Текст книги "Ford and Stalin. How to Live in Humaneness"
Автор книги: (IP of the USSR) Internal Predictor of the USSR
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«“Khrushchevki” + “six hundred square meters”» = «destroyed biocenoses + waste of land resources, transport and industrial capacities» in contrast to the option of building family cottages with attached plots of land in towns and developing production which does not engage many people in small towns and in the country-side.
The development of the USSR’s Armed Forces in the post-Stalin period was also an act of sabotage. For the military forces in peaceful time to warrant the country’s ability to defend and to develop successfully the number of soldiers or seamen should correspond to the number of officers and the quantity of high-quality equipment in accordance with the specific branch of arms and the military doctrine. In order to maintain all of this in fighting efficiency an infrastructure of bases (accommodation for soldiers, officers and their families, shooting-ranges, etc) and training facilities should be developed. Because some armaments become morally and physically obsolete and are taken off the register national economy should develop a complex of modernization, reconstruction and utilization industries[148].
Violation of structural proportions of the military forces towards increasing the quantity of armaments and manpower proper which are not backed up by due development of infrastructures of basing, training, reconstruction, modernization and utilization is justified in one and only case: if the war is known to start in the nearest future. In this war the quantity of armaments and manpower excessive in comparison to the proportions of peacetime will secure a quick victory resulting from a massive strike on the offence or on the defense. Or it will be destroyed during the first stage of a stabilized warfare.
But if the military forces of a state are growing during more than 30 years (1953 – 1985) according to proportions of a wartime period – it is an issue of a separate research.
In our opinion during the period between the summer of 1953 when Nikita Khrushchev came to power and the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982 all the information on real processes of global policy given to the leaders of the USSR was intentionally perverted by consultants in science (The Institute on the USA and Canada) and intelligence, which happened due to the all-around influence of second-generation Trotskyites. Drinking (both Khrushchev and Brezhnev) and smoking (Brezhnev) were with few exceptions an integral part of the party and state leaders’ life-style. They perverted and depressed the psychological state of politicians and prepared a «fertile field» for them to be suggested all kinds of false ideas about the intentions and actual policy of the USA, NATO and the processes of global policy in general.
As for the states, which were enemies of the USSR in the «cold war» of 1946 – 1985, a lot of their politicians were initiated masons who acted according to the masonry’s global political scenario. Those who were not masons were fooled by science and intelligence of their countries, which were infiltrated by masons. Marxist Trotskyism initially included a branch of masonry; therefore everything in the global policy was under control of the representatives of biblical conception.
Under such circumstances the proportions of the military forces of the USSR redundantly deformed in relation to infrastructure of basing and provision convinced everyone who was not admitted to the global scenarios that the country was preparing to start a war and all that noise about a peaceful co-existence of two systems was intended to put Western politicians and society off their guard.
Moreover, there were methodological errors in the work of State Planning Committee of the USSR and of the Union Republics and bodies of government supervising their economies, and so good intentions could not be realized because inappropriate means were used.
Thus, although such branch of knowledge as «economic cybernetics» did appear in Soviet science, those economic «cabernet[149]-ics» were engaged mainly in small talk and in adjusting quotations from western researches to Marx-Lenin ideology and to publications of the regular Congress of Communist Party instead of scientific and creative research work.
As a result «economic cybernetics» did not solve the problem of defining targets and did not define the price list to be the financial and economic expression of the error vector of the society’s self-control. It did not consider the problem of the system’s internal «noise» and the external noise on the level of micro– and macroeconomy, means of their suppression and excluding from the processes of control and self-control. It did not reveal the problems of coordinating the addressed directive (structural) control and the market self-regulating system (non-structural control) in a general process of controlling the realization of plans. No theory of control can be a consistent basis for the practice of control unless it has definite answers to such questions as: what is a vector of control objective? what is the objective expression of control error vector? what can be used as means of control? which parameters should be independent in the process of control? It concerns both Soviet and foreign cybernetics.
For this and other reasons State Planning Committee of the USSR was doomed to practice defective and vicious methods of modeling social and economic development and of plan optimization.
In order to demonstrate what idiotic notions about the functioning of a multiindustrial production and consumption system the State Planning Committee indulged in and what ideas Soviet economic science cultivated let us consider a quotation from the work “The Planned Equilibrium: installation, maintenance, efficiency” (by V.D. Belkin and V.V. Ivanter, «Economica» Publishing house, Moscow, 1983, p. 209):
«The question is how to estimate the product a part of which was produced over the desired solvent demand? It can be done using the equilibrium prices[150]. As it was demonstrated (…) the prices for the goods, the production of which is redundant in relation to the solvent demand, should be lower than the production prices. The redundant production means redundant expenditure in labor, material and natural resources, damages for the entire society and the recession of economic efficiency of national economy».
The last phrase is the expression of a private-owner, capitalist mode of thinking, which does not comprehend the structural integrity of a multiindustrial production and consumption inside a society and which a single businessman directs towards deriving of maximum of profit right now and always.
This world understanding is incapable of defining targets and evaluating efficiency in the activity of a super concern state. The logic of the last phrase from the given quotation leaves only one step to make towards suggesting to destroy the product, which is redundant in relation to the solvent demand at prices that do not cover the expenses on its production. Private-property economy gives us a scope of such examples: it is well known that corn was drowned in sea or used as fuel for electric power-stations in order to raise prices while the population of whole regions in other countries was starving.
There is a need in a different approach to the efficiency of national economy. The latter is a structural integrity designed for guaranteed satisfaction of the daily living needs of the entire population in the succession of generations, but not of the degraded parasitic needs of a small “elite” group. However we do not even put a question of interrelation between a turnout exceeding the solvent demand and a demographically grounded need in a book dedicated to the planned equilibrium in a state whose goal is to build «communism» when everything will be free of charge and free-for-all.
Yet if one proceeds from the principle that production in a society is performed for the sake of satisfying vital needs, then in a normally functioning production system product quality should correspond to these needs and to the standards in which they are expressed. A price in such system first of all is a means to limit the number of consumers. It deprives the insolvent part of the possibility to obtain or use some product.
Correspondingly production exceeding the expected (planned) solvent demand on the demographically grounded range of needs an advanced result in carrying out the plan and is socially useful for it will permit to satisfy the vital needs of more people within the planned period. Therefore the prices on this product should be lowered in due time to ensure its sales, and the «losses» of the manufacturers should be covered by subsidies. Otherwise former prices ensuring the profitability of production should be retained, while the potential consumers should be offered target subsidies.
Here is the opinion of H. Ford on the question:
«We are not much concerned with the statistics and the theories of the economists on the recurring cycles of prosperity and depression. They call the periods when prices are high “prosperous.” A really prosperous period is not to be judged on the prices that manufacturers are quoting for articles.
We are not concerned with combinations of words. If the prices of goods are above the incomes of the people, then get the prices down to the incomes (put in bold type by the authors). Ordinarily, business is conceived as starting with a manufacturing process and ending with a consumer. If that consumer does not want to buy what the manufacturer has to sell him and has not the money to buy it, then the manufacturer blames the consumer and says that business is bad, and thus, hitching the cart before the horse, lie goes on his way lamenting. Isn’t that nonsense?» (Ch. 9. “Why Not Always Have Good Business?”).
This helps to understand that H. Ford understood the aim and manner of a normal functioning of a multiindustrial production and consumption system better than the collaborators and directors of State Planning Committee 60 years after “My Life and Work” by H. Ford has been published[151]. The fault of State Planning Committee and economic «science» of the USSR is aggravated by the fact that unlike H. Ford they had several decades of working-out the plans of which they were to make sense. But social climbers and bureaucrats are hopeless.
As for the question raised by the authors of “The Planned Equilibrium” it demands a substantial answer:
The exceeding of a planned range of production by a real output will inevitably lead to the reduction of prices on the product on the demographically determined specter of needs. And in this case the fiscal-subsidizing policy of a super concern state, such as the USSR, should provide under the normal functioning for the solvency balance of the branches of economy. This – is a normal regime of functioning of a multiindustrial production and consumption system of a morally healthy humanly developing society.
If the product exceeds the proper demographically determined needs of the state it should find its outlet on the world market (its quality should suffice) or it should be given to the destitute countries as a gratuitous or other kind of help in the course of the goals of state’s global policy[152].
However the economic science of the USSR did not understand the exceptional position of a socialist political system as an owner of the whole credit and finance system and an exclusive operator of the «financial press» which gives birth to law of value (i.e. a price current base of nominal prices and price correlation). This science put it in the way that the state – is one of many private owners of this system, which can use it until its activities are paid off under the set prices and price correlation.
Such position would be correct in relation to any private-capitalist political system where the owner of the credit and finance systems and operator of a financial running knot is a usurious corporation independent of state[153].
Such branch of sociological science that could be called «juridical cybernetics» also did not appear in the USSR. This science could have analyzed and developed legislature as a system of social self-government algorithms in the course of a definite conception of global policy.
Certainly, many of the mentioned and not mentioned, but known from the life of the post-Stalin USSR, facts are vices unconsciously, automatically inherited from the epoch of J.V. Stalin and earlier times.
However in the years of Stalinism they are forgivable for they were objectively determined by the fact that the socialist revolution took place in the country where 85 % of population were completely illiterate. The first educated generation of the Soviet nation grew up during the pre-war years. They mastered science (including Marxism which was imposed on them) and culture belonging to the previous ruling “elite”. They inherited the science and culture, which were already formed and retained all their vices. It was therefore inevitable that the predominant part of population was not free in its world understanding from the power of the vicious and obviously false ideas, which they duly put into practice.
But at the end of 1952 “The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR” was published in which J.V. Stalin pointed out many of the problems mentioned by us directly or in connection with other issues. And when the «ottepel» started nothing – except corruption, obsequiousness and malignancy of scientists, «Soviet» intelligentsia in general, limiting them in their choice of objects for research and restraining in obtaining morally acceptable results – nothing prevented them from investigating and solving the problem formulated by S. Okito in the interview quoted in Digression 6.
Many years that passed after 1953 – the years of a different morality of scientists and politicians – allowed to get free from the mistakes and abuses characteristic of Stalin period and to develop all the good that was given a start and new power in the result of the Great October Socialist Revolution, building of socialism and victory in the Great Patriotic War of 1941– 1945.
However malignant scientists and politicians (under the connivance of the rest of population) carried to the point of absurdity everything that was good, perverted and violated it while developing everything bad. Logically there came the perestroika and the situation we have today as the in-between results of the then launched reforms.
All this shows that in the fragments quoted from “The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR” by J.V. Stalin are no empty talking. In a brief work it is simply impossible to explain all the particulars and details[154]. Stalin determines only those problems and sets up those the goals that he finds essential to be solved by the entire population to ensure further successful development of the USSR as a multinational society in which everyone can master his genetic potential of development and become an individual.
Let us now return to the main issue of this part.
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It is well known that J.V. Stalin is an advocate of socialism and planned economy, yet many people tend to forget that he supports not a planned economy «generally speaking», but a planned economy definitely aimed at complete satisfaction of vital needs of all people in the society. The fact that the guaranteed satisfaction of morally healthy needs is meant is implied by the very Idea of socialism and social justice in its evolution in each particular historical epoch.
Let us now turn to the viewpoints of H. Ford. Earlier we have quoted his opinion on the central flaw of the system of private-capital enterprise as a system of production and distribution of products in the society:
«The present system does not permit of the best service because it encourages every kind of waste – it keeps many men from getting the full return from service. And it is going nowhere. It is all a matter of better planning and adjustment».
Thus it can be understood that H. Ford and J.V. Stalin share the following opinion:
National economy (and in the historical perspective – world economy) should be planned, socialist in its essence and it should guarantee in succession of generations the satisfaction of vital needs of laborers conscientiously participating in the economic activity, i.e. of the majority of society.
Suspicion may arise that this opinion, which belongs to the private owner – a capitalist H. Ford – is an incidental, unmotivated slip of the tongue or some ambiguity torn out of context[155]. That we use it with reference to Ford’s authority to provide grounds for the necessity of planned basis in economy on micro– and macro-levels and a socialist character of production-consumption social interrelations. Let us therefore turn to other parts of Ford’s work where the issue of necessity of planning in economy on micro– and macro-levels and of relations between the capital and the businessman and the rest of society is the major topic:
«By poverty I mean the lack of reasonably sufficient food, housing, and clothing for an individual or a family. There will have to be differences in the grades of sustenance
The underlying causes of poverty, as I can see them, are essentially due to the bad adjustment between production and distribution, in both industry and agriculture – between the source of power and its application (put in bold type by the authors)[156]. The wastes due to lack of adjustment are stupendous. All of these wastes must fall before intelligent leadership consecrated to service. So long as leadership thinks more of money than it does of service, the wastes will continue. Waste is prevented by far-sighted not by short-sighted men. Short-sighted men think first of money. They cannot see waste. They think of service as altruistic
«Although there is never a time when everyone has too much of this world’s goods – when everyone is too comfortable or too happy – there come periods when we have the astounding spectacle of a world hungry for goods and an industrial machine hungry for work and the two – the demand and the means of satisfying it – held apart by a money barrier
We suffer frequent periods of so-called bad luck only because we manage so badly. If we had a vast crop failure, I can imagine the country going hungry, but I cannot conceive how it is that we tolerate hunger and poverty, when they grow solely out of bad management, and especially out of the bad management that is implicit in an unreasoned financial structure[160]. Of course the war upset affairs in this country. It upset the whole world. There would have been no war had management been better. But the war alone is not to blame. The war showed up a great number of the defects of the financial system
The start toward the stabilization of his own affairs may be made by any one. One cannot achieve perfect results acting alone, but as the example begins to sink in there will be followers[162], and this in the course of time we can hope to put inflated business and its fellow, depressed business, into a class with small-pox – that is, into the class of preventable diseases. It is perfectly possible, with the reorganization of business and finance that is bound to come about, to take the ill effect of seasons, if not the seasons, out of industry, and also the periodic depressions» (Ch. 9. “Why Not Always Have Good Business?”).
Those were the thoughts of H. Ford about the problems caused by the absence of planning basis and they might have been regarded as simple complaints which do not oblige and do not exhort to do anything. But it is not so considering the general context of his book where in chapter 7 he makes direct statements on the objectively formed necessity to include planning basis into the economy of society:
«There are far too many assumptions about what human nature ought to be and not enough research into what it is. Take the assumption that creative work can be undertaken only in the realm of vision. We speak of creative “artists” in music, painting, and the other arts. We seemingly limit the creative functions to productions that may be hung on gallery walls, or played in concert halls, or otherwise displayed where idle and fastidious people gather to admire each other’s culture (put in bold type by the authors)[163]. But if a man wants a field for vital creative work, let him come where he is dealing with higher laws than those of sound, or line, or color; let him come where he may deal with the laws of personality. We want artists in industrial relationship. We want masters in industrial method – both from the standpoint of the producer and the product. We want those who can mould the political, social, industrial, and moral mass into a sound and shapely whole. We have limited the creative faculty too much and have used it for too trivial ends (put in bold type by the authors)[164].
We want men who can create the working design for all that is right and good and desirable in our life. Good intentions plus well-thought-out working designs can be put into practice and can be made to succeed. It is possible to increase the well-being of the workingman – not by having him do less work, but by aiding him to do more. If the world will give its attention and interest and energy to the making of plans that will profit the other fellow as he is, then such plans can be established on a practical working basis. Such plans will endure – and they will be far the most profitable both in human and financial values (isolated in a separate paragraph and put in bold type by the authors).
What this generation needs is a deep faith, a profound conviction in the practicability of righteousness, justice, and humanity in industry. If we cannot have these qualities, then we were better off without industry. Indeed, if we cannot get those qualities, the days of industry are numbered. But we can get them. We are getting them (isolated in a separate paragraph and put in bold type by the authors) (Ch. 7. “The Terror of the Machine”).[165]
Ford was mistaken in his evaluation of the perspectives: the days of industry are not over. But he was right in his apprehension that in the historically developed by that time (it was only 1922) form industry does not have a right for existence. He was right: the global biosphere and environment crisis, an unquestionable attribute of the life of mankind in the last quarter of the 20th century and in the foreseeable perspective of the 21st century, is a result of predominance of those methods of managing which Ford foresaw, condemned and warned against offering his alternative.
Yet the problem of alternative principles of managing organization on the basis of demographically grounded target definition and of planning in long-term successions is connected with the question how a problem of freedom of man is comprehended within a society. Depending on the answer to this question a private-capitalist enterprise and «free market» system will pass to this alternative according to its own free will or it will happen inevitably under the influence of extra-social (biosphere-ecological crisis and people’s physical and psychological degradation) and intra-social conditions (social and political activity, uncompromising initiative of the more progressive part of society).
In one of his interviews Stalin commented upon the rights and freedom of man:
«I can hardly imagine what «personal freedom» an unemployed may have, he who walks hungry and cannot find an application of his labor. The real freedom exists only where exploitation is destroyed, where there is no oppression of people by other people, where there is no unemployment and hunger, where a man does not live in fear of losing his job, his house, his bread next day[166]. Only in such society real and not official, personal or any other freedom is possible[167]» (from a conversation with the chairman of a news-paper union Roy Howard, March 1, 1936).
It has been mentioned that the high level of individual social protection including the guarantees of economic rights (which are essentially creative and consumer’s rights) and freedoms calls for control. I.e. it calls for a demographically grounded definition of targets and efficient regulation of product exchange, in a multiindustrial production and consumption system from which the society obtains the majority of consumed goods.
11 years later (in the year of H. Ford’s death) Stalin has a discussion with another foreign interviewer concerning the problem of necessity to regulate production and distribution in national economy in order to get free from the vicious circle of economic depressions and social disorder resulting from the latter.
«J.V. Stalin asks: And what about the businessmen? Are they willing to be controlled and limited?
Stassen answers that they usually object to it.
J.V. Stalin observes that they will surely object» (from a conversation with some Stassen, April 7, 1947).
Stassen’s answer actually proved that Stalin was right in rejecting H. Wells’ statement of bourgeoisie’s kindness. In the other aspect a question of necessity of governmental regulation of private enterprise is a question of private and state ownership over means of production and a question of relationship between the state and any individual of the society and especially the businessman.
What is the essence of the right of ownership over means of production? What is the difference between private and public ownership over means of production? – These questions belong to that multitude of questions to which traditional political economy (including its Marxist version in general and socialist version in particular) does not give articulate, systematic and practically viable answers. Let us therefore clarify them.
The right of ownership is one of many rights acknowledged by very different societies. It is realized by ownership subjects in relation to property, i.e. to objects of ownership. It is realized through proclamations as well as through implications. And proclamations can be suppressed by the actions of implications attending to these proclamations. An example to it is a violation of the Biblical commandment «Do not steal» by the prescription (also biblical) to the Hebrew of international usury executed on the racial corporation basis: «steal and the main thing – make everybody think that this stealing is allowed by God himself and to you alone» (see Supplement 1).
In well-meaning concepts of social organization people cannot be objects of ownership neither in proclamation (slave-owning, feudalism, serfdom) nor in dissembling (private-owning capitalism with the strangling not of usury or of personal «copyright» on the objects of «intellectual» property).
Of all the ownership rights an exclusive role belongs to the right of ownership on the means of production, because much depends on it directly or indirectly in the legislative regulation of economic life of society.
The essence of the notion of «the right of ownership on the means of production» is revealed exclusively as the right to co n trol production and distribution of product either directly or through a del e gate.
