第21章 克里姆林宫：铁幕1985第十七章「苏维埃篇」马尔萨斯世界（2/2）

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Since the beginning of human history for agricultural farming, human beings have been living in the Malthusian world of Malthusian traps.

The concept of a Malthusian trap is that there is a resource that is limited. The population grows until it grows large enough that it begins to consume the resource. None could escape for thousands of years prior to the Industrial Revolution. It was not until the Industrial Revolution that the Malthusian world of smallholder economies was freed from the Malthusian trap that dictated that pre-industrial countries with predominantly smallholder economies could not accept excessive population growth.

The Industrial Revolution allowed for the creation of a global economy, one of excess, where more goods and services could be produced than what was needed. This excess has been growing exponentially since the Industrial Revolution.

In the world of smallholder societies, technological development would have brought wealth and population growth, but in the Malthusian world, both the wise and the foolish rulers chose to restrict technological development and universal education.

The point is that technological development in a Malthusian world dominated by a smallholder economy does not improve the standard of living of the population. Adding more people to a small farming economy would only create instability. Instability leads to famine, death, and war.

The Industrial Revolution created a technological explosion that has allowed humanity to escape the Malthusian trap.

If we graph the economic development and population growth of ancient regimes, excluding external factors and transient regimes (e.g. foreign invasion and coup d\u0027état). We can find that the graphs will show as curved movements. Where there was a spike in population, a famine occurred. Where there was a spike in economic development, a war occurred.

The warring and famine plagued the world until the Enlightenment. The Industrial Revolution, which began in the 1700s, created enough wealth to halt the Malthusian growth.

The Industrial Revolution also created the modern world. The mass production of goods led to a consumer society, a society where people buy more than what they need with the money they earn.

Malthusian world was and continues to be a world of Malthusian traps where human beings are trapped. Technological development is laddered, pre-industrial technological development leads to instability, but in the post-industrial world it is the opposite, each country has to keep developing technology to stay in the race for survival.

If we organize the salaries and population of the pre and post industrial world into two charts, we will find that salaries in the pre-industrial agricultural world were almost constant while the population showed cyclical fluctuations.

Why is this important? It means that human beings are not necessarily better off now than in the past. Whereas the graphs in the industrialized world show a stepwise and rapid increase in salaries and population, the graphs of the older world show a more fluctuating pattern. This could be due to the chaotic and turbulent nature of a smallholder economy that was based on the principles of self-sufficiency and austerity.

The question that needs to be answered is whether or not there are any significant differences between the way human beings in the old world and the new world lived.

Is the old world really old world or is it just old? It is the latter that you have to look at.

In the context of this question, old world just means pre-industrial. By that, you are asking if there were substantial differences in the way that people lived before the industrial revolution compared to the way that people live now.

In answering this question, you are looking at the historical process that has occurred over the past two centuries.

When thinking about how two eras differ, it is important to look at the differences in perspective.

If economic growth and bank interest rate fluctuations in the post-industrial world were also charted, we would find that market economies exhibit cyclical economic crises.

The reason for this is simple, if there were no markets, there would be no fluctuations, and thus no economic crises.

What we are looking at here is a change in perspective.

The oddity of the Soviet planned economy is that it is perfectly capable of producing excess products so that the people no longer stand in line, but in order to prevent the contradiction between supply and demand caused by overproduction to come to an economic crisis, and the initiative of the government to completely control industrial production, but the people\u0027s demand for consumer goods can not be completely subject to the material balance sheet and planning statements, there are bound to be many factors that lead to demand outside the plan, which leads to excess demand will have to waiting in line and waiting for production to be available.

It was not that the Soviet Union, with its complete industrial system, was unable to provide its people with an abundance of consumer goods, but that it was simply stubbornly fighting the economic crisis. If it had given up fighting the economic laws and let the civilian economy produce more consumer goods and food or temporarily imported consumer goods and luxuries from the international market as Russia did in reality, would the queuing problem have been so severe?

It caused the Soviet Union to be able to produce tanks by the tens of thousands, bullets and rifles by the billions, and nuclear warheads by the tens of thousands, but to be unable to let the population enjoy sufficient consumer goods. The queuing was a problem because the production and supply was not flexible enough to respond to the demands of the civilian sector.

When the planned economy built in the Soviet Union was not a planned economy with the participation of workers and peasants, as was the ideal in communist theory, but a planned economy with uniform distribution by government bureaucrats (the ideal participatory economy would have been met by the self-regulation of production by workers, but this would have required sufficient democracy to do so; I am talking about the democracy of workers, i.e., the democracy of workers having the ability to elect fairly, one person, one vote, in each enterprise and factory I mean the democracy of the worker, the economic democracy of the worker who can fairly elect all managers in every enterprise and factory, one person, one vote, and the political democracy of the worker who can fairly elect all executives in politics, one person, one vote. Unfortunately, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union has done so. It was impossible for the members of the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve to be elected by the employees of the banks, and it was impossible for the members of the Politburo of the Soviet Union to be elected by the people; both the United States and the Soviet Union were authoritarian states pretending to be democratic. (Only, the former was a bourgeois dictatorship and the latter was a bureaucratic dictatorship, that\u0027s all.)

Thus, the Soviet-style command-planned economy that developed from the unitary economy was necessarily homogeneous and lagging. For example, under the industrial production chain of the command-planned economy, the decision on whether or not to build a new factory was made long before any decisions were made regarding the design of the factory, the process to be used in its production, or the people who would work in it. If sufficient funding is available, a prototype of the planned factory will be constructed, and the economic department will estimate the expected cost of production and the demand for the finished good, deciding whether or not to build the planned factory.

And even if the food factory was built, even if labor productivity under the neglect of slack, the production environment of the state-owned enterprises of the Soviet planned economy dictated product homogeneity and the inability to innovate. The market was a chaotic and unpredictable system of supply and demand, one that did not easily lend itself to the production of a single product. But under the planned economy of the Soviet Union, the production sector would judge that only one type of product was needed to supply the population with the same type of product. (The most typical example is Coke; the Soviet Union introduced only Pepsi before Gorbachev\u0027s reforms, and Pepsi monopolized the Soviet market, so it was impossible to find a bottle of Coca-Cola in the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era. (Not to mention, jeans and rock records.)

Therefore, in this case lags and shortages are bound to exist. Product supply and demand are not medical services, and no matter how fast and hard-working the Soviet production sector and laborers are, it is impossible to meet the needs of all citizens for vehicles, housing, and necessities in the same way that the Soviet Union\u0027s developed medical system did. It was also impossible to deal with the planned economic information transfer instantly with the same productivity and arithmetic power as in the 20th century. If, with the resources and computing networks and speed of information dissemination of the later era, the construction of an information-based planned economy might be able to solve the shortage problem. (Soviet scientists hope to build OGAS system part of the concept in the twenty-first century market economy is now realized, such as the supply chain system. But in the end, it is difficult to build an automated economic system beyond a specific industry - nationwide. Because, it is not a technical problem, but will affect many things and many people\u0027s interests. (Only a country willing to touch interest groups or a strong government with organizational power determined to do so can do so.)

The optimization of statistical planning systems and the simplification of statistical methods by data-based network systems are likely to help governments manage highly centralized and controlled planned economies. Daily calculations can be made more accurate with less manpower, and the efficiency and budget allocation can be greatly improved. And workers are not likely to use their free time to study on their own to improve their thinking and develop professional skills and life hobbies under the intense working hours.

(This is a factor, but far from a critical one. The Soviet centrally planned economy was inefficient but stable. The key mistake was for Gorbachev to undertake both market and political reforms, thus triggering a recession while holding the Soviet union states accountable for it and allowing previously repressed nationalist sentiments to be asserted. Andropov planned to carry out the latter before the former, but he died too soon. Moreover, the market reforms he advocated were bound to fail; all the countries of the Cold War socialist camp could carry out market economy reforms, but only the Soviet Union could not. (Because only the Soviet Union - the leader of the socialist camp - could completely threaten the economic system dominated by the U.S. There was no possibility that the U.S. would not take advantage of the situation and destroy the Soviet economy.)

There is no perfect economic system, market economy and planned economy are just different ways of functioning. A planned economy has no economic crisis but uses efficiency and innovation in exchange for stability, inefficiency, waste of resources in construction, and in general no incentive for companies to innovate. A market economy ensures economic growth and technological innovation through healthy competition among firms, but has periodic economic crises, similar to the population size of the Malthusian world. Considering the 1987 U.S. stock market crash and the 2008 financial crisis, a third economic crisis should occur in the years after 2021.

After all, there is no perfection and everything must be reformed.

Classes are groups with intrinsic tendencies and interests different from those of other groups in society, and are the basis for fundamental antagonisms between these groups. For example, maximizing wages and benefits is in the maximized interests of workers, while maximizing profits at the expense of wages and benefits is in the maximized interests of capitalists, which leads to contradictions within capitalist society.

The entire society flows resources and wealth to the rich, and the rich get good and free services. All society discusses not the future development of mankind and the construction of society and knowledge, but individual wealth. Both the rich and the workers are squeezed by the consumer capital. The rich need to maintain their social status and economic capacity constantly, and if the rich lose the possibility of profitability they will be abandoned by everyone. The laborer, on the other hand, is exploited and oppressed.

Any political system, any legal system, is ultimately run by specific people. Therefore, under the free market, wealth will only be gathered more and more in the upper social class, which is the natural law of the market economy and is not transferred by human will.

In the process of social class game, when the economy grows at a high rate, the workers and elites can reach a social consensus to perpetuate or hide the social conflicts. But when economic growth is stagnant and all social contradictions are revealed and intensified, the gains from killing each other are far more beneficial than the win-win cooperation...

When finance uses activities to lend to workers for consumption, thus postponing the economic crisis until the workers default; the role of the technological revolution is to ensure high economic growth, so that workers\u0027 wages rise long in economic development to ensure the ability to repay, continuing the point of economic crisis further and further back in time. Even if this configuration was once stable for a long time, the marginal consumption of human beings and the speed of technological ladder development do not allow endless economic growth, the economic crisis will still come in the form of workers can not pay back the subprime mortgage crisis.

Many countries called \"revisionist\" are characterized by a more \"bureaucratic monopoly capitalism\" in their economic form, i.e., members of the ruling party often receive more salary, real estate, etc., when they get a position; at the same time, they also set up large and small companies for business activities or directly hold a position of At the same time, they also set up large and small companies to carry out business activities or directly hold top positions such as chairman of so-called state-run enterprises. Does this have anything to do with true Marxism or socialism?

No, it\u0027s market capitalism.

The history of the world is punctuated by grand narratives, great ideas that have galvanized human action and imagination.