Digression 7: The Post-Stalin USSR was an Anti-SocialistState
Ford and Stalin. How to Live in Humaneness · перевод (English) · раздел 22 из 42
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Digression 7: The Post-Stalin USSR was an Anti-SocialistState
As for the fundamental economic law of socialism, which defines the goals of production and distribution of products in a society, there was no strict differentiation and division between the degraded parasitic and the demographically grounded range of needs neither in the general political economy of socialism nor in the applied theories of controlling economy on a planned basis.
In the Stalin period it can be explained by solving the tasks of the country’s social and economic development on the basis of Marxism which the Russian culture accepted but had no time to comprehend in correlation with the actual life situation. The intellectual potential was spent in struggles within the party, technological and organizational aspects of restructuring national economy in the 1920-s - 1930-s. Then all every effort was directed to win the Great Patriotic War (World War II as it is called in the formed USSR) and to carry out the economical restoration and re-equipment of military forces (when missiles and nuclear weapon were introduced) that followed. But after the restoration period was over and “Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R” was published the complete failure and futility of social and economic sciences in the USSR can be explained only by the degraded parasitic morality of the scientists themselves. The more vicious in morals - the more corrupt and obliging and higher in the social hierarchy, but at the same time the more stupid and less efficient in defining and solving the problems of actual life and social development.
As a result of such indifference of science and politicians towards the two incompatible ranges of needs alcohol and tobacco products were taking the leading places in the revenues of the USSR budget. And by the mid-1980-s each rouble gained from sales of alcohol was attended by 3 - 5 roubles (in different assessment) of direct or indirect damage registerable by bookkeeping. It was caused by faults, factory accidents, absenteeism, spoilage, hooliganism and more serious crimes and results of people’s actions under the influence of alcohol. There is also damage that evades bookkeeping and includes health damage to the new generations given birth by drinking parents and cultural damage caused by absence of proper education and by genetic potential’s degrading under the influence of alcohol.
The same can be said about the production and usage of tobacco products and, especially today, of different dopes.
As a result the USSR - Russia in post-Stalin period fell, falls and in the nearest future will fall behind the requirements of time in mass solving of moral, scientific, technological and organizational problems of its development which define its international position and the attitude the local “elites” and common people of other regions of the Earth share towards it.
It’s also no use speaking about the satisfaction of people’s needs by means of development and improvement of production on the basis of high technologies. The old enterprises were working for decades without upgrading their technological base and the new ones were constructed according to projects, which provided for the use of old technologies and morally outdated equipment. Above all «dolgostroy» (long-term building) flourished caused by the violation of proportions between the planned amount of works and the productive capacity of the construction industry.
It means that in the post-Stalin period it was not only the fundamental economic law of socialism that was violated but the law of planned proportional development was systematically violated as well. In our opinion the most striking example of violating proportions resulting from falsely defined targets i.e. from violating the fundamental economic law of socialism, - are the forays of «virgin soil reclamation» and the development of the USSR Armed Forces.
The first virgin soil crop exceeded all expectations. It was reaped… and mainly rotted because the infrastructures of accommodation, storage, grain processing and transport had not been created in advance. Moreover during the first forays on the virgin soil an agrotechnics, that did not agree with the natural conditions of Kazakhstan steppe, was employed and in some regions up to half a meter of fertile soil was carried away by weathering. It will take the soils thousands or at least hundreds of years to recover from this damage.
The personal blame for this sabotage, this biosphere environmental crime lies completely on Nikita Khrushchev, the members of the Central Committee of Communist Party, the deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of those years, the State Planning Committee, the corresponding departments of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
This could have not happen if it had been done according to common sense, the fundamental economic law of socialism and the law of planned proportional development of national economy.
In this case the roads and accommodation would have been built first of all. The agricultural production would have been limited by the amount necessary to feed the new-coming population. In several years aeromechanics would have been modified to agree with natural conditions of the region. And then on this basis the problem of food self-sufficiency of the USSR would have been solved in the regular succession of generations and in constant care for the sustenance of the soils’ fertility [143].
One does not need to be a genius to work out in advance a plan for reclamation of virgin soils very much like this sequence of successive and mutually coordinated actions. It was necessary simply not to regard a plan as some sort of a record to beat, not to make much of abstract numbers in order to blow up a propaganda boom, but to concentrate on what in particular should be done, in what succession and by whom, what resources are necessary for it and what metrologically consistent indices give ground that one may proceed to the next stage of a complex plan.
Another expression of the “elite” policy of constraining population to the degraded parasitic range of needs are «khrushchevki» (standard blocks of flats built during the times of Khrushchev). Their «architecture» psychologically depresses an individual and their overcrowded conditions (or «compactness and «combined lay-out» of everything and all, if to use the slang of those times). Their small size and number of rooms destroyed the extended family. Thus the «khrushchevki» epoch caused an irretrievable damage to formation of individuals in several generations, because nothing can substitute an everyday communication of a small child with his grandparents [144].
If to dwell further on the problem of individual formation let us recollect a well-known phrase «architecture is music in stone». And in the same way as musical background (radio, audio-records) influences human psyche and activity, architectural background also has this kind of influence. In textbooks on ancient history, which everybody (in the USSR) studied by in the 1960 - 1970s, it was told how an enemy army burst into the Athens acropolis. When the warriors beheld the statue of Pallas Athena standing in front of them on the pedestal they were stunned and retreated without committing any plunder. This is an example of the influence of architecture which is if not ideal yet closer to an ideal than that of modern cities. And when we try to investigate the reasons of youth riots like the one in the center of Moscow on June 9, 2002 when Russia lost the football match to Japan it should be kept in mind that the majority of the participants of that hell-bender grew up against the «architectural» (if it can be called such) background of «khrushchevki» - «vivarium» [145].
One can often hear that «khrushchevki» caused rapid growth of housing construction, that people moved from communal flats and cellars, that the housing problem [146] in towns was being solved. But these are two different and hardly interconnected questions: the first is a question of architectural forms and styles and the second is a question of building materials, technologies and constructions. Nothing, except an anti-national neo-Trotskyite political course, prevented from applying more productive building technologies in combination with a life-asserting architectural style instead of the unnatural style of «khrushchevki» - «vivarium».
Besides, in order to raise the statistics on «housing construction» the doors in «khrushchevki» were installed not on the borders between a room and a corridor (or a kitchen and a corridor) according to the rectangular outline of rooms, but within a meter from this border towards the corridor. A passage to the kitchen through a niche in the dining room in some «khrushchevki» can be explained by the same desire to fake report statistics. This niche appeared as a result of eliminating the wall between the dining room and the corridor that led to the kitchen passing the bathroom. Because of such architectural perversions each room or a kitchen acquired up to two additional square meters, which could not be used but were included into reports on housing construction. These meters were also charged according to tariffs on usable are and were taken into account in case of an application for improvement of living conditions.
The same happened with the staircases. Lifting a piano to the fifth floor became an theme for jokes of that epoch. However the reality was that millions of elderly people could not descend those staircases and that the deceased had to be turned over in order to be carried down because the coffin could not fit into the narrow space of stair flights. It will take several generations to overcome the consequences of that period.
Besides, «khrushchevki» were tightly connected with the notorious «six hundred square meters» [147] land allotments, which were sometimes a hundred kilometers away from the town place of habitation (it deserves no other name). The result is:
«“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.