Unequal Development and Dependency Structures in Comecon

This article deals with the problems of the international division of labor within the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON). The processes which determine the exchange and dependency relations between socialist nation-states are analyzed. The meaning of uneven national development of labor productivity is explained and attention is directed to the functions which the patterns of commodity production have either for an increase or for a decrease of the development unevenness within the Comecon-system. For this pur pose, the role of capitalist forms of value and price creation for the interaction structures of the socialist states is especially taken into consideration. The study comes to the conclusion that the exchange relations are still oriented toward criteria of the capitalist world market and that specifically socialist alternatives are not developed. Nevertheless, these structures, although taken over from the world market, operate in a different way within Comecon. The socialist states succeeded in organizing protective forms against ne gative consequences of these structural principles. These productive form prevented a fixation or furtherance of inequality within the Comecon-system. This was possible because the relations of productions directed by social economic planning in the socialist countries allow for a considerable latitude of political, use-value-oriented decisions.