SOCIAL SCIENTIST For socialist forces the criterion for judging the success of the alternative programme cannot be a comparison with the advanced capitalist economies. In other words, setting for ourselves the objective of achieving in the quickest possible time the living standards, defined in exclusively material terms, prevailing in the advanced capitalist countries, would be self-defeating. There are at least three reasons for this: first, the commodity basket constituting the average living standard prevailing in the advanced capitalist countries does not remain unchanged over time. It changes owing to the process and product innovations that are continually occurring under capitalism. In general, these innovations, as Marx had argued long ago, take the form of a substitution of dead for living labour. This substitution leads to significant rates of labour productivity growth. And any country attempting to imitate this pattern of innovations with a time lag would have to have more or less the same rates of labour productivity growth. Even with fairly high ratios of investment in output, and hence with fairly high growth rates however, such high rates of labour productivity growth entail low or zero rates of growth of demand for labour. Any backward economy, which is already saddled with large labour reserves and high rates of population growth, would therefore find movement towards the using up of labour reserves to be either impossible or inordinately protracted with such an imitative strategy. Secondly, quite apart from the question of employment, a strategy which is imitative of the innovations of capitalism, must necessarily rely on continuous imports of technology and commodities from the advanced capitalist countries. Whether or not the latter accept exports that are large enough to pay for these imports, this pattern of trade dependence gives the latter a leverage which makes the relationship of the country in question vis a vis imperialism an asymmetrical one. In other words the control over technology which is an important weapon in the hands of imperialism gives it a strong leverage vis a vis all countries that depend on this technology. If the imperialist countries were sufficiently and effectively disunited then this may not pose a serious problem, but this is not the case in the current conjuncture (as the sanctions against Iraq amply demonstrate). Thirdly, any country which adopts such an imitative strategy gets doomed at best to acquiring the status of a second-ranking capitalist country. It does not pose a challenge to capitalism, it implicitly concedes the superiority of capitalism. It does not hold out the vision