149 to over 15,000.

Nearly half of all services are provided by private craftsmen.

This state of affairs has been deliberately encouraged by the Kadar bureaucracy through tax concessions and other measures to encourage private business.

In Poland policies of this kind have existed since 1964. Now all petrol stations and one third of the catering industry are in private hands.

And in East Germany two thirds of services are in the hands of private enterprise.

In the Soviet Union this trend has been much more restricted.

It still has only 100,000 private traders and craftsmen in a population of 260 million-a proportion fifteen times less than Hungary.

Even so the continued importance of the private plot on Soviet collective farms means that 10% of total Soviet production is in the private sector.

Threatens

The growth of the private sector in Eastern Europe reflects the contradictions produced by bureaucratic planning.

It has not meant yet that the progressive socialised production towards an economy democratically planned and controlled by the working class constantly threatens the gains of the October revolution in the Soviet Union, and in those countries to which post-October property relations have been exported under bureaucratic control.

Advance

But it is also important to see the other side of the coin-the almost incredible advance in production which even the bureaucratically dominated Soviet economy has been capable of achieving.

The Soviet Union now produces 50% more steel than the United States.

This and similar economic achievements are reflected in the vast and growing military superiority of the Warsaw Pact over the NATO countries, especially in Europe and the Atlantic.

More jeans The American imperialists may still have more blue jeansthey even wear them nowadays in the White House-but they are falling far, far behind the Soviet Union in the forms of production which influence the balance of international power.

Only with the political overthrow of the Soviet and Eastern European bureaucracies by political revolutions led by the working class will this vast economic power finally be put to uses which fully benefit the masses of these countries and of the world.