Correspondents' Correspondence 'Mitterranomics'

...Comes the revolution," it was insisted, this would be replaced by a dictatorship of the proletariat which would smash the existing state apparatus and replace it from the ground up...

...Indeed, it is from an advanced starting point that Mitterrand proposes to lead his country into socialism . Specifically-to cite a number of the principal measures of his program-the new government intends to nationalize another 9 per cent of the nation's industrial sector, including most of the remaining large banks that escaped earlier nationalization...

...Recently Maharashtra's Chief Minister, Abdur Rehman Antulay, decided his government should rid the capital of several burgeoning slums...

...Lenin certainly would not...

...Public opinion in France will be able to express itself in the nationwide municipal elections coming up in the spring of 1983...

...But it will not be solved simply by preventing them from coming into the cities, or by efforts to provide decent housing once they arrive...

...The U.S...

...For the U.S., judgment day is even nearer: the Congressional elections in the fall of 1982...

...Family allocations providing substantial allowances for every child growing up have no equivalent in the U.S...

...Most of them do, after all, perform numerous services required by an urban environment, like collecting rags and other scrap, working as somestics and taking low-skilled jobs...

...The Maharashtra government's action clearly reveals a callousness toward the "wretched of the city," who have been pushed out of their rural homes by abject poverty...

...Social welfare legislation here is much more generous than in the U.S...

...to increase purchasing power by hiring tens of thousands of additional government employees...

...for the past six weeks or so, the weather has been perfect...

...to stimulate the economy by increasing investment in high-technology industries...

...One after another of its major features-shorter work weeks, longer vacations, higher minimum wages, earlier retirements etc.-seem inevitably destined to increase government deficits and industrial costs...

...and 9 per cent of the country's industrial sector is nationalized...

...It is the professoriat, not the proletariat, that has taken power in France: In the recently formed Mitterrand government, as well as in the National Assembly, former teachers constitute the largest professional group...

...Simply stated, Mitterrand's program puts the primary emphasis on redistributing the GNP pie, rather than on making it grow...

...The Indian Constitution guarantees citizens the right to live and travel where they want...

...Eliot describe London in The Wasteland, and the characterization fits Paris in these early days of fall...

...Public sector expenditures in France total over 45 per cent of the GNP (as compared to some 30 per cent in the U.S...

...The hapless new arrivals can only find living quarters in miserable tin and burlap hovels...

...The socialism being legislated into law in the French National Assembly bears little resemblance to that envisaged in Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program, or to that of Lenin's State and Revolution...

...hundreds of destitute familes were thrown into the rain without any hope of securing shelter from the incessant downpour...

...A harbinger of things to come: French inflation for the last three months has been running at an annual rate of over 17 per cent, a new record for recent years...

...Among the functionaries who staff the bureaucracy there is little change, except that they have a new and obviously more congenial set of bosses...

...French citizens, for example, currently enjoy comprehensive medical and dental insurance, relatively higher yielding old age pensions, plus unemployment insurance that pays over 80 per cent of the workers' last salary for the first year of unemployment and over 70 per cent for a second year...

...Orthodox Marxism and its Leninist version saw the state under capitalism as embodying the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie...

...The minimum wage in France also is higher than that in the U.S., and wage indexing has kept the purchasing power of French workers abreast of inflation through the decade of the '70s...

...From a macroeconomic point of view, the logic behind this prediction seems to me unassailable...

...to institutea tax on fortunes...

...Naorman Jacobs Bombay Bulge Bombay-this capital of Maharashtra State, in Western India, is the commercial and industrial center of the country, so it is perhaps not surprising that it is suffering the fastest growing population bulge of any city in the nation...

...and to narrow the gap between lower and upper income groups...

...And I have grave doubts that the Socialist Party's program has the answers to these bread-and-butter problems...

...Even worse, those slumdwellers who were apprehended before they could flee were bundled into specially commandeered trucks and transport buses and shunted off to towns closest to the states of their origin on the borders of Maharashtra...

...When the removals began early one morning-without any prior warning-a number of journalists got wind of the cruel procedure and quickly presented a petition before the Bombay High Court to stay further evictions...

...After a typically damp and dreary spring, followed by a cold and wet June and July, summer finally came to this city...

...From even this partial list, it should be evident that French social welfare benefits (enacted, incidentally, mostly by Center-Right governments) add up not to a "safety net," but to a thick safety blanket...

...The decisive factor was discontent with record unemployment, that showed no signs of diminishing, and with ever increasing inflation...

...Reaganomics with its free-market, supply-side emphasis and Mitterranomics with demand-side, socialist emphasis have nothing in common other than that they are both in large measure ideologically inspired...

...The only long-term solution, it must ultimately be recognized, requires the development of industries and employment programs in rural areas to eliminate the major cause of the migration in the first place.-darryl D'Monte...

...Now, 133 years later, the electorate of this advanced capitalist nation has voted into office a government committed to instituting socialism...

...But against this familiar background, history is being made...

...In both cases the opportunity to pass judgment on these conflicting economic approaches is not so very far off...

...to shorten the work week and lengthen vacation periods...

...Whether Marx would today approve of Francois Mitterrand's program, I don't know...

...Nothing of the kind is going on here...

...In other words, the new government is going to be judged less by whether it brings socialism to France than by how well it brings jobs to the unemployed and checks inflation...

...While the eviction from public places was strictly legal, this deportation was not...

...Way back in 1848, Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto evoked the specter of Communism to predict the speedy demise of capitalism in the leading nations of the West...

...It is not without irony that two major powers of the free world are simultaneously embarked on contrasting experiments in economic management...

...The French capital has never been more radiant, and it is still overflowing with tourists eager to see its sights and enjoy its beauties...

...The government is now engaged in legislating those intentions into laws, so no French citizen can accuse it of not living up to its campaign promises...

...Few Americans realize Mitterrand is bringing socialism to a country that is already one of the most advanced social democracies in the world...

...In the election campaign, Mitterrand spelled out his Socialist intentions clearly and categorically...

...to lower the retirement age...

...Unfortunately, the cleanup campaign was launched in the middle of the monsoon season...

...real estate, believe it or not, is as expensive in middle class Bombay as it is in New York City...

...On the other hand, there is no denying that for most Third World countries the treatment of such people is a serious problem...

...It is much closer to something espoused by American Socialists in the '20s: to Norman Thomas' vision of a socialism limited to taking over the "commanding heights" of the nation's economy...

...On the contrary, I think events will confirm the prediction defeated President Valery Giscard d'Estaing made during a pre-election television debate with Mitterrand: If you Socialists win, said Giscard, and put your program into effect, unemployment will increase and inflation will get worse...

...and France are apparently destined to endure the trial-by-fire of these two ideologies until the respective electorates of the two countries cry: hold, enough...

...They were successful to the extent that the Court ruled no more slumdwellers could be moved until October 15, by which time the monsoon season would be over...

...Some 300 indigent people trek into Bombay every day seeking jobs, adding to its already 8 million inhabitants...

...But 1 very much doubt that the French Left won the Presidential and parliamentary elections because a majority of the French peopleopted for socialism...

...He therefore ordered officials, with the aid of the police, to demolish the "shanty towns" that have sprung up on the pavements here...