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14УДК 316.334.2 © П.И. Осинский
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ОСАДНАЯ ЭКОНОМИКА КАК ИНСТИТУЦИОНАЛЬНЫЙ ПРЕДШЕСТВЕННИК ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОГО СОЦИАЛИЗМА
Государственный социализм имел мало общего с идеей безгосударственного эгалитарного коммунализма К. Маркса. В то же время, его создатели приняли на вооружение немало принципов, заимствованных у модели германской экономики времен Первой мировой войны [1]. Германский военный социализм, в свою очередь, напоминал организационные формы, исторически практиковавшиеся в осажденных крепостях [2]. В средневековых городах, окруженных вражескими войсками, руководители реквизировали жизненно важные ресурсы и распределяли их поровну среди защитников крепости. Исследование нескольких таких эпизодов, приводимых в данной работе, дает основание утверждать, что социальная модель осажденной крепости может рассматриваться в качестве институционального предшественника государственного социализма.
Ключевые слова: государственный социализм, война, революция, осадное положение, осадная экономика.
P.I. Osinsky Boone
SIEGE ECONOMY AS AN INSTITUTIONAL PRECURSOR OF STATE SOCIALISM
State socialism had little in common with a model of stateless egalitarian communalism envisioned by Karl Marx. At the same time, its designers borrowed heavily from a model of a German state-controlled economy instituted during the First World War [1]. German war socialism, in turn, curiously resembled a form of organization historically employed in besieged fortresses [2]. In the medieval towns surrounded by the enemy troops commanders requisitioned war-related resources and rationed out these resources to the defenders. After examining few episodes of siege warfare, that study argues that social organization of besieged fortress may be viewed as a true institutional precursor of state socialism.
Keywords: state socialism, war, revolution, siege, siege economy.
One of the most remarkable phenomena of the twentieth century was emergence, existence, and demise of the state socialism in several countries of the Eastern Europe and East Asia. Among them, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China represented the largest and the most powerful nations. Ideologically, these regimes claimed to be materialization of a Marxian social project of the communist society. Such self-legitimization was partially justified. Both socialist superpowers, in accord with Marx's social ideal, eliminated capitalist exploitation and instituted collective ownership of the means of production. In other respects, however, the practice of real socialism contradicted some fundamental postulates of the Marxist theory. Specifically, Marx viewed communism as succeeding the capitalist mode of production at its highest stage of development. In reality, however, the communist revolutions triumphed in the backward, predominantly agrarian countries caught by the social and political cataclysms at the early stages of modernization. This leads us to a question: if it was not capitalism that «gave birth» to state socialism, what was its real «parent»?
This is not an idle question. Discussing organizational innovations, Padgett and Powell [3] had noted, «We economists, political scientists, and sociologists have many theories about how to choose alternatives, once these swim in our field of vision. But our theories have little to say about the invention of new alternatives in the first place». The origins of many institutional arrangements are still opaque to scholars although many of these arrangements are not new. Padgett and Powell argue that understanding of these origins requires a historical turn of mind: «Organizational genesis does not mean virgin birth. All new organizational forms, no matter how radically new, are combinations and permutations of what was there before. Transformations are what make them novel» [3].
Following a similar logic, this study suggests that state socialism represented a peculiar institutional adaption to the conditions of the total warfare of the first half of the twentieth century. Involvement in a modern war of attrition such as the First World War required establishing centralized allocation of war-related resources. A need for such mechanism was particularly strong among the continental «interior states» that found themselves isolated from the international markets and deprived of goods from overseas. Some of these states (such as Germany and Austria-Hungary) were able to institute the bureaucratic regulatory mechanisms «from above» and prolong their resistance. Some other states (such as Russia) proved unable to establish effective regulatory mechanisms. In this case, a society instituted such mechanism in a revolutionary way, «from below». In their design, modern command economies resembled social organization of a medieval fortress
besieged by enemy troops. The latter, I would claim, should be viewed as an actual institutional precursor of state socialism.
My argument proceeds from a premise that a key factor, which distinguished the socialist-type economies from the market economies was not a proportion of economic assets owned by the state (which varied) but the institutional environment in which economic actors operated. If economic actors functioned within a market environment and responded to price incentives, this was a market economy. If economic actors operated within an administered environment and followed directives of political actors, this was a command economy. The Soviet-type economies represented only a subtype of the command economies, in which most productive assets were socialized. Once this fact is established, examining institutional origins of state socialism becomes a plausible task. In order to do that, one needs to examine origins of the command economies.
Scholars argue that modern command economies or, at least major structural elements thereof, crystallized among the major belligerent powers in Europe during the First World War [4]. World War One, it was argued, represented a watershed in history of warfare [5]. When the conflict broke out, most European leaders anticipated a short and victorious campaign. No government was prepared to a stalemate at the front and such an enormous demand for weapons and munitions as it emerged in the fall of 1914. Confronted with a reality of a prolonged war of attrition, the European nations began reorganization of their economic and social institutions. The logic of the reorganization was generally the same: more state control, regulation, and regimentation [6]. The scope of state regulation, however, varied across countries. In a study of wartime economic mobilization among five nations -Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, and Russia - I examined policies of state regulation across four domains: munitions production, raw materials distribution, workforce mobilization, and allocation of provision. Four indicators of extensive state regulation had been used: cost-plus-profit arrangement in munitions production, centralized allocation of raw materials, compulsory mobilization of workforce, and state monopoly on grain
[7].
As I have found out, Great Britain was a nation, which was able to dispense with the most extreme forms of state regulation conducting economic mobilization largely within a framework of a liberal capitalist state. The Central Powers, Austria-Hungary and Germany, on the other hand, deployed the most extensive measures of war socialism. France and Russia represented intermediate cases (Table 1).
Table 1
Selected Measures of Economic Regulation among five European Nations, 1914-1918
Great France Russia Austria- Germany
Britain Hungary
Cost-plus-profit No No No No Yes,
arrangement September
1915
Corporate alloca- No Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes,
tion of materiel October July October August
1917 1915 1914 1914
Compulsory allo- No No No Yes, Yes,
cation of workforce July December
1914 1916
State monopoly of No Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes,
grain November March February January
1917 1917 1915 1915
Why did Germany implement more extensive measures of «war socialism» than other countries? The answer is simple. The Allied naval blockade deprived this country of necessary imports and severely constrained opportunities for expanding domestic production to match the increased output of the Allies. To compensate the gap, Germany had to establish centralized bureaucratic institutions that monopolized all strategic resources. The market gave way to administrative regulation. Public managers and planners, not private entrepreneurs, came to occupy the command positions in the economic system.
Thus, most extensive measures of wartime regulation (i.e., command economies) were deployed in the nations (Germany and Austria-Hungary) where two structural conditions were present: (1) wartime isolation (i.e., blockade) of the national economies and, as a consequence, (2) shortage of vital resources that threatened with breakdown of the entire social and political order. In short, war socialism was a product of artificially created scarcity. But was it really a modern, twentieth-century phenomenon, as we used to think?
On February 28th, 1534, troops of Prince-Bishop Franz von Waldeck launched a siege of the Westphalian city Münster, which in preceding months became one of the centers of the Anabaptist agitation. After the siege was launched and the city was encircled by the Bishop's troops, Jan Matthias, the leader of the city community, declared that all property (including food, clothing, furniture and even bedding) should be placed in central de-
pots under the charge of seven officials. One official was responsible for meat, one for grain, one for beer, one for clothing, one for furniture, one for weapons, and one for valuables. All these goods were held in common. Because no private property remained, there was no need for money. All individuals who had previously worked for wages now contributed their labor to the common good; in return they received the food, clothing, and tools for free. All debts and financial obligations were cancelled [8].
After Matthias was killed in a sortie against the Bishop's troops, Jan Bockelson (better known as Jan van Leyden) became a commander-in-chief. He attempted to control everything that happened in the besieged community. The city council promulgated laws regulating such matters as animal husbandry, gardening, nail manufacture, fishing, gathering tin, lead, copper, and oil. Violations of the communal norms such as blasphemy, attempts to flee, impurity, avarice, theft, fraud, lying, slander, idle conversation, anger, envy, and disobedience to authority were now punishable by death. People were to dress modestly. Homes were to be left unlocked, doors ajar. Every meal was taken in common. The siege lasted fifteen months, until May of 1535, when troops of von Waldeck, finally seized the city and conducted a massacre of its remaining defenders [8].
Social organization of the Anabaptist Münster represented perhaps the most outstanding case in its kind but by no means an isolated case. Historically, centralization of resources, particularly food, was a common practice under such circumstances. In the Chinese medieval warfare, for example, commanders of the encircled cities would requisition rice to the public granaries and distribute it among the defenders [9]. In many episodes of the European wars of religion, such as the Siege of Sancerre (1573) and the Great Siege of Paris (1590), the municipal authorities rationed bread whereas religious houses were ordered to distribute food daily among the poor [10].
Although siege communalism (like one described above) was not an uncommon arrangement in the history of warfare, the scope of collectivist organization was limited to isolated urban communities. Such arrangements did not apply to the larger political-territorial entities. Only three centuries later modern territorial communities «caged» by the nationwide administrative institutions were able to replicate siege-like arrangements on a national scale. Four political developments had made such arrangements possible.
The first development was institutionalization of a territorial state as a dominant type of sovereignty. Until the mid-sixteenth century Europe represented an assortment of city-states, city-leagues, empires, theocracies, principalities, etc. [11]. The early modern military revolution had intensified interstate competition and involved rulers in extracting the means of war
from the population. Extraction and struggle over means of war provided advantage to the territorial states that could field standing armies and had access to large rural population and commercialized urban economies. The territorial sovereign states began to set the terms of warfare while their form became predominant one in Europe [12].
The second development was dramatic growth of the infrastructural power of the territorial states. According to Mann [13], «states began the modernization process as little more than elaborated networks of drill sergeants, recruiting officers, impressment gangs, and attendant tax officials». Once they were entangled in intense military-economic competition with their adversaries, the governments had to enhance their extractive capacity. The industrial revolution contributed immensely to this process. Some states sponsored and promoted railroad construction that widened markets and strengthened regional integration. Canals, roads, telegraph, postal service expanded transportation and communication networks. Public schools and mass newspapers helped to produce law-abiding citizens and disciplined recruits. Modern systems of policing and welfare programs allowed taming the «dangerous» classes and mitigating social unrest [14].
The third development was introduction of the universal conscription. First draft was conducted in France in August of 1793 when the French National Assembly «permanently requisitioned» all citizens for the national service. In the 1860-70s, after decades of experimenting with various forms of recruitment, all large European states, including Austria, Italy, Prussia, and Russia, were compelled to follow suit and institute the universal male conscription [15].
The fourth development was crystallization of the continental coalition alliances. Concerns over German military-economic advantage, which became manifest during the Franco-Prussian war prompted France and Russia to negotiate a military pact of mutual defense. Being challenged by the Germans in colonial matters, Great Britain joined the Entante cordiale. On the other hand, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy had formed the Triple Alliance. The contingent configurations of the coalition alliances made a situation of blockade and isolation within the continental system possible.
As stated above, nowhere governmental control during the First World War was as strong and comprehensive as in the wartime Germany. On the day of mobilization, the Prussian Law of Siege of 1851 was enacted in each army district into which the Empire was divided. The Reichstag passed an Enabling Act which became known as the Burgfrieden, an allusion to a social truce in the medieval fortress. In few months the government established strict control over entire German economy and workforce. A mammoth bureaucratic institution, the War Raw Materials Department (KRA) was
created for mobilization and allocation of war-related industrial resources. Later in war, a universal labor draft for civilians was instituted. After 1916, Germany was transformed into a compulsory economy (Zwangswirtschaft), in which market forces yielded to the rule of the state bureaucrats [16].
One of the key objectives of the German war-economic mobilization was centralization of food supply [17]. In few months after the outbreak of the war the Allied nations, one after another, banned exports of foodstuffs, forage and fertilizers. In response, Germany instituted a comprehensive state-directed system of supply and distribution of food. The Bundesrat declared a state monopoly on all grains in the country. By February 5, 1915 all owners of grain were obligated to declare and surrender their stocks of grain to the local authorities at the fixed prices. The flour, which was a property of the corporation, would be delivered to municipal authorities, army administrations and navy administration. The free trade of grain and flour was prohibited. Bread rationing was introduced in Berlin in January of 1915 and extended to the rest of the country in June; a ration card for bread allowed two kilograms of bread per person per week [18]. In 1915-1916 similar rationing schemes were introduced for other foods [19].
The measures of war socialism were not able to avert Germany's ultimate defeat but they allowed it to hold on for three and a half years in war against a far more powerful coalition. Two institutional features were particularly important for preserving the social order. First, economic regulation (including centralization of foodstuffs and rationing of consumption) ensured appearance of «equality of sacrifice», which mitigated class polarization threatening to undermine the social truce [18]. Second, the state was able to preserve its control over the army (and the weapons). When the Imperial Germany had to accept a defeat, the troops were able to contain and suppress radical uprisings.
What happened in the situations when the commanders of the besieged cities failed to ensure equality of sacrifice while a gap between the rich and the poor reached critical proportions? The uprising in Paris during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 provides an interesting example of such occurrence.
The Franco-Prussian war (1870-1871) turned out to be catastrophic for France. In early September of 1870, only a month and a half after beginning of the hostilities, the bulk of the French troops was defeated in Sedan. Emperor Napoleon III was taken a prisoner of war. After the news of the defeat of the army and fall of the monarch arrived to Paris, the Republic was proclaimed and the Government of National Defense, dominated by liberal republicans was formed. In meantime, the Prussian troops continued their ad-
vance westward and soon invested Paris launching a siege of the capital on September 20, 1870.
To seize Paris was not an easy task. In addition to regular troops, the French government raised a large corps of civilians, the National Guards. Together with the regulars they made a 400,000-strong contingent, which allowed holding the city for a long time. In the beginning, popular morale was strong but as the siege prolonged and shortages of necessities began taking their toll, social conditions deteriorated [20]. Two arrangements, however, made a situation better than it otherwise could have been. First, the National Guards were well paid (1.5 francs a day) and well-provisioned [21]. Second, the authorities established a hold on rent and debt payments, measures that provided a great relief for the poor Parisians.
It was however obvious that siege would not last long. Eventually, the republican government had to begin armistice negotiations with the Prussians. The armistice agreement was signed on January 27th, 1871. Among other conditions, the French had to elect a legitimate state authority (the National Assembly) to ratify peace treaty conditions negotiated with the victors. The newly elected National Assembly, dominated by the conservatives, adopted laws that provided that all debts, on which a moratorium had been declared during the war, were to be paid within 48 hours, while a similar law decreed that landlords could now collect payment for all accumulated rent. One more act ended the pay of 1.5 francs a day to the National Guard [20]. These laws had undermined the social truce and made situation in Paris explosive. The principle of commensurate sacrifice was de facto abandoned; the poor had to pay the bill of war.
On March 18th, 1871, an attempt to disarm the National Guard resulted in a mass uprising. The government fled to Versailles. Power in the capital fell in the hands of the radicals who established a new authority, the Commune of Paris, dominated by the Jacobins and the Socialists. The Commune nationalized all workshops abandoned by their bourgeois owners, abolished the system of fines imposed on workers, limited salaries of all officials to 6,000 francs a year, roughly equal to a worker's wage [20].
The Marxist scholarship views the uprising as a first genuine proletarian revolution in the world history. There are, however, reasons to doubt that. First, the workers did not make a majority in the Commune. Out of 92 members of the Commune only 21 were workers, whereas such middle class individuals as journalists, writers, clerks, and small tradesmen constituted a majority [22]. Nor it was driven by a communist ideology of a Marxist type. The Commune was largely an improvisation with no coherent ideology or a program. It represented an impromptu plebeian-praetorian authority that was born in the extraordinary circumstances of war and a siege. As Horne [28]
had noted, the Commune emerged directly from the siege; without the siege, the Commune of 1871 could never have happened.
As stated above, the macrocosm of the First World War strikingly resembled conditions of siege warfare [2]. Economically, Germany and Austria-Hungary have found themselves in a situation of blockade. To some extent it was also true for Russia, despite the fact that this country fought on the side of the Allies. The disintegration of the European economy and the naval blockade severely constrained Russia's access to resources from the outside world.
There were, however, two features that brought Russia's case closer to a siege of Paris situation in 1870-1871. First, whereas the German authorities introduced far-reaching measures of state regulation, including rationing of provision in the early 1915, the Czarist government procrastinated with adopting analogous measures. As a result, by early 1917 economic inequality and political polarization reached extreme proportions. When the authorities finally consented to rationing of bread in Petrograd it was already too late. Rumors about restricting bread consumption caused a panic. Strikes and demonstrations of starving people came out of control and turned into a mass revolt. In February 1917 the Russian autocracy collapsed and the Provisional Government took power.
Second, the breakdown of state authority in Russia, in contrast to Germany, resulted in total disintegration of the military institution [23]. The Provisional Government attempted to restore order and morale in the army but it had failed. Ironically, the government itself became a de facto hostage of soldiers, sailors, and the armed workers. In October of 1917, they overthrew the Provisional Government and established control over Petrograd and other major cities.
It is noteworthy that socialization of private property, which is usually attributed to an ideologically driven strategy of the Bolsheviks, began before the Bolsheviks' seizure of power in October and independently of them [24]. Under conditions of a severe economic crisis and a campaign of lockouts, Russian workers began taking management of enterprises in their own hands. Also, to keep factories running, workers (and local authorities) tried to find mechanisms of economic coordination among enterprises. Because the market mechanism was destroyed, such coordination could be accomplished only through the administrative entities, such as the local Soviets, trade unions, etc. [25].
Initially, many Bolshevik leaders shared the perception that workers' control at the enterprise level would be enough for running the socialized economy. Soon, however, the Bolsheviks began to realize that workers' con-
trol or even self-management alone would not work as they had hoped. Scarcity of raw materials and disorganization of transportation indicated that workers' control had to be supplemented by bureaucratic regulation at the national level. To ensure the centralized direction of the socialized economy, the Bolsheviks created the Supreme Council of the National Economy (the VSNKh) in December 1917. Thus, the very logic of socialization led step-by-step to the state-run economy.
A war-centered argument developed in this paper challenges the conception of the state socialism as a form of societal organization succeeding the capitalist mode of production. Instead, it builds on an analogy with a social organization of a besieged fortress. As I argued above, a success or failure in defending a besieged city was to a great extent predicated on success in mobilization of war-related resources, including provision, and equal distribution of these resources among the defenders. Such measures did not necessarily guarantee the ultimate victory but allowed to hold on for a longer time. What happened in the besieged cities if commanders failed to ensure equality of sacrifice while the gap between the wealthy and the poor reached critical proportions? In such situations, class conflict reached its utmost intensity. Sometimes the poor turned their weapons against the better-off, seizing and equally distributing the property of the wealthy among the whole community. In other words, they made a social revolution. That's exactly what happened in Russia in 1917.
Contrary to the popular image of the Russian revolution as an event prepared and staged by political actors according to a preconceived ideological design, the Bolsheviks did not have any practical economic program in their agenda [26]. In fact, the early economic policies of the Bolsheviks displayed a remarkable similarity to the wartime centralizing policies of the Imperial Germany; the Bolsheviks had learned a lot from the German experience [1]. There was, of course, one great difference: whereas in Germany regulatory policies were implemented within the political framework of the existing military-bureaucratic regime, in Russia the old regime proved incapable of implementing necessary policies. As a result, the old regime was overthrown by the radical coalition of soldiers, sailors, and workers. The command economy, which began taking shape under the Bolshevik rule, became a plebeian version of a command economy installed «from below» rather than «from above».
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Сведения об авторе:
Осинский Павел Иванович, доктор философских наук, ассоциированный профессор департамента социологии Аппалачского государственного университета, г. Бун, Северная Каролина, США, e-mail: osinskyp@appstate.edu
Data on author:
Osinsky Pavel Ivanovich, doctor of philosophical sciences, associate professor, department of sociology, Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina, USA, e-mail: osinskyp@appstate.edu
Рецензенты:
Бадмаева М.В., доктор философских наук, доцент, заведующая кафедрой философии Бурятского государственного университета;
Дагбаев Э.Д., доктор социологических наук, профессор кафедры политологии и социологии Бурятского государственного университета.
