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Ford and Stalin. How to Live in Humaneness · перевод (English) · раздел 23 из 42
Перевод исходного произведения; точность перевода оценивается отдельно.
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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 «this - is a rejection of a barrack-equalizing pseudo-socialism». Poverty can be done away with only by plenty, and we have now gone far enough along in the science of production to be able to see, as a natural development, the day when production and distribution will be so scientific that all may have according to ability and industry.
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 «i.e. unprofitable a priori» instead of as the most practical thing in the world. (put in bold type by the authors) [157]» (Ch. 13. “Why Be Poor?”).
«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 «caused by many ways by the usury of banks and stock-market speculations». Both manufacturing and employment are in-and-out affairs. Instead of a steady progression we go ahead by fits and starts - now going too fast, now stopping altogether. When a great many people want to buy, there is said to be a shortage of goods. When nobody wants to buy, there is said to be an overproduction of goods. I know that we have always had a shortage of goods, but I do not believe we have ever had an overproduction (put in bold type by the authors). We may have, at a particular time, too much of the wrong kind of goods. That is not overproduction - that is merely headless production. He may also have great stocks of goods at too high prices. That is not overproduction - it is either bad manufacturing or bad financing «i.e. an attempt to gain excess profit by forcing up prices». Is business good or bad according to the dictates of fate? Must we accept the conditions as inevitable? Business is good or bad as we make it so. The only reason for growing crops, for mining, or for manufacturing, is that people may eat, keep warm, have clothing to wear, and articles to use. There is no other possible reason, yet that reason is forced into the background and instead we have operations carried on, not to the end of service «i.e. other people», but to the end of making money «for oneself» (put in bold type by the authors) [158] - and this because we have evolved a system of money that instead of being a convenient medium of exchange, is at times a barrier to exchange [159]. Of this more later.
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 «i.e. laid open the failure of hopes for the self-regulation of production and consumption by a free market in connection with the actual living needs», but more than anything else it showed how insecure is business supported only by a money foundation. I do not know whether bad business is the result of bad financial methods or whether the wrong motive in business created bad financial methods [161], but I do know that, while it would be wholly undesirable to try to overturn the present financial system, it is wholly desirable to reshape business on the basis of service. Then a better financial system will have to come. The present system will drop out because it will have no reason for being. The process will have to be a gradual one.
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 control production and distribution of product either directly or through a delegate.
The essence of the notion of right on such objects of ownership as earth and its bowels, waters and other natural resources is revealed only as a right to organize human labor using these resources and also as a right to limit access to its non-productive use (e.g. for leisure, etc).
Right (in the meaning of personal right as a social institution) and value are categories residing in a social organization, not nature. Under the circumstances of purchase of such rights it is a result of human labor in the past, present or a possible result in future that is always paid. «Natural resources and comforts» do not objectively have any value. Their payment is a nominal solvency limitation of possibility to use them and a creation of funds to pay the labor contributing to the natural reproduction of these resources.
The notions of private and public ownership are connected with the social division of professionalism and its reproduction with the succession of generations in the social labor consolidation. Their essence is revealed through the process of formation of administrative personnel.
A property is private if the staff operating the means of production does not have an opportunity to immediately remove from administration those who did not justify their confidence and to employ or propose someone from their own circle as a new administrator.
A property is public if the administrators who have ceased to be trusted, did not cope with the duty of improving administration quality can be immediately removed from their posts through the initiative of the operating personnel. This is based on of the condition: a closed social group an entrance to which is restricted to the representatives of other social groups cannot be a social basis for an administrative body.
It is impossible to introduce public property in its administrative essence by a law because:
· if a dominating opinion is that what is public de jure is ownerless de facto, then the latter would become private personal or corporate.
· moreover, legal introduction of public property is possible only under a definite level of development of culture, morality and world understanding of a society, at least of its politically active part.
The right to remove an administrator - which is indispensable from public ownership - may be socially useful only if the personnel are conscious that the only reason for this is an administrator’s inability to exercise his duties on the necessary level of quality according to the socially supported conception of social life. In particular, a reason for the removal may be the use of administrative post for personal or family-clannish enrichment through blatant stealing, financial fraud, creation and support of possibilities to get exclusively high payment and other things of this kind which directly or indirectly cause damage to the contemporaries and descendants.
In other words the right of public ownership is based on the world understanding of individuals integrating a society and unconsciously (automatically) reproduced cultural traditions, but not on juridical declarations. That means:
First, in a society’s culture and psychology a moral worldview basis should appear in which the ownership on the collectively used means of production is understood as public irrespective of its legal form. And only after it the domination of public ownership de facto will express itself in the practice of controlling the society’s multiindustrial production and consumption system and will legally ratify itself.
If there are juridical forms but no moral worldview basis then a “public” de jure property is doomed to be a de factoprivate property of a corporation of swindlers-administrators as it was mostly the case in the USSR in the course of its entire history though it was caused by different reasons in different periods.
Private property may be personal (family-clannish) as well as “elite”-corporate. And a corporation may have a legal form of a privileged class (nobility) or caste (merchant class in Russia) or it may not have such a form but act in a mafia-like manner (as bureaucracy in the USSR). In the case of private corporate property it may seem public and have the juridical status of a public one. In the USSR the «national» state and cooperative-kolkhoz property was public in form but because of “elite” exclusiveness and absence of social control over «nomenclature» bureaucracy, which over generations started reproducing itself as dynasties, all «public» property under the connivance of the rest of population became “elite”-corporate. This was a manifestation of an actual morality that dominated among the non-party population and in the Communist Party. During the «perestroika» and «democratization» this actual fact of life began to be legally substantiated [168].
Now when we have explained the question of ownership on the means of production and the difference between the public and private (personal and corporate) ownership on the means of production let us turn to H. Ford’s views on the capital.
«Capital that a business makes for itself, that is employed to expand the workman’s opportunity and increase his comfort and prosperity, and that is used to give more and more men work, at the same time reducing the cost of service to the public - that sort of capital, even though it be under single control, is not a menace to humanity. It is a working surplus held in trust and daily use for the benefit of all. The holder of such capital can scarcely regard it as a personal reward. No man can view such a surplus as his own, for he did not create it alone. It is the joint product of his whole organization» (put in bold type by the authors) (Ch. 13. “Why be Poor?”).
Thus it may be understood that though H. Ford is one of private owners and capitalists and a shareholder of «Ford Motors Company», he nonetheless actually perceives «Ford Motors» (and also all the other enterprises in the USA and in the world) as public property of all nations and mankind in general which is controlled personally by certain individuals. He does not go into the details of: who has been personally trusted to control this or that property by society; and who has usurped this right and misuses the legal right of private property by exploiting people’s ignorance and the vices of historically developing culture. But Henry Ford is a socialist by the essence of his words.
This explains the calumnious character of Marxist articles on H. Ford and his activity:
In the 20th century the psychical Trotskyites [169] and their backstage masters claimed to build not a really socialist society but a slave-owning system [170] on the basis of exclusive exploitation of the Ideas of socialism and justice in the social life organization in the form of Marxism-Leninism. That’s why socialist «Fordizm» was so dangerous for their project.
On the other hand H. Ford developed the socialist ideas freely and independently of contemporary Marxist rubbish, which was hardly known to him. This fact only speaks for his, in this case, common sense. Because the real socialism on the basis of Marxism - despite all the subjective desire of many true communists in and outside Russia to be faithful to Marxism - cannot be objectively realized for two fundamentally important reasons:
· Philosophy with its «basic» question “What is primary: matter or mind?” takes us away from solving the problem of predicting consequences to the end of choosing the best scheme of action which makes the fully functional control possible. In other words if you do not foresee all the possible actions and their consequences beforehand how can you consciously choose an action which leads to the realization of consciously set goals?
· Marxist «political economy» is based on fictional categories that cannot be evaluated in the process of economical activity. («Required product» and «surplus product» - could you distinguish them in the warehouse; «required working hours» and «surplus working hours» - could you find the watch that shows when the former end and the latter begin; «expenditure of labor» in many fields of activity used as a basis of price formation theory but which cannot be objectively measured; only idiots can agree that a bookkeeping operation of «value transfer» - when numbers are transferred from one account to another - ratified by the legislation in action is an objective economical process of transfer of objectively immeasurable value of means of production on the delivered product, etc.) As a result Marxist political economy cannot have anything in common with bookkeeping (socialism - according one of Lenin’s aphoristic definitions - is «accounting and control»). The latter is a basis of control on the micro-level of economy and gives rise to statistics that is essential for analysis, modeling planning and control on the macro-level of multiindustrial production and consumption system [171].
Let us return to the part of H. Ford’s book where we have stopped. H. Ford continues:
«The owner’s idea may have released all the energy and direction, but certainly it did not supply all the energy and direction. Every workman was a partner in the creation. No business can possibly be considered only with reference to to-day and to the individuals engaged in it. It must have the means to carry on. The best wages ought to be paid. A proper living ought to be assured every participant in the business - no matter what his part. But, for the sake of that business’s ability to support those who work in it, a surplus has to be held somewhere. The truly honest manufacturer holds his surplus profits in that trust. Ultimately it does not matter where this surplus be held nor who controls it; it is its use that matters.
Capital that is not constantly creating more and better jobs is more useless than sand. Capital that is not constantly making conditions of daily labor better and the reward of daily labor more just, is not fulfilling its highest function. The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more service for the betterment of life» (Ch. 13. “Why be Poor?”).
What conclusion may be drawn from the last two paragraphs though H. Ford himself did not make it? - If it is said that «No business can possibly be considered only with reference to to-day and to the individuals engaged in it. It must have the means to carry on. (…) Capital that is not constantly creating more and better jobs is more useless than sand. Capital that is not constantly making conditions of daily labor better and the reward of daily labor more just, is not fulfilling its highest function. The highest use of capital is not to make more money «personally by his owner», but to make money do more service for the betterment of life «of everybody» then, as the proverb goes, having said “A” - say “B”. In particular:
As the juridical private capital in its essence and origin is public property and not personal or family property then its control must be handed over not to the juridical kin-heirs according to the right of succession or a portion out described in a will as it takes place in case of private property. But it must be handed over to the best in moral and professional qualities from the circle irrespective of his social background and post occupied by him whether he is an owner, chairman of the directors’ board, Chief Executive, top-manager, etc.
Though H. Ford himself handed the management of «Ford Motors» to his relatives [172] he was ready to eliminate that rule and thus turn a juridical private ownership over means of production into public ownership on paper and in practice.
Only if the right of enterprise management is inherited by the most deserving of candidates - irrespective of his right to inherit a family property of the firm founder as a relative «capital that is employed to expand the workman’s opportunity at the same time reducing the cost of service to the public, even though it be under single control, is not a menace to humanity».
However let us again stress that the right of public ownership on the means of production originates from the world understanding of separate individuals as well as society on the whole and cannot be realized legislatively in an opposition to the dominating morality and world understanding [173].
First, in a society’s culture and psychology a moral worldview basis should appear in which the ownership on the collectively used means of production is understood as public irrespective of its legal form and only after the domination of public ownership de facto will express itself in the practice of management of a social multiindustrial production and consumption system and will legally ratify itself.
Only when in society’s culture there is such moral worldview basis stable in succession of generations is it possible to remove inappropriate administrators from management on the initiative from below or to hand over these posts to the most deserving by the firm’s head.
Yet such a basis did not exist neither in the USA in times of H. Ford nor in Russia by 1917. It was not formed in the USSR either where public, especially in post-Stalin times, was considered by the majority as «belonging to nobody» which anybody can disrupt to use for his personal or family needs. As a result became possible a breakdown of the USSR and the privatization of «soviet heritage» by the financial and stock exchange speculators and marauders under the connivance and accomplice of the remaining part of population less successful in deceit and machination.
If the majority of the society understood that the public property is a personal property of everyone, that it is a part he himself affords (directly or indirectly through the institutions of his own state) out of his exclusively personal or family use to the public use of more or less broad circle of people, - the breakdown of the USSR and the privatization of the «soviet heritage» would have been impossible. The attempts to act in this direction would have been considered by the politically active part of population an expression of mere insanity or an intentional aggression of exponents of degrading parasitic morality, and would have been opposed in advance by effective counteraction on the part of the true, i.e. conceptually powerful Bolshevik communists.