Sorry for my pretty late reaction, honorable ladies and gentlemen, but this week is completely fulfilled with different professional obligations. But, never mind that – let’s go to our slightly irrupted topic!
It is just the evidence that multinational states collapse as a rule.
Excuse me for my interference, but not necessarily, honorable Mr. Kato – Switzerland still represents a bold example that country that contains more than one national entity is not obligatorily susceptible to different nationalist challenges from within its own borders, especially if societal groups contained by the state do have an explicit and definitive supra-national identification.
…this phenomenon will soon disappear. Communism is dead.
Not inevitably, my dear Mr. Kato. Since he came down from the trees, man has faced the problem of survival not as an individual, but as a member of a social group. His continued existence is testimony to the fact that he has succeeded in solving the problem, but the continued existence of want and misery, even in the richest of nations, is evidence that his solution has been, at best, a partial one. Yet man is not to be severely censured for his failure to achieve a Paradise on Earth. It is hard to wring a livelihood from the surface of this planet. It is only because man is a socially cooperative creature that he has succeeded in perpetuating himself at all.
But the very fact that he has to depend on his fellow man has madethe problem of survival extraordinarily difficult. Man is not an ant, conveniently equipped with an inborn pattern of social instincts. On the contrary – he is pre-eminently endowed with a fiercely self-centered nature. If his relatively weak physique forces him to seek cooperation, his untamed unconscious drives constantly threaten to disrupt his social working partnerships.
In early societies the struggle between aggression and cooperation is taken care of by the environment – when the specter of starvation looks a community in the face the pure need for self-preservation pushes society to the cooperative completion of its daily tasks. But in an advanced community, this tangible pressure of the environment is lacking. When man no longer works shoulder to shoulder in tasks directly related to survival, when tree quarters or more of the population never touches the tiled earth, enters the mines, or builds something with its own hands, the perpetuation of the human animal becomes a remarkable social feat.
So remarkable, in fact, that society’s existence hangs by a hair. A modern human community is at the mercy of thousand dangers: if its farmers should fail to plant enough crops, if its railroad men should take into their heads to become bookkeepers or its bookkeepers should decide to become oceanologists, if too few should offer their services as miners, farmers, candidates for engineering degrees, nuclear physicists… in a word, if any of a thousand intertwined tasks of society should fail to get done, modern industrial life would soon become hopelessly disorganized. Every day the human community faces the possibility of breakdown – not from the forces of nature, but from sheer human unpredictability.
Classicistic wisdom claims that development of an astonishing game in which society assures its own continuance by allowing each individual to do exactly as he sees fit – providing that he follows a central guiding rule, will be sufficient to resolve the aforementioned problem. The name of the game is the market economy, and the rule is deceptively simple: each should do hat was to his best monetary advantage. In the market economy the lure of the gain steers each man to his task. And yet, although each was free to go wherever his acquisitive nose directs him, the interplay of one man against other results in the necessary tasks of society getting done.
Unfortunately, it is by no means clear that all the jobs of the society – the dirty ones as well as the plush ones – will be actually done, or that unequal access to productive resources will be able to assure necessitated degree of production, or that system will allow to all its members to play the game on the equal basis for valued rewards. Even today millions of people, in practically all parts of the world, have found reason to complain about the shape of their lives, and not a few of them have, from time to time, set up some sort of social movement, of protest, or reform to change existing societal fabric. Throughout history there have been men and women who imagined different societal alternatives, who thought about restructuring their societies in terms that they conceived of as better than any current arrangements. When people become dissatisfied with their current situations, thus compelled to change them, there is a plethora of alternative courses of action that are completely open. Different forms of more egalitarian social movements are then, at least sociologically, completely possible.
I don’t think one should take Soviet statistics as credible one. The fact is that
the Soviet Union was not able to satisfy its own needs in food-stuffs in the following decades after collectivisation.
Well, fortunately we do have some highly credible American sources. So here they are:
Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy, by Sherman Kent [third edition] – (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1963) – p. 261
The crux of the agricultural problem was not the collectivization, but productivity per acre, deeply dependant upon adequate mechanization and chemization of agriculture. Agricultural corporations - the ultimate goal of the Soviet Union in farming production - actually represented a direct copy of the highly inventive American organizational patent from 1932, aimed to handle the giant farms as specific factories, with enclosed production and different “inputs” (such as pesticides, feed, fertilizer, and fuel) and “outputs” (corn, chickens, pigs, and so forth). The goal was to increase yield and decrease costs of production, typically by exploiting economies of scale, with factual employment of workers-like, wage-earning personal of different profiles (harvesters, drivers, veterinarians, manual workers, accountants, etc.). This goal transformed the Soviet countryside from millions of small peasant holdings to a consolidated pattern of fewer than 50.000 centrally controlled operating units.
Despite significant transformations in early 1970’s, the bulk of the Soviet agricultural production represented a direct copy of the American intensive agricultural schematics, with some 26.000 giant farms – averaging 14.750 hectares (36.000 acres), plus so called state farms with average 6070 hectares (15.000 acres) occupying 97% of Soviet farmland. Some 38 million private plots of farm and city families made up the remaining 3 %.
Constant lack of sizable capital inputs for adequate machinery and chemicals (estimated lack of tractors for adequate soil preparation in 1956 was 200.000 units over 65 HP!) as well as ideologically driven abhorrence toward applied genetics in hybrid seeds production actually represented the main causes for the misbalances in the Soviet agricultural production.
International economics in the first half of the XX century were dominated by the brake in the fundamental unity of the old, known world, and the rise of two sharply polarized social and productive systems each of which was all but controlled by a giant. Not since the apogee of the Imperial Rome has any one sovereign community in the Western World risen to a position of such overwhelming superiority as the United States. Even Britain at the time of her industrial and commercial supremacy a hundred years ago never achieved such preponderance of power. And at the opposite pole the Soviet Union has an even more crushing power. The USSR has, with hardly any outside help, in merely 25 years of unparalleled effort not merely transformed itself from a mainly primitive peasant economy into the second largest Industrial Power equipped with every miracle of science and technology – from jet engines to hydrogen bombs – but initiated a completely new system of economic organization at fundamental variance with what was before. By her exertions USSR has proved the possibility of the conscious planning of supra-national economic destinies. The vast effort required and the constant, historically confirmed fear of armed attack led to policies – indeed to the rise of a whole system – which evoked apprehension, disapproval and hatred abroad.
Behind these struggles and antagonisms there were looms in both political spheres, with a fundamental problem of dealing with production, with transformation of primitive farming into an efficient provider of food for the growing population of both East and West. The old Malthusian problem of over-population and the forcing-down of living standards was once again posed for the majority of the human race.
Woytinsky and Wojtynsky: “World Population and Production”, New York, 1953
Sorry, honorable ladies and gentlemen - forced break of the page, the text i have entered is too long (12.745 characters)… to be continued.:roll:
