Friday, January 3, 2014

Cromwell and Stalin? No please!



I wanted to squeeze in one-post two topics, but both topics turned to be too big, so I separated them;

Matter fact it is also the end of the year…

2013 did not bring much of positive changes…
On the surface it looks like the end of long lasting economic crisis, but in general nothing significant happened to address the issue…

Still far too many people are suffering, far too many children dying of hunger and the world is also far form general economical or political stability and peace… And our goodfella Barack is still playing spy games in the oval office.

I would call the year of 2013 as the year of manipulations…

So let us go back to our original topics:


In our previous post about Bismarck and Angela we have mentioned the Marshall plan; 





In addition, a head of a big and powerful state recently 
compared Stalin to Cromwell... I

 would somehow disagree... So let's see why?














It is obvious, that after the Second World War the western part of Europe started to develop with amazing speed; but it is not so obvious, that it was the influence of the Marshall plan alone… Or might be something else;



For comparison we can take Spain. Due to Franco regime, Spain was excluded from this. But what have happened, that after a slow start, Spain managed to produce in period of 1959-1974 the second highest economic growth rate in the world. Second after Japan.

And we also want to see what happened to the “other bloc”.

Yes, the COMECON was formed and it was meant as an economic tool. I have tried to find some more or less realistic analysis of those times – I mean about the Eastern par of Europe…

It looks like we shall have to struggle with the western clichés for a longer period. Most of the works I have found are still demonising that era and looks more, like a cold war propaganda tool, than some scientific work.




It happened to me to live or to visit several countries of the Eastern Block, and it is might possible to prove to the generations born after 1985 (those, who could not really have any live memories about those times), that everything was wrong, people were starving and stupid, but this would be far from the reality. I also had some base for comparison with the "West" during the 80's.

In fact the so called “Eastern Block” lived its particular life, there were better and worst performers… Some places people lived in moderate welfare and for sure at some places people had to suffer a lot.

There was no one single “economic” or even not one “political” model for those countries, even the western propaganda tried to present them as one place to be hated.

It is also very much true, that the 90’s have found those countries partly in bad economic shape, however the big changes in the eastern block were mainly motivated by politics and less by bad economic situation;

In general the “Eastern Block” philosophy was, that the state provides its people with growing living standards and the people do not mind to live in separation and with limited rights for freedom. This scheme was the one fall apart in the 90’s…

Why we talk about all this?

As it is a general view, that the so called “socialist” economic model is not working… That the western economies have outperformed the “Eastern Block”…

So it would be logical, that after the 90’s all those economies in transition would show much better results, then before, you know, during those very bad socialist times…

But this did not really happened…




Most of the “Eastern Block” economies show some progress on paper, but even those, believed to be successful, are not really and not convincingly improved. In several former USSR states the situation till now is worst, than it was before the 1990’s, but we can also take as an example the former Yugoslavia, where the majority of the member states are still far behind the level of the period before the “transition”…

The Elbe River

“The Elbe is one of the major rivers of Central Europe. It rises in the Krkonoše Mountains of the northern Czech Republic before traversing much of Bohemia, then Germany and flowing into the North Sea at Cuxhaven, 110 km northwest of Hamburg.” (Wikipedia)

The Elbe River has in many ways not only a geographical, but also a very much significant geopolitical and economical influence;

The last “division by the Elbe River was drawn by this famous handshake… Marking the end of the Second World War in Europe.

But Elbe was for thousands of years a natural border… From the times of the Roman Empire, through the European invasion of Mongols and later during the division of the German states and through Napoleon wars…

Economically and geopolitically Western Europe is what is west of that river…

The rest we can call Central, or Central East or East, I mean Europe… Depending on what we are talking about… But the fact remains fact… The economical development went different way on the two sides of that river…

So take a look on this map and we shall stop here for sometimes;

At this moment we need to take a look on some further definitions;


Feudalism – this term is used as historical, political also as an economical term… More we look into different definitions more we get confused…
All in all there is one significant point – in a feudal society, the highest power (the king or the emperor) delegates certain powers to the members of the society in exchange for loyalty and support;

Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations (1776) used the term 'feudal system' (a phrase he coined) to describe a form of production governed not by market forces but by coercion and force. For Smith the 'feudal system' was the economic exploitation of peasants by their lords, which led to an economy and society marked by poverty, brutality, exploitation, and wide gaps between rich and poor. This economic definition of 'feudalism' found its way into the writings of Karl Marx. Across the channel Enlightenment philosophes, notably Montesquieu, also saw the 'feudal law' as a system of exploitation. For them 'feudalism' meant the aggregate of seigneurial privileges and prerogatives, which could be justified neither by reason or justice. When the National Constituent Assembly abolished the 'feudal regime' in August 1789 this is what they meant.




Manorialism, or seigneurialism, describes the aristocracy's political, judicial, and economic power over the peasantry. It is both a mode of production and a system of political control.

Serfdom is the status of peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism. It was a condition of bondage or modified slavery, which developed primarily during the High Middle Ages in Europe and lasted in some countries until the mid-19th century.

Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the Lord of the Manor who owned that land, and in return were entitled to protection, justice and the right to exploit certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence. Serfs were often required not only to work on the lord's fields, but also his mines, forests and roads. The manor formed the basic unit of feudal society and the Lord of the Manor and his serfs were bound legally, economically, and socially. Serfs formed the lowest social class of feudal society. (Wikipedia)


But how this worked in simple words?

The owner of every land is the King or the Emperor. Out of his will he grants land to the people loyal to him. Those people share further the land and the income from the land. The land is ruled by those empowered by the emperor and the serfs (peasants) cultivate it. Even the aristocratic classes were freed all over Europe, but East of Elbe the aristocrats considered themselves (with rare exempts) the slaves of the King (or the Emperor) and they also considered the serfs as their slaves.


And now let me remind you of Elbe River!

Manorialism and Serfdom had declined since the 13th century West from the Elbe and the same Serfdom intensified and spread till 18th century East of Elbe…

We can say it even remained in its original form in several places till the 19th century…

Dates of emancipation from serfdom in various countries

           Scotland: neyfs (serfs) disappeared by late 14th century, but heritable jurisdictions survived until 1747

           England & Wales: obsolete by 15th-16th century,

           Wallachia: officially ended in 1746 (land reforms in 1864)

           Moldavia: officially ended in 1749 (land reforms in 1864)

           Savoy: 19 December 1771

           Austria: 1 November 1781 (first step; second step: 1848)

           Bohemia: 1 November 1781 (first step; second step: 1848)

           Baden: 23 July 1783

           Denmark: 20 June 1788

           Helvetic Republic: 4 May 1798

           Batavian Republic (Netherlands): constitution of 12 June 1798 (in theory; in practice with the introduction of the French Code Napoléon in 1811)

           Serbia: 1804 (de facto, de jure in 1830)

           Schleswig-Holstein: 19 December 1804

           Swedish Pomerania: 4 July 1806

           Duchy of Warsaw (Poland): 22 July 1807

           Prussia: 9 October 1807 (effectively 1811-1823)

           Mecklenburg: October 1807 (effectively 1820)

           Bavaria: 31 August 1808

           Nassau: 1 September 1812

           Governorate of Estonia: 23 March 1816

           Württemberg: 18 November 1817

           Governorate of Livonia: 26 March 1819

           Hanover: 1831

           Saxony: 17 March 1832

           Hungary: 11 April 1848

           Croatia: 8 May 1848

           Austrian Empire: 7 September 1848

           Bulgaria: 1858 (de jure by Ottoman Empire; de facto in 1880)

           Russian Empire: 19 February 1861 (see Emancipation reform of 1861 and the state owned at 1866)

           Iceland: 1894 (completely)

           Bosnia and Herzegovina: 1918

           Afghanistan: 1923

 

However there is a big difference on the East and the West side of River Elbe… On the West, the serfdom practically died out due to the industrial revolution… While on the East the emancipation was granted as a political response to revolutions, fights for independence or major unrests, natural disasters or combination of those;





The dates of abolishing the serfdom east of Elbe meant little in general… Technically the system of serfdom remained till the 1st World War. As there was no viable alternative to it… Especially not in the feudal or feudalistic societies in the region;

In general East from Elbe freeing the serfs was met with a confusion and absolute non-understanding.

(You can further read on Russian http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/634373 )



And we shall stop here again for a moment;

We need to go back to Marx… Yes, Karl Marx…

Together with Engels they have developed a theory, where the capitalist society will lead itself to the stage, where it comes to a conflict, which can be solved by a revolution;

‘What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers. Its fall, and the victory of the proletariat, are equally inevitable.’

The key to becoming the builder of a new society from being the subordinate class under capitalism is the proletariat’s revolutionary prowess. The changes in social human relations necessary for this transformation are dialectically united by revolutionary practice. As Marx put it in the Theses on Feuerbach:

The materialistic doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that therefore changed men are the product of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated ... The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionising practice.

The difficulties of a proletarian government will be not so much in the domain of property, but rather in that of production, and of overcoming human nature as shaped by the old society. The field in which the difficulties will be most acute will be that of work discipline. The workers work because of the discipline of hunger and the threat of the sack. Of course in an advanced stage of socialist society, where working hours will be reduced to a reasonable limit and the unpleasant aspects of the process of labour eliminated, where the workplace will be hygienic and attractive, where the monotony of labour will largely be done away with, where the material inducement will be lavish, workers will work from force of habit and from the desire to serve the needs of fellow human beings. But it will take a whole historical period to change labour from a burden to a joy. How will labour discipline, so necessary for the continuation of production, be established immediately after the social revolution, with the proletariat still affected by the customs of capitalism?”


They also predict a long way to the socialism as a long and more like a process of evolution of changing the society and the human nature;

Lenin in the meantime regarded imperialism as the chance for the developed nations to “corrupt” their workforce and meet some of their demand on the cost of exploiting the colonised territories.



So he came to a conclusion that the revolution will strike at the weakest countries. Such a country was Russia. However he estimated to use the capitalist (bourgeois-democratic) revolution as the star up for a proletarian revolution.

This sounds complicate, but it is in fact very simple – Lenin wanted to skip the “bourgeois” transitional period and the transformation of the feudalism and serfdom into capitalism, by directly capturing the power by the workers class.

He also expected the revolution to happen in not one, but several countries as a result of the crisis not only in Russia, but also in the majority of that time developed World.

However the first negative sign came from the western battlefields, where it tuned to be clear, that Germany instead of falling into revolution, still attacking the Russians.

Lenin signed a humiliating peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk to gain some time. He got not much, as right after the peace treaty was signed, the civil war started in Russia.

The civil war lasted till October 1922. However from 1920 it was clear, that the Bolsheviks are going to win.

From October 1917 till May 1918 Lenin started the economic part of the Revolution. Many say, that these measures, like the nationalisation of banks, industries and trade, lead to the civil war…

From our point of view we can only say, that it is not possible to speak about any kind of economic policy during a war, especially not during a civil war… So what triggered what is still not very much clear…

What we know, that Lenin pronounced the New Economic Policy (NEP) at March 21st 1921. We can regard this policy as the first non-wartime economic program.
It is in fact in line with the original Marxist theory and Lenin’s view on the transitional period leading to the Socialism.

The main point is, that Lenin himself repeated a number of times, that he cannot predict how the “socialism” will look like exactly and how long time it shall take to reach it… He expected at least one or two generations to work on this…

Do you still remember the date of abolishing the serfdom in Russia? So the wartime economy was an absolute copy of the serfdom, even it was harsher, than in the “old times”… Among other regulations the NEP intended to emancipate (again) the rural Russia.

Lenin died 3 years later, January 21st 1924.

Stalin (Iosip Vassarionovich Dzhugashvili) – took over the power – by eliminating all of his opponents – the most famous were  Leon Trockij and Nikolai Bukharin.


1928 marked the end of NEP and beginning of a new era of Neo-Serfdom or Neo Feudalism – called the collectivization; And the mechanism of 5 year plan economies.

Stalin was the best man for this – hard childhood, attending church school, at age of 21 he drops out of school and starts to read Lenin’s works… Joining the Bolsheviks at the age of 25. Robbing a bank in Tbilisi and then several times sent to Siberia. Supposed to be sent to fight in the First World War, but found not fit enough… Returning back to St. Petersburg in Marc 1917, right in the middle of the bourgeois revolution. Stalin came to the top of Bolshevik rule. He turned out to be one of the most hard line members of the Bolshevik political elite…

Why we are talking about this?

Very simple… Since the Russian revolution there is an ongoing debate about the Socialism – is it good or bad. A lot of debate and a lot of criticism…

However we can only imagine about what Marx, Engels and Lenin were talking and thinking about. As what was happening after 1928 has little to do with the kind of socialism they were dreaming about.

Iosif was a good pupil in the church school. He must have learned a lot about the best traditions of the Russian Feudal society.

What was the result?

One-person rule (himself), centralized government, feudalistic, paternal society. Classic pyramidal vassal based power scheme. Just they did not call them as Emperor and nobles, but they could be found as the new proletarian aristocracy… With practically the same levels of power sharing as in a classic feudal society;

Iosif listened Lenin, but not carefully enough, so he did not catch the point;

Lenin was the fierce enemy of feudalism in any form. He was against the whole concept and its participants. Lenin did not afraid of bourgeois system – he was confident, that it should lead to the socialism;

Iosip did not have that confidence – he believed in totalitarian scheme;

And we need to stop here for a moment…

Lenin was born in Astrakhan. The place itself is very much symbolic. Astrakhan is a port and trading city, practically the end point of the Silk Road. Vibrant, cosmopolitan, multinational, open and often rebel;

Lenin’s father was a second-generation freed serf. Educated in Kazan University and later teaching in Penza. Lenin’s mother was from German-Swiss, Jewish multinational, wealthy background. She learned German, English, French and Russian literature. Father after 10 years of marriage becomes noble after rewarded as a master of primary schools of the district;

The young Vladimir got classic education. He lost his father at age 16. He lost his fait in God at the same time and in general he become a confrontational character;

His brother at that time graduated with gold medal in St. Petersburg and got in touch with anti-monarchist liberal movements. First he was involved in public protests and soon he joined a socialist group organizing to assassin the Tsar. The plot was uncovered and his brother Alexander was sentenced to death and hanged in May 1887.

Lenin despite the loss of both, his father and older brother decided to study law in Kazan University; this is the start point of the young revolutionary… And it would need to have 3 more posts to go through Lenin’s life… You can read here about this:


Stalin was born in Gori (near todays Tbilisi, Georgia); His mother was a housekeeper, the father repaired shoes… Father was an alcoholic beating both him and his mother. The young Stalin was born with berth defect, later got smallpox leaving his face with scars and at age of 12 got an accident injuring his left arm;
Stalin got religious education up to university level; http://www.history.com/topics/joseph-stalin

The two persons have got absolutely different characters and motivations;

This in many ways influenced later the course of history;

Lenin’s main goal was to destroy the feudalism, including the monarchy with all its tributes. He has seen the church as the servant of the same system, so he also had its main target on them;

Stalin listened Lenin, but after his death he had no other alternative and no other knowledge, than to run into what he knew; A totalitarian dictatorship and creation of a new “religion” he called communist ideology;

Stalin was a classic dictator, with the worst personal characteristics; He did not trust or believe anyone, including his own family members; In the meantime he recognized the necessity of developing his country. So he went the ‘good old way”. He thrown back the countryside into the neo- or socialist type of serfdom and by any means started up a forced industrialisation.

In fact Stalin strongly believed, that the science and technology can be superior to the nature and by this it is possible to change anything in the World;

Stalin has also raised a cast of strong technocrats, loyal ideologists, scientists, banker and for sure, loyal artists;

You may ask – how this neo-serfdom could happen? After Lenin’s death Stalin ordered the program of “collectivisation” – all the agriculture had to be performed in “collectives”.  This meant the total destruction of the first market-oriented structure of wealthy farmers, the kulaks in the agrarian sector;

The financial system, the trade and the industry was already nationalised;

All the land, all he means of production – in general everything belongs to the state – the people have to give their workforce and loyalty. In return the state will take care of them. As in the classic serfdom the serfs (in our case the industrial and other workers and the peasantry) had no properties at all, they lived on the rented land or houses, they were not allowed to move freely and they had limited rights in case a dispute with the higher power.

A question emerges – if this is an outdated system – how come Russia still managed to grow and to produce, to win a war and after that to become a super-power!

Stalin from his early childhood learned one very strong motivation.

The fear.

Fear from his father, from his principles in the school and university. Unfortunately he could not see the films of Hitschkock. So

He built a system, with

Total control

and the total fear. Fear from your boss, fear from your employee, fear from your colleague and even fear from your children;

The technocratic invent of planned and 100% regulated economy was the best tool of the follow up and the instrument of the implementation was the fear.

Stalin instead of leading his nation to the socialism, choose to reform the feudalism. The economic system he created we can call the

 “fearonomy”…

Besides the fear motivation, in addition he developed at the start of Second World War the Russian Nationalism, which he named Patriotism.

In fact the idea came from the Napoleon invasion, when the Russian peasants (serfs) choose to fight against Napoleon (who by the way promised to liberate them) and to protect the serfdom, the Tsar, the Monarchy and even their own rulers. As we know, the patriot idea worked again.











And you may ask – what happened to those other states East of Elbe River?


After the First World War, the map of  Central Europe was radically changed… After the fall of Austria-Hungarian state, new countries were formed. Majority of those countries were Monarchies, with a lot of remains of feudalism; some “bourgeois” or market elements started to be applied and practiced, but in general there was no time for radical changes. Between the two World Wars the Great Depression destroyed whatever would start to develop;



But this is not the end of the story – the famous handshake at the Elbe River we mentioned at the beginning of this post shaped the fait of most of those nations;

After the Second World War the neo-feudal “fearonomy” system was applied in most of those countries.

How successful it was?

Stalin himself admitted in 1937 at the annual congress of factory directors, that the existing system is not working properly and a reform is needed to increase the motivation of the people, reduce the unnecessary waste, increase the efficiency of using the national resources; But then there was no further steps, as Stalin drowned himself in the Winter War with Finland (at winter 1939) and later the War Communism known from 1918 Civil War was applied after Germany invaded Russia at 1941.


At East of Elbe, the introduction of the system caused mass revolts in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. (1956, 1968, 1982)…

Economically Tito’s Yugoslavia created the most successful system. However this system was created to differentiate from Stalin and Russia. The rest was following the main "guidelines" set by the USSR, but each made their own specific approaches to the system.. All in all among the more successful were Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the DDR. Albania and Romania considered as a total failure.. Albania not only copied, but developed into a more radical system of neo-feudalism, than the stalinist model used to be, while Romania thought to be a "softer" version of the same. Poland, Bulgaria were in the middle group... (you can see for your reference the graph at the beginning of this post)


And now we come back to our original question.

What is going on with the economies East of Elbe River?

Why no major improvements, where is the dynamism? The prosperity? The famous efficiency of the market economies?

I was watching a EU official talking about the entry of the European “Eastern Block” countries. He said, that the institutions are there; the mechanisms are there, but still the people in there thinking different. The same systems and institutions working in other parts of Europe, simply do not work the same way in that region…

So why?

I am sure you could guess – because the roots of the feudal system are still deeply in there…

So we need to go back to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Karl Marx… And we need to finish the process-started West of Elbe River in 13th Century.

Destroy forever every trace of serfdom and feudalism!  

 Not only as institution, but also as a form of mentality, philosophy and everyday approach to the life situations. Including the paternalism and the thousands of forms of the corruption especially the one made of influence and power.

When the last trace of the feudalism is destroyed, than we can expect some more advance movement in those economies… And do not be too much optimistic – it shall take 1-2 and may be even 3 generations to “clean up” that…

However the roots of feudalism are very much strong and most of the time they sit very nicely hidden in different kind of transformed forms of existence… And it is still lot to do towards the East of Elbe.

It might sounds funny, but the West already applied half of the statements of the Communist Manifesto and if we read carefully the works of Lenin, than he for example proposed to the Bolshevik state exactly what is applied for the 2008 financial crisis – the control of the Banks… And creating a Central Bank – what is EU talking about now?

For the Western philosophers and economists it was easy to make some propaganda remarks, that all the idea of Engels, Marx and Lenin have died out… Fortunately not… Just need to take a careful look around…

I remember the Western Nations, when they celebrated the triumph over the Communism during the fell of Berlin Wall and the socialist countries regimes…

Mistake – there was no communism and there was no socialism – what collapsed was the neo-feudalism…




The celebration is ok, as most of the people were celebrating, but we should be always aware of our real situation to be able to go further. From wrong findings we shall always make wrong conclusions…






So Mr. Cromwell can you choose which one?

- Stalin or Lenin?




















Noted Mr. Cromwell - I would choose the same guy....








And I let you think about this…


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