<>1921:German sociologist Max Webers "life
work", Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft [Economy and Society], published
posthumously. Contained influential treatment of "class and status" [CCS:409-23
| CCS,1:701-15]. A great
European, whose career got under way in 1904:1905,
had his most influential work published only after his death
<>1921fe22:Soviet Central
State Economic Planning Commission [GosPlan] created
<>1921fe27:Georgia [Gruziia] Soviet regime established
<>1921mr01:mr08; Kronstadt (fortress island
protecting Peterograd) the scene of a significant rebellion against Communist
rule, though in favor of Soviet rule. Resolutions
[BNE:239-41 |
Chamberlin,2:495-7 |
SGv:147-8 | DPH:435-6 |
Voline:passim | PWT2:298-300]
<>1921mr08:mr16; Communist Party Congress #10
[McC2:207-14]
*--Resolution on Unity [Chamberlin,2:497-9 | SGv:149
|
DPH:436-7]
<>1921mr16:English-Russian commerce [Senn,2:]
<>1921mr18:Poland
gained recognition of independence by Treaty of Riga,
which favored Poland (1/3 of the population in the new Poland were non-Poles,
mainly East-Slavic peoples of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine)
<>1921mr23:1927de; Soviet Republic
[soon the USSR] declared New
Economic Policy [NEP] which lasted seven years
*--Comparison of the 1921 Soviet economy with the last pre-WW1 year of the
Imperial economy (1913) [McC2:257]
*--The so-called "War communism" of Revolutionary Civil War period
relaxed. Radical Communist restructuring of the Soviet economic system was postponed (some
thought forever)
*--The agricultural economy, including the growing
number of "Russian farmers", and the small-scale commercial economy
were allowed
to operate without direct state control
*--Decree on tax in kind, etc [Chamberlin,2:499-503
| SGv:323-4 | DPH:437-8]
*--The state did retain control over the "commanding heights" of the economy
=
banking, currency, foreign trade, heavy industrial productivity, means of communication
and transportation, national labor organizations, etc
*--Industrial wage-labor disturbances in this year cautioned against letting workers go free in their unions
[Page]
*1921mr27:Lenin outlined the threats to the revolution [BNE:241-]
*1921ap05:Soviet commercial and trade concessions to
Germany and Italy [McC2:241]
*1921ap07:Russian-German negotiations [McC2:195-6]
*1921my30:Army called in to perform significant economic tasks [McC2:238-9]
*1921jy08:Nikolai Bukharin, "The New Economic Policy of Soviet Russia"
*--USA journalist William Henry Chamberlin witnessed and described NEP [P20:115]
*--USA labor activist and pacifist Anna Louise Strong
traveled from Seattle to Russia, working for the American Friends Service
Committee relief mission, and wrote descriptions of famine and socialist
construction during NEP,
The First Time in
History: Two Years of Russia's New Life, August, 1921, to December, 1923
(1924), with an introduction by Leon Trotsky.
Website excerpts. NB! her chapter on the
Russian oil enterprise and its place in the larger story of the Russian
Revolution. [Connect with the petroleum
LOOP] She also wrote accounts of famine relief in the Volga
basin
[W]
*--This marked the beginning of a period that Moshe Lewin has titled
Lenin's Last
Struggle (1968), three years from NEP to 1924ja21:Lenin's death. These
first three years of NEP provided a chance for the Revolution to take a
different path than that forced by circumstances of WW1 and Civil War. A central
vexing problem was how to balance Party power with
wage-labor authority, or at least "in-put". However,
Lenin's last struggle was not successful, or perhaps not
full-hearted. These years were merely a
prelude to the rise of Stalinism
\\
Rimlinger:252-69 [TXT]
<>1921je:jy; Mikhail Gerzhenzon & Viacheslav Ivanov, Correspondence from
Two Corners [Raeff3:373f]
<>1921jy:Soviet Republic hosted Third World Congress of the Communist
International [RFP2,2:158-61]
<>1921fa:1922wi; Soviet Republic suffered famine
*1921oc:Volga region famine described by Philip Gibbs [Eye:493-5]
<>1921no05:Mongolia and the Soviet Republic signed treaty
after Mongolia broke away from China
<>1921de06:Ireland and Great Britain signed
Treaty of Irish independence
*1922:1923; Ireland soon locked in a
bloody civil war. One of the two
big Irish political parties, Fianna Fail, was founded by Eamon de Valera, the
man who led the opposition to the 1921 treaty that forged the new southern Irish
state. Valera felt that the pact tied Ireland too closely to Britain. He would
not accept the oath of allegiance to the English King which the treaty required.
He and his associates also resented the division of Northern Ireland from the
Irish Free State and the continuation of English rule there
*--The other big Irish party, Fine Gael, was later created by those who accepted
the treaty. By 1923, they had crushed de Valera's rebels. In the decades to
come, these two political parties kept the hostilities alive that had fueled the
murderous civil war. Then there arose another major party, Labour, which grew
from a faction in the rebel ranks that hoped the rising against imperial
dominion of the English would spark a Marxist revolution of workers against all
bourgeois exploiters
*1960s:1997; IRA conducted a war of terrorism against English power
*1997:The IRA declared a cease-fire
*2005:The IRA disarmed, making it possible again to celebrate the
Easter Uprising, banned in
Ireland since 1966
<>1921de19:de22; USSR Communist Party conference11
officially named the new revolutionary nation the "Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics" (USSR), which was to survive seventy years, almost to the day, until 1991de31
<>1922:England | C. E. Montague,
Disenchantment [BNE:211-5]
<>1922:Irish author James Joyce published
Ulysses in book form [TXT],
a great 20th-century fine arts landmark. Joyce was "Irish" by birth and steeped
in a half-millennium of Irish history, but
he was pan-European by avocation. Like so many leading figures of 20th-century
high art, he lived the life of the émigré
*--In this same year, USA-born émigré in England T.S. Eliot published his
challenging and characteristic poem "The Waste Land" [TXT]. Eliot had warned that “poetry, in our civilization, as it exists at present,
must be difficult”
*--Readers on their own have difficulty with
Joyce and much else in 20th-century high culture. They have often had to seek
guidance -- “mediation” -- from cultural/literary commentators. The
European “audience” has always had Joyce’s challenging literary art “mediated”.
An English critic wrote [2005ap29:TLS:3] =
Disorientated by the radical novelty of Ulysses, many
early readers relied instead on the critical compass of insiders like Larbaud, whose
influential 1922 essay in La Nouvelle Revue Française had been informed
by access to Joyce’s private schemata of the novel’s structure. This experience
of heavily mediated reading remains just as true today. Joyce asks that we be
well versed in Catholic rite, fluent in Latin and with few snatches of Greek, on
intimate terms with Homer, naturally, but no less with Dante, Shakespeare, St
Augustine, Aristotle, Aquinas, music hall, opera, the Celtic twilight, and the
demography, topography and historiography of turn-of-the-century Dublin -- the
whole kit and boodle in a word. Because our cultural competence is not up to the
task now, if ever it were, we fall back on a wealth of reference materials....
Where earlier reviewers complained of the book’s unreadability, today’s
critics regard this resistance to reading as a legitimate means of keeping the
work ‘open’
*--Geert Lernout and Wim Van Mierlo, eds., The Reception
of James Joyce in Europe | noUO
\\
*--[W]
<>1922ja26:China and USSR
issued Joint
statement of Sun Yat-sen and A. A. Joffe [RFP2,1:177-8]
Official USSR Communist Party position was to support nationalist "liberal"
Kuomintang party in China
*1922fe06:USA Washington, DC | Belgium, Great Britain, China, France, Italy,
Japan, Netherlands, Portugal, USA signed Nine-Power Treaty on China |
RWP1,3:222-4]
*--Sun's decade of
greatest political influence on events was nearing its end, but his legacy
lived on in his party, the Kuomintang, which played a central role in Chinese
politics throughout the 20th century
<>1922ja31:German financier Walther Rathenau became German Foreign Minister
<>1922mr:ap; USSR
Communist Party congress #11.
Joseph Stalin became First Secretary [F/] of Central Committee [F/]
of Communist Party of the USSR. Fundamental institutions of one-party rule now firmly in
place: Politbiuro [F/] and Secretariat (led by First Secretary or sometimes General
Secretary or "Gensek") the central ruling group within the highest larger
"representative" body, the Central Committee. GPU [F/] [State Political
Controlthe centralized state secret police] replaced Cheka [F/]
*--Tomskii speech criticized wage-labor strikes [SGv:409f]
*1922:Main Administration for Affairs of Literature and
Publication (Glavlit) created. It functioned into the final years of the USSR as the
main institution administering Soviet
censorship of the print media [PS&C:132-5]
*1922:USSR revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky published Dictatorship vs. Democracy [CCS:945-67
| CCS,2:557-79]
*1922:OGPU (Ob"edinnenoe
gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie; Unified State Political Controli.e.,
state police) established
*1926:Law on OGPU prohibited changes in OGPU personnel above rank of ordinary
agent, except from Moscow; i.e., limited provincial control & strengthened Moscow
control. Police everywhere instituted as arm of central state, another institutional
foundation for Stalinism
<>1922mr01:Sweden signed commercial treaty with USSR
<>1922ap:USSR diplomat Georgii Chicherin expressed views on Reconstruction [Senn,2:]
<>1922ap16:German-Soviet
Rapallo Treaty resumed normal diplomatic and commercial
relations and recognized USSR as "great power" [DPH:461-2
| Senn,2:]. Thus the two "renegade states" of Europe, Germany in
defeat and Russia in revolution, gave one another support while other European
governments continued to insist on German payment of indemnities to the
victorious Allies and Soviet
payment of tsarist debts (mainly connected with WW1) to Allied treasuries and
bankers
<>1922my:Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Tikhon arrested
<>1922my24:Italy signed commercial treaty with USSR
*--Commercial relations in the first year or so of
NEP [LOOP]
<>1922my25:Vladimir Lenin 1st stroke
<>1922je24:German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau murdered by right-wing
nationalists
<>1922au04;au07; Communist Part Congress
#12 [McC2:214-17]
<>1922se19:Germany, Kiel | USA author Ernest Hemingway
described scene of economic collapse [Eye:497-501]
*--In a matter of a few months, the Deutschmark had fallen from 162 to the USA dollar to
7000 DM/dollar. Within a year, it fell to 4.2 trillion DM to the dollar! [I.e., it
evaporated]
*1923:Konrad Heiden, The Ruinous Inflation [P20:153]
<>1922oc:Vladivostok,Siberia | Japan
withdrew its forces from the vital Russian port after almost 4 years of
occupation, since the early days of the
Revolutionary Civil War
<>1922oc30:1943jy26; Italian
Fascist Party came to power and remained for 21 years after Benito Mussolini
(1883-1945) led march of para-military supporters on Rome [DPH:387-8]
The Fascists were a political party in mold of the Nazis. They could
claim to be the original European fascist-style party
*--On the very eve of this success, Mussolini delivered a speech in Naples in which he
said, "We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, it is passion. It is not
necessary that it shall be a reality. It is a reality by the fact that it is a good, a
hope, a faith, that it is courage. Our myth is the Nation, our myth is the greatness of
the Nation! And to this myth, to this grandeur, which we wish to translate into a complete
reality, we subordinate all the rest" [BMC1:649-50]
*--"Life under Fascism" [W]
*--Photo exhibits =
[pix]
[pix]
*1932:ex.USSR leader Leon Trotsky explained, from his
Communist point of view, how Fascism succeeded in Italy, with reference also to
the looming possibility of Nazi victory in Germany [TXT]
<>1922oc30:USSR | NEP era labor law
[SGv:413-24]
<>1922no:USSR hosted Fourth World Congress of the
Comintern [RFP2,2:161-5] Marxist ideology was being
tailored to meet needs of a world wider than northwest Europe =
*1923:Pod znamenam Marksizma#1:177-8 | Petr Stuchka on the inconsistencies
in the Marxist theory of Basis [Unterbau]
and Superstructure [Überbau] [Jaworskyj:99]
Compare with post-Stalinist essay over
thirty years later on the same topic
<>1922no01:Turkey | Mustafa Kemal (Kemal Pasha or Kemal Atatürk) led modernizing
revolution to power at the head of a rebel army. Declared the Ottoman Empire dead, pulled
down the old state, moved government headquarters (capital) to Ankara, and declared a
Turkish Republic
<>1922no16:Italian Chamber of Deputies heard
Fascist Party leader Mussolini's speech [DPH:388-9]
<>1922no18:USSR | Bukharin issued
policy statement on the right of "red intervention", a foreign policy
justification for pre-emptive strikes against bourgeois power anywhere in the
interests of the liberation of the world proletariat
<>1922de13:de30; USSR formally declared. First
Transcaucasian Congress of Soviets (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaidzhan) brought
the formal proposal to the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets (Georgia,
Armenia, Azerbaidzhan, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia [RSFSR]).
1924ja13:Approved
<>1922de23:1923ja04; Vladimir Lenin's
"Testament" [TXT] dictated over two week period [SGv:155-9]. A critique of Joseph Stalin
and others, but essentially a belated call for radical democratization of Party and state
<>1923:Austrian-born Hebrew scholar and moral
philosopher Martin Buber published I and Thou in which he described a highly
personal relationship between the individual and God, a relationship which provided
the ideal model for all human relationships, subjective dialogue rather than interaction
between objectivities. In 1929 he published an essay "Zwiesprache" [dialogue]
which concentrated on this idea [CCS,1:337-61]
<>1923:NYC etc | Sergei Esenin, "An Iron Mirgorod" [Hasty:144-58]
<>1923:Spanish philosopher José
Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) published El tema de nuestro tiempo
[1931:translated as The Modern Theme] in which he argued that "the modern theme is to
subject reason to living, to localize it within the biological field, to subordinate it to
the spontaneous". He celebrated razon vital [living reason; rationality for
life] [CCS,2:709-729]
<>1923:USSR and Finland sought advisory
opinion in international law from the League of Nations Permanent Court of
International Justice [ID] regarding jurisdiction in eastern Karelia [RWP1,2]
<>1923ja:German industrial center in the Ruhr area was
occupied by French and Belgian troops to ensure that Germany make reparation payments.
German officials adopted passive resistance to occupying forces [DPH:412-13]
*--Versailles settlement crumbled yet further
<>1923mr04:Lenin published his
last substantial piece, "Better Fewer, But Better"
[TXT] [Moshe Lewin,
Lenin's Last
Struggle:156-74]
*--A comparison of this work with Lenin's famous
What's to be Done? twenty years
earlier helps measure the evolution of his political thought
*1923:1925; Documents of Soviet History, v3 [DSH,3]
<>1923my12:Italian
periodical Il Mundo employed the political term
“totalitarian” to describe a kind of political order. Fascist Party leader Mussolini coined and used,
with approval, the political term totalitario
<>1923jy24:Turkey | Convention
Relating to the Regime of the Straits [TXT#1 and TXT#2]
*--Revolutionary Turkey was the only defeated power in WW1 to force revision of the peace
terms imposed by victorious allies at the Paris Peace Conference [ID] (e.g.,
Versailles). In this year, Mustafa Kemal
[pix]
created the "Republican People's Party" and began to fashion a modernizing,
secular, one-party state, taking inspiration from the Soviet Revolution. Kemal's political party was in the Leninist tradition
<>1923se:German officials called off passive resistance to Allied occupation of
Ruhr district
*--Within the next year the "Dawes Plan" put reparation payments
back on track, still without any time limit. Heavy payments from
Germany continued for six more years, until the Dawes Plan was replaced by a less harsh "Young Plan"
in 1929 [DPH:413-118]
<>1923de06:USA President Coolidge on "interrupted" USA foreign policy
and on the special problem of Russia and earlier famine relief, with Soviet responses [RFP2,2:37-9]
<>1924:China | Kuomintang declaration [SPE2:875-9] China
<>1924:USA culture critic Gilbert Seldes published
The
Seven Lively Arts, a pioneer study of popular commercial arts [pop-arts] or commercial culture in
the new electronic media. Seldes expressed an open willingness to find all that
was best in the new commercial media [bibliography]
*--Gilbert Seldes' brother George Seldes [ID] was also
an influential pundit
<>1924:German novelist Thomas Mann published
his third great novel, Der Zauberberg [The Magic
Mountain] which portrayed the details in the life of a young middle-class man
visiting a TB sanatorium as WW1 loomed. Somehow, though not originally sick, the
young man stayed in the mountain-top sanatorium. There he cast his many petty
and creature-comfort-oriented personal agonies and ecstasies across the ruined
but somehow still beautiful European bourgeois cultural landscape
<>1924:Russian political émigré, ex-terrorist and
anti-Bol'shevik insurgent Boris Savinkov slipped over the border into the USSR
but was soon arrested
*--Savinkov was forced to flee the USSR six years earlier. He wrote fascinating
Memoirs of a
Terrorist
*--Now he fell into the hands of Soviet authorities, was put on trial,
and imprisoned. He committed suicide the following year, ending
a fabulous two-decade political career
<>1924ja13:USSR Second All-Russian
Congress of Soviets approved first USSR Constitution, based on deliberations
that got under way in 1922de. This first constitution
took the form of a Declaration and a "Treaty", the first Union Treaty, among the
unifying republics [SGv:51-62]
*--Passport regulations in the early Soviet period [PS&C:161-3]
*1923 essay by Soviet Marxist ideologist I. Podvolotskii argued that civil
rights were a bourgeois deception [Jaworskyj:114-17]
*1924 essays by N. V. Krylenko on the Marxist concept of Law and State and on
the conflict between socialist theory and Soviet reality [ibid:142-9, 162-78]
Compare with a theoretical discussion ten years later
*1926 essay by I. Naumov on "legal nihilism" [ibid:247-51]
<>1924ja21:Vladimir Il'ich Lenin died, ending
a remarkable revolutionary career that spanned 28 years
<>1924ap:Moscow | Joseph Stalin
(1879-1953) laid his ideological claim to Communist Party leadership with a series of
lectures, later gathered and augmented in a booklet Foundations of Leninism [CWC:233-51
| BPE:560-72 | MDF:122-3]
*--With
this work Stalin first suggested the idea of "socialism in one country". [On
dialectical and historical materialism, see BMC1:626-34 & BMC4:731-8]
*--Stalin and Trotsky were locked in an ideological struggle with immense
implications for the Marxist legitimacy of the Soviet Union. Stalin staked all
on the concept of "socialism in one country" and Trotsky on "permanent
revolution" [TXT]
<>1924my31:China & USSR Agreement on General
Principles [RFP2,1:179-83]
<>1924oc02:Geneva Protocol set procedures and obligations
in connection with the League of Nations effort to settle
international disputes without war [DPH:462-5] The protocols
failed due to English refusal to ratify them
<>1924de:USSR hosted Fifth World Congress of the Communist International [RFP2,2:165-9]
<>1925:1926; NYC, Chicago, etc.| Vladimir Maiakovskii, "My Discovery of
America" [Hasty:159-220]
<>1925:Germany | Austrian-born political
conspirator Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) described his main political ideas with bold clarity, Mein
Kampf [My struggle TXT] [CWC:191-218 | BMC4:748-9] This text became the main ideological foundation of
the Nazi movement
*1926:German intellectual Friedrich Jünger presented anti-democratic argument
based on his sense of a "new nationalism" [P20:154 |
PWT2:328-31]
<>1925:Italy, Perugia | Fascist Party
activist Alfredo Rocco delivered authoritative speech in which he defined "The
Political Doctrine of Fascism" [CCS:1015-36 | CCS,2:648-69
| BMC1:640-6 | BMC4:738-44]
<>1925:USSR scholar and Marxist ideologist D. Riazanov published article
[TXT]
on Engels' Peasant War in Germany
<>1925:Spanish writer and thinker
Miguel de Unamuno
published The Agony of Christianity [CCS,2:858-72] Born
in Basque country, Unamuno grew up mindful of cultural distinctions. He resisted
simple-minded generalizations like "Europe" and
"The West". His
thought was full of lively paradox, and he placed highest value on immediate experience. He
and Ortega y Gasset contributed a distinct,
innovative yet traditional flavor to 20th
century thought, a "Spanish" flavor, if you find such generalizations to your
taste
<>1925ja:USSR War Commissar Leon Trotsky
dismissed under attack from moderates in Communist Party, led by Nikolai
Bukharin [RRC1,3:534-41]
*--Having sided with Stalin
against Trotsky, now Bukharin
would come under attack
from Stalin
<>1925ap:USSR Communist Party congress12;
Joseph Stalin
announced concept of "socialism in one country", shocking conventional Marxist
ideologists who all presumed, as Lenin had for so long, that no true socialist revolution
was possible in an economy ("mode of production") as undeveloped as
Russia's
<>1925oc16:Locarno Treaties negotiated by France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Poland,
and England in an effort normalize relations in the post-WW1 era. For the first
time in this era, Germany met as a sovereign equal in open diplomatic parley
with the other European states, and the intention was to mop up some part of the
mess created by the Versailles Treaty. The central issue was regularization of Germany's borders to east and
west. Locarno marked the high point of European inter-state goodwill between WW1
and WW2 [DPH:465-8] Several treaties were signed in
these sessions =
*--Germany agreed with France to recognize borders set in the Versailles Treaty, in exchange for
German entry into the League of Nations
*--Germany and eastern European states failed to achieve as much, but they agreed at least to diplomacy and arbitration
*--England refused to sign on with France to those provisions that guaranteed
east European borders. England was concerned only with the German threat in the
westward direction. This was the major flaw of Locarno diplomacy. Thus, France
signed independent mutual defense pacts with Poland and Czechoslovakia against
Germany, not at all in the spirit of Locarno or the League of Nations
<>1925de24:Italian parliament neutralized by laws that
allowed Mussolini to rule as a Fascist dictator [DPH:389-90]
<>1925de25:Moscow premier of two movies: ROBIN HOOD, starring Douglas Fairbanks,
and BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, directed by Sergei Eisenstein
\\
*--Richard Schickel, "Cinema Paradiso", 99su:WQu 23,3:56-70, a brief
history of movies ("film") as a world cultural phenomenon, lamenting decline in
recent years. Moscow premier is the central symbolic moment in his tale of
movies and the pop-arts
<>1926:Austrian Count Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi
argued against nationalist and racist doctrines and in support of what he called Pan-Europe
[P20:196]
<>1926:English economist John Maynard Keynes published
Laissez-Faire and Communism [CCS:754-74] and
"The End of Laissez-Faire"
[TXT with an antagonistic editorial warning]
[Excerpts = BPE:663-8]. In this epoch of serious
market-economic collapse and widely expressed hysteria about the apparently
thriving revolutionary Soviet economy, with its claim on social justice as well
as prosperity, Keynes also wrote "A Short
View of Russia"
*--English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) published an influential book on
Science and the Modern World [BMC1:606-9 | BMC4:699-701]
<>1926:German political activist Robert Michels explained European class
consciousness [CCS,1:739-65]
*--German teacher and free-lance writer Oswald Spengler completed his gloomy Decline
of the West [BPE:637-62 | BMC1:683-6 | BMC4:777-80 | CCS,2:485-507
| CCS,1:134-43].
The book wasn't published until after the war. What it lacked in seriousness of
content, it made up in popularity. Spengler set the tone for following
generations of pop-art pundits. He caught the mood of
the time and helped popularize the concept of "The West"
<>1926:Scottish-born USA political philosopher Robert M. MacIver sought to redefine
relationship of individual to society and state, to defend liberal
and democratic governments from the onslaught of European statist doctrines, in his book
The
Modern State [CCS,1:631-50]
<>1926ja31:Italian Fascist dictatorship of Mussolini
strengthened by law on power of the executive branch to make decrees having the force of
legislation or laws [DPH:390]
<>1926ap03:Italian Fascist
dictatorship of Mussolini strengthened by law forcing state control over compulsory
collective labor relations. Labor unions brought into
"Corporative State" and a form of fascist welfare
statism put in place [DPH:390-1]
<>1926my03:my12; British General Strike spread for nine days throughout
major industrial centers of England, Wales and Northern Ireland
\\
*--Anne Perkins, A Very British Strike... [noUO], offers an establishmentarian interpretation with more attention
to “Communist influence” than to domestic economic and political actualities in the everyday life of
wage-laborers
<>1926jy:USA Colonel Raymond Robins decried lack of normal USA-USSR relations [RFP2,2:42-8]
<>1926oc:USSR | Leon Trotsky &
other "Joint Opposition" leaders, Leo Kamenev & Grigorii Zinoviev, dismissed from
Politbiuro [F/]. [Excerpt from Trotsky's "defense" [TXT]]
*1926:1928; Documents of Soviet History, v4 [DSH,4]
<>1927:1928; French writer André Gide wrote Voyage au
Congo and Le retour du Tchad, powerful but straightforward descriptive
condemnations of imperialism based on eye-witness experiences in the
Congo [CCC2,2:853f CCC3,2:1161-9]
<>1927:1937; Europe-wide era of economic,
social and political crisis
*--Dramatic Soviet modernization seemed to rival capitalism. Apparent Soviet
success, combined with collapse of the world’s market economies in the Great
Depression might be compared with a crudely reversed set of events at the end of
the 20th century = apparent US success, combined with "the collapse of
Communism". And an even more crude parallel might be seen in the resurgence
of Russia and the economic crisis in the "capitalist world" beginning in 2008
*--After WW1 and particularly in the late 1920s, market economies were in shambles.
As one result, European welfare programs expanded.
Welfare programs were designed to address the needs of labor. One natural motive
was to reduce the chance that labor might turn to
progressive and socialist movements, or fall under the influence of Soviet
Communism. At the same time, Welfare might limit the influence of crisis-driven,
far-right fascist-style
political movements. Post-WW1 European states were caught not only between a
rock (Soviet Communism) and a hard place (radical rightist movements), but had
to try to navigate around a perilous "soft place" right in the center
of their paths, namely, the revival of 19th-century social
democracy. Labor unions were weakened, but still capable of significant
self-organization and exertion of economic pressure on "the bosses"
*--Economic collapse in a global GREAT DEPRESSION
impacted USA like a meteor, having already for ten years wobbled the orbits of
European and world capitalist markets [EG]. USA isolation was not a
successful quarantine
against world problems. USA isolation exacerbated world problems and intensified the
shock when these problems finally caught up to USA
*--Economic and social collapse inspired and served to justify "right-wing" reactionary
and well as "left-wing" revolutionary statism =
*--RISE OF FASCIST ITALY and
NAZI GERMANY
*--USSR TURNED TO STALINISM, a trend that had been growing
in Russia over the previous ten years
*--By the late 1920s, many European nations (e.g,, Austria, Spain)
imitated Italy & Germany, rather than the USSR
*--In the broadest sense 20th-century statist radicalism, "right and left"
[ID], may be
said to have grown from the following trends =
*--World War One opened a new era of "far-right" and "far-left" statist radicalism.
Perhaps the France of Louis Napoleon
(Napoleon III) was the earliest European harbinger, but now statist
radicalism waxed with intensity through World War Two, and it continued to
flicker to life again
and again, even into the 21st century
<>1927:French philosopher Julien Benda, The Treason
of the Intellectuals [BMC4:761-3]
<>1927:German philosopher and educator Martin Heidegger
(Marburg University, then Berlin) published Sein und Zeit [translated in
1949 as "Existence and Being"] Heidegger may be thought of as the creator of
non-Christian or "esthetic" existentialism
*--Sartre was his student
\\
*--[W]
[W]
<>1927:USSR feminist writer and public figure Aleksandra
Kollontais novel Red Love, which was taken to advocate "free love"
relationships between men and women, once translated into English, caused stir but
inspired more radical participants in the women's movement
*--Kollontai had been the first woman ever appointed ambassador when she took up her post
at the Soviet Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden
<>1927:USSR Foreign Affairs Commissar (de facto) Maksim
Litvinov proposed "the complete abolition of all land, naval and air forces" to members of the League
of Nations.
The proposal was couched in terms that could not please League members = "armed
force is a weapon in the hands of great powers for the oppression of peoples in
small and colonial countries"
[ORW:196-7]
*--Intuitively grasping the close similarity of "external war" (war between
nation states) and "internal war" (revolution within the nation state)
[ID], League members saw no sense in a disarmament that
left the world-revolutionary Comintern, under Soviet leadership, still active in
its support of anti-imperialist armed insurrection and thriving, to all
appearances, in its exaggerated ambition to overthrow the very members of the
League of Nations themselves
*--Even active members of the Comintern were beginning to stir under increasing Soviet
control of the nominally "international" organization. See Helmut Gruber, ed.,
Soviet Russia Masters the Comintern: International
Communism in the Era of Stalin's Ascendancy
<>1927mr:China, Hunan Province | Communist activist of
peasant origins, Mao Tse-Tung [Zedong], published report
on rural conditions, "Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in
Hunan" [CCS:1120-52] The Comintern now thought
it could count on serious participation of Chinese revolutionary forces
*--GO my30
<>1927ap21:Italian "Corporate
statism" consolidated itself by gaining dominion over the
wage-labor
movement with its "Charter of Labor" [DPH:393-6]
*1927my:Italian leader Mussolini addressed his puppet parliament and attacked political opposition as
“silly and superficial in a totalitarian regime” [Nicholas Farrel,
Mussolini: A New Life:161
| Also see 2005mr25:TLS:17]
<>1927my30:Comintern Executive
Committee resolution on China [Gruber,2:490-500 | BNE:299-303]
*1927jy25:Japanese Premier Tanaka memo to Emperor on railroads
and "Our New Continent" (China) [RWP1,2:113-24 | RFP2,1:191-3]
*1927au01:Stalin on China [RFP2,1:184-90]
<>1927oc:USSR "Joint Opposition", including Trotsky, expelled from Communist Party & banished
<>1927oc15:oc20; Turkey
| Mustafa Kemal,6-day speech [SPE2:855-6]
<>1927de02:de19; USSR Communist Party Congress #15. End of NEP. Stalin proposed new industrialization program which
became the foundation of the industrial Five-year plans for
rapid economic modernization [DPH:439-]
*--Collectivization of agriculture proposed
*--Five-year plans and Collectivization were the two core ingredients of Stalinism. These two were quickly augmented by intellectual
and cultural control, and purges (terror as state policy)
*--The Stalinist "cadre" political party sought
managerial control over all aspects of national life [SWL:103-34]
*--Debate sharpened on the comparative virtues (and relationships) of Stalinist style
command economies and capitalist economies, such as in USA. Even some who had
the strongest negative views on Stalinist economics were quick to invest and do
business in and with the USSR. For example, Henry Ford was a famous
anti-Communists at home, but his company built vehicles in the USSR
*--Other USA businessmen became deeply involved in the Soviet economy, for
example, Armand Hammer. His (auto)biography (co-written by Neil Lyndon) deals in
part with his Russian/American background and experience =
Hammer
(1987)
*--Total managerial policies of Stalin influenced by global growth of a
managerial culture in association with large trans-national corporations
(see Merkle and Granick below). What began as
management of workplace efficiency was becoming a widely employed technique
of industrial institutional administration
\\
*--Merle Fainsod,
Smolensk Under
Soviet Rule focuses on captured archives relating to one western region
*--Judith A. Merkle,
Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International
Scientific Management Movement (1980) Ch.1, Origins:7-36; and
"The Taylor System in Soviet Socialism":103-135 [TXT];
on Stalinist industrialization and collectivization of agriculture
[TXT]; on Henry Ford's Soviet plant
[TXT]
*--David Granick,
Red Executive:1-33, 266-81. Chapter titled "Managerial
Class":307-16 [TXT]
*--Cyril Black, "Russian and Soviet Entrepreneurship in a Comparative Context",
intro to Entrepreneurship:3-10
*--J. C. Thompson & Richard F. Vidmer,
Administrative Science & Politics in the
USSR and the United States: Soviet Responses to American Management Techniques,
1917-Present (1983) Chs. 1-4 (ca. 69 pp) into the Stalin period
*--Barry M. Richman,
Soviet Management: With Significant American Comparisons
(1965)
*--Milton Friedman with the assistance of Rose D. Friedman,
Capitalism and Freedom
(1962)
*--Saul G. Bron, Soviet economic development and American business; results of the first year
under the five-year plan and further perspectives (New York, 1930) [ORBIS,
OSU]
*--Joseph Finder, Red Carpet: The Connection between the Kremlin and America's Most
Powerful Businessmen--Armand Hammer, Averell Harriman, Cyrus Eaton, David Rockefeller,
Donald Kendall (1983) [ORBIS OSU]
*--Antony C. Sutton,
Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution
(1974)
*--Edward Jay Epstein,
Dossier : the
secret history of Armand Hammer (1996)
*--GO 1928my28 for more Russia/USA macro-economic comparisons,
concentrating on agriculture
<>1927de27:Joseph Stalin condemned Trotskyist
Opposition [SGv:160-2]
<>1928:Peruvian Marxist and member of the Comintern
José Carlos Mariátegui (1895-1930) published Seven Essays Interpreting the Peruvian
Reality. The second essay was "The Land Problem" [CCS,2:730-52]
<>1928ap14:USA Secretary of State Kellogg stated
impossibility of USA-USSR relations so long as Comintern existed [RFP2,2:39-41]
<>1928my28:USSR | Joseph Stalin on Collectivization of agriculture [SGv:325-30]
Collectivization was a component of a broad Stalinist program of
economic modernization. Beginning that fall, Central Committee for five months debated
about the kulaki [kulaks, "tight fists", usurers; in this case, by
extension, rich farmers, peasants who had thrived in the countryside since the 1907no09:Stolypin land laws and the 1921:NEP] [Tucker,Stalin in Power:84-5]
*--Two movies illustrate some of the similarities and differences in the revolutionary
Soviet and depression-era US views on the "land" and the "salt of the
earth"the agriculturists who work the land, those who produce the food =
*--USSR film1929: "The General line",
directed by Sergei Eisenstein
*--USA film1936: "The Plow that broke the Plains", written and directed by
Pare Lorentz
*--USA Library of Congress website on "Dust Bowl" culture
*1936:USA | Dorothea Lange's depression-era photo
"Migrant Mother"
*--Everywhere in the 1930s, farmers had a hard time
\\
*--Rimlinger:269-80
*--N. C. Field's comparison of the
agricultural land base of the USSR and North America" [TXT]
*--Jon Lauck,
American agriculture and the problem of monopoly: the political economy of grain belt farming, 1953-1980
(2000) helps put Soviet collective farming into context with a later trend in
the USA toward corporate farming. This study puts a question mark around several
of the titles that follow below, those mid-century efforts of USA specialists
who placed much emphasis on the contrast of individual, free-market farming in
the USA with Soviet statist agriculture =
*--George Grantham, et al., eds.,
Agrarian Organization..., v1:1-24 (gnr intro)
v2:USA & Russia
*--Agriculture in the United States and the Soviet Union
(Several US gov. publications)
*--Lazar Volin, Agricultural Picture in U.S.S.R. and U.S.A.
(1963)
*--E. G. Richards, ed.,
Forestry and the Forest Industries: Past and Future; Major
Developments in the Forest and Forest Industry Sector Since 1947 in Europe, the USSR, and
North America (1987)
*--USA Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Soviet Economy in a Time of Change
(1979), see especially Douglas B. Diamond and W. Lee Davis, "Comparative Growth
in Output and Productivity in U.S. and U.S.S.R. Agriculture"; and Imogene Edwards,
Margaret Hughes, and James Noren, "U.S. and U.S.S.R.: Comparisons of
GNP":369-401
*--Agrarnaia evoliutsiia Rossii i SShA v XIX-nachale XX veka : materialy sovetsko-amerikanskikh
simpoziumov [Agrarian evolution in Russia and the United States in the
XIX--early XX century] (1991). Table of contents also in English
*--GO 1964:USA for more Russia/USA
macro-economic comparison
<>1928jy:USSR | Conclusion of Shakhty [Mines, Miners] Trial,
early Stalinist purge trial
<>1928jy:USSR | Sixth World Congress of the Communist
International [RFP2,2:192-8]. USSR asserted its dominion over
the members of supposedly international Comintern [ORW:199-200]
*1928:1929;
US Communist Party, a product of
earlier home-grown radical traditions, now fell under the dominance of the Comintern.
By this time, Jay Lovestone was the leading figure in CLP, but he became
entangled in Stalin’s struggle against Nikolai Bukharin. Oddly, the US movement
vibrated in response to Soviet Communist Party internal struggles rather than in
response to political and economic conditions in the USA. Comintern leadership
and policy were at a crossroads. Bukharin was forced out, but Lovestone would
not denounce him. Under Lovestone’s leadership US Communist Party
dissenters tried to resist Stalinist
manipulation of the Comintern
*1928de:1929sp; Bertram Wolfe traveled to Moscow in an effort to restore
harmony, but he found the Soviet Party set on taking over the USA Party by
undermining its elected leadership
*1929my06:my14; Moscow | Stalin delivered three speeches on the US situation in
which he conceded that US capitalism showed certain specific features, but that
it was quite wrong to presume that these warranted different Marxist analysis or
Party program in USA. CPA leaders “exaggerate the significance of the specific
features of American capitalism and thereby overlook the basic features of world
capitalism as a whole”. In other words, CPA should not seek to form policy based
on US specifics but rather on global universals, as defined at global
headquarters = the Comintern
*--Perhaps Stalin’s most salient point was this = CPA had no one to back them
up, CPA by now had no “constituency”, no authentic comradely association with US
workers. Constituent relationships with the working people were not
characteristic of the parties close to the center of the Comintern. CPA was
asked to bear in mind that it had only one important “comrade”, and that was
Stalin. He was not to be defied
*--After Stalin’s my14 speech, many of the CPA leaders capitulated. However,
when Stalin left the meeting at which he defeated the US leadership, he stopped
to extend a hand of greeting to Edward Welsh, a black delegate in the US group.
Welsh turned from Stalin to the defeated Lovestone next to him and asked, “What
the hell does this guy want?” Welsh did not shake Stalin’s hand
*1929je:Lovestone was expelled from the Comintern, and so was Wolfe when he
refused to support the Comintern decision against Lovestone.
The USA Party, earlier in a majority behind the dissenter Lovestone,
now went along with the decision handed down from Moscow, and this on the eve of
the US stock-market collapse
\\
*-- Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia: The Formative
Period (1960)
*--The Soviet World of American Communism
<>1928au27:Kellogg-Briand Pact | Germany, USA, France,
England, Italy, Japan, plus Belgium,
Czechoslovakia and Poland
solemnly declared "that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of
international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their
relations with one another" [DPH:468-9]
*1922fe06:1936de31; Fourteen years of negotiations between USA, France,
England, Italy and Japan, in an effort to limit naval armament, lay behind the
landmark
Kellogg-Briand Pact [RWP1,3:230-7] USA isolationism began to crumble, but was it too little, too late?
*--The Pact affirmed good sentiments, and was eventually signed by 65
nation-states. But the Pact provided for no enforcement mechanisms and thus
reflected a general structural fault in the design of the League of Nations
<>1928se:Scotland | Achnacarry Agreement created global petroleum cartels
*--International Petroleum Cartel (WDC:Gvt. Printing Office,1952)
<>1928oc:1932de; USSR First Five-year
Plan lasted four years and became the economic cornerstone of Stalinism
\\
*--Paul R. Gregory, The Political Economy of Stalinism:
Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives
<>1928de09:Italian Fascist state
strengthened by its absorption of the Grand Council of Fascism (something like the fascist
party executive). The corporate state was absorbing the Fascist Party [DPH:396-7]
*1928, Mussolini published his autobiography. The English translation sported
a forward by Richard Washburn Child, who had witnessed the rise of Italian
corporate statism as Ambassador to Italy from USA. Child was an early supporter of Theodore Roosevelt and his "Bull Moose"
party of US progressives. Now Child scoffed at the "so-called liberals" who
criticized Fascism. Child extolled the mystic power of the Italian leader and
compared his personal magnetism to that of Teddy Roosevelt. "Admire him or not,
approve his philosophies or not, concede the permanence of his success or not,
consider him superman or not, as you may, he has put to a working test, on great
and growing numbers of mankind, programs, unknown before, in applied
spirituality, in applied plans, in applied leadership, in applied doctrines, in
the applied principle that contents are more important than labels on bottles.
He has not only been able to secure and hold an almost universal following; he
has built a new state upon a new concept of a state. He has not only been able
to change the lives of human beings but he has changed their minds, their
hearts, their spirits." [xi]
\\
*--Thomas J. DiLorenzo,
Professor of Economics at Loyola University and Senior fellow at the
Ludwig von Mises Institute,
explored the broader 20th-century implications of "corporatism" in his article "Economic
Fascism"
<>1929:English novelist Virginia Woolf published
personal declaration of independence, requiring only, as her title put it, A Room of
One's Own
[TXT]
[CWC:386-98]. Yes, a room of one's own, but also, as her text added, a steady income of 500 British Pounds a year. A feminist manifesto by a representative of the
English social, economic and cultural elite, one of the great novelists of the 20th
century, was also a plea for economic independence. Economic pressures caused by
the commercialization of the fine arts and the rise of pop-arts was felt in
Woolf's circles. Her manifesto had long-term influence, and not only on women's movements
<>1929:German writer Erich Maria Remarque published powerful novel about
WW1, All Quiet on the Western Front
*--German sociologist (Hungarian-born) Karl Mannheim published pioneer work in the
"sociology of knowledge", Ideology and Utopia [CCS:329-56]
<>1929:Spanish philosopher
Ortega
y Gasset, Revolt of the Masses
[TXT] [TXT] [Excerpts
= (W) |
(W) | CCS:485-506 | CCS,2:508-29
| BMC4:659-61] Critical of mass culture [of which
pop-arts
were but a superficial expression] and suspicious of undisciplined democracy, he was nonetheless a liberal who fought against old regime Spain and helped establish a
brief republican epoch before defeat in the Spanish Civil War brought
militarist, right-wing movement of Franco to power
\\
*--[W]
*--A praiseful contemporary "right-wing" critique of Ortega's central ideas
(with long quotes)
[W]
<>1929fe09:USSR | Joseph Stalin on
Nikolai Bukharin and the Right Deviation [SGv:163-6]
*1929:1931; Documents of Soviet History, v5 [DSH,5]
<>1929fe11:Italian Fascist state
signed concordat with Pope [DPH:398-9]
<>1929ap08:USSR | Status of Religious Groups Defined [SGv:63-70]
*--Changes over the following half century documented = [PS&C:298-304]
<>1929oc29:USA | New York Times reported "Stock Prices
Slump", marking the beginning of the US phase of the temporary global
collapse of the capitalist economy. "The Great Depression" was already a
decade old in central Europe and only now swept over
USA isolationism
*--Andrew Mellon served as Secretary of the Treasury (1921-1932) during
administrations of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. He was described by his son Paul as “a thin-voiced, thin-bodied, shy and uncommunicative man” driven
by a narrow acquisitive ethic and esthetic. He seemed a man of much wealth and very little personality. However,
he established a fabulous personal art collection and used it to found the great National Gallery of Art in
Washington, DC
*--Mellon averred that the only role of government in a free economy was to cut
taxes and balance its budget. Nonetheless, Mellon continued from his high position of national governmental
responsibility and trust to tend daily to the business of his own remarkably successful “laissez-faire”
enterprises. He claimed to have withdrawn from his own
companies “as if I had died”, but that was a lie. He had no sense of
contradiction or conflict of interests. As the depression set in, he claimed
that people needed simply to work harder and “lead a more moral life”. His
financial elitist and anti-wage-labor views, and his harsh, impractical ideas about
the national economic crisis were so offensive that President Hoover found it
necessary to
reassign Mellon as ambassador to England
*--The most famous pop-art song about the depression, "Brother Can You Spare a
Dime" [TXT#1 and #2], was
written in 1931 by two Russian Jewish émigrés in America, Yip Harburg (lyrics) and Gorney
Harburg (music).
\\
*--Rimlinger:193-200 [TXT]
<>1929no:USSR | Nikolai Bukharin dismissed from Politbiuro; "right opposition"
defeated
<>1929de21:USSR | Fiftieth birthday of
Joseph Stalin
<>1929de27:USSR Collectivization of agriculture
intensified as Stalin delivered speech which called for "the
liquidation of the kulaks as a class" and "the eradication of the
distinction between city and countryside" [SGv:330-1 | DPH:440-1
| PWT2:306-7]
*--The next few months witnessed forced collectivization of about
half the USSR rural population, a bitter struggle, eventually with tragic result that
millions died in the Soviet countryside, particularly in Ukraine
*1929:1932; Letters and other testimony from rural laboring folks [SWL:28-77]
*--Party activist and later dissenter Lev Kopelev recalled long after the events his own
participation in the Terror in the Countryside [P20:121
| PWT2:307-10]
*--Miron Dolot much later recalled his experience of the Famine in the Ukraine [P20:124]
*--From the time of Collectivization, Soviet Union expanded programs of removal
and concentration of designated individuals and groups, lodging them in an
expanded system of Government Administered Camps [GULag]
*--Oleg Khlevniuk,
The History of the
GUlag: from Collectivization to the Great Terror
<>1930:Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud published
Civilization
and its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur) [Summarized
TXT w/quotes | Excerpts = CCS:623-40
|
CCS,1:365-82 | PWT2:242-7
(includes other excerpts) | BMC1:617-20]
*--Freud
was then at the height of his career, but he had been moving in recent years
beyond the "science" of psychoanalysis into huge issues of cultural analysis and criticism =
*1927:The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion),
a serious critique of religion as an illusion [BMC4:661-3]
*1939:Moses and Monotheism (Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische
Religion)
<>1930:German journalist and Nazi
ideologist Alfred Rosenberg wrote the influential Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts
[The Myth of the Twentieth Century] [BMC1:651-3 | BMC4:749-51]
<>1930ja05:USSR | Collectivization of agriculture accelerated [SGv:331-2]
*--GO 1930mr
<>1930mr:Stalin signaled crisis in the implementation of Collectivization with his deceptively titled speech "Dizzy with
Success" [SGv:332-3]
<>1930mr:USSR Menshevik Party trial
<>1930mr20:Italian labor law,
reforming the National Council of Corporations, further strengthened Fascist
statism [DPH:399-401]
<>1930mr28:German
Socialist Party [SPD] addressed an Executive Appeal to the German working people. The SPD was a central component of the several
coalition governments that tried to rule under the Weimar Constitution. In this appeal it
defended its social welfare program against the attacks of a
strong right-wing party, Deutsche Volkspartei [German People's Party] [DPH:418-19]
*--More social-democratic and right-wing parties
<>1930my21:India
|
Followers of Gandhi marched on salt deposits at Dharsana to protest English arrest of
their leader, as described by Webb Miller [Eye:501-4]
*1931no30:Gandhi
[pix] addressed Second Plenary Meeting of the Second Session of the Round
Table Conference. He spoke boldly for the whole of India and insisted upon complete
freedom and independence from England. He saw India guided by the political
party, the Indian National Congress
(founded in the 1880s) [BNE:303-6] Gandhi
visited the English Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street
[pix]
*1933:1972; Afghanistan ruled for nearly 40 years by "king" Mohammad Zahir
Shah. Pressed between colonial India and Iran (and eventually Pakistan), and at the
strategic southern limit of Russian imperial expansion, Afghanistan was an artificial
border drawn by great-power rivalry, and within it Uzbek, Pashtun (Pakistany) and
Iranian
peoples lived. Yet it found its way through the next four decades. 1946:Kabul University
founded. 1964:"liberal" constitution limited monarchical power. The 40 years of
the Shah was a time of moderate self-administered "modernization" without
thorough uprooting of traditional ways. Afghanistan
might have become a model of independent, non-European modernization if the great powers
had not once again decided to focus their rivalries on it
<>1930se:USA ex-Socialist John Spargo argued for recognition of USSR [RFP2,2:49-58]
<>1930oc09:1940je26; USSR | Stalinist
decade of labor laws (prior to WW2) [SGv:425-32]
*1932au10:Nizhnii Novgorod penal labor colony [GULag] described in official
report [SWL:88-93 | see also other documents and
narrative discussion:94-102] [W]
[W]
*--Women's memoirs of the GULag, edited by Simeon Vilensky,
Till My Tale is Told
*1930oc25:oc26; Georgian Society of Marxist Theorists of State met, followed
soon by =
*1931ja07:ja14; Moscow meeting of the First All-Union Congress of Marxist Legal
Theorists [Jaworskyj:281-90]
<>1930oc18:German Social-Democratic [SD] deputies in the
Reichstag declared their unwillingness to cooperate with either the National Socialists [Nazis] or Communists [supporters of the Soviet programs designed
within the Comintern]. Surrounded on the right and on the left,
German SDs predicted victory for the Nazis, but insisted that Social Democracy and free trade unions were a bastion against Fascism in Germany. "The
whole working class must support the parliamentary struggle of the
Social-Democratic
deputies...with all its power" [DPH:419-20]
<>1930no:USSR "Industrial Party" trial under way
<>1931:Austrian (born in Czech region) mathematician
Kurt Gődel (sometimes "Goedel" and
incorrectly as "Godel") (1906-1978) published his Incompleteness Theorems in Uber formal
unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme
*--The Goedel Society website explains
that Goedel "proved fundamental results about axiomatic systems showing in any
axiomatic mathematical system there are propositions that cannot be proved or disproved
within the axioms of the system. In particular the consistency of the axioms cannot be
proved. This ended a hundred years of attempts to establish axioms to put the whole of
mathematics on an axiomatic basis".
\\
*--[W]
*--Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (1981)
<>1931:German author of world fame,
Thomas Mann, tried to
put rise of Nazism in broadest cultural and historical framework in a article titled
"An Appeal to Reason" in which he reflected that Europe was in
"a crisis which heralded the end of the bourgeois epoch that came in with the
French revolution and the notions appertaining to it. A new mental attitude was
proclaimed for all mankind, an attitude that has nothing to do with bourgeois
principles such as freedom, justice, culture, optimism, faith in progress. As
art, it gave vent to expressionistic soul-shrieks; as philosophy it repudiated
... reason, and the ... ideological conceptions of bygone decades; it expressed
itself as an irrationalistic throwback, placing the conception life at
the center of thought, and raised on its standard the powers of the unconscious,
the dynamic, the darkly creative, which alone were life-giving." [P20:169
| PWT2:351-2]
*--Late this same year in Germany, Arthur Koestler joined the Communist Party
and remained a member into the year 1938. Later he explained the circumstances
that attracted him to the Communist Party [PWT2:352-4]
<>1931:Berlin, Rome and Moscow were the only places where the 100th
anniversary of Hegel's death was
celebrated. Hegel might not have approved of Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin, but
they all had reasons to approve of him. How are philosophy and totalitarianism
linked in this episode?
*--In this same year, as the Nazi movement grew in strength,
Free
Corps spokesman Ernst von Salomon described the atmosphere of post-war life
= Brutalization of the
Individual [P20:86 | PWT2:286-7]
<>1931:USSR | Stalin
delivered speech
(1931fe05:Pravda) in which he said, "One feature of the history of old
Russia was the continual beatings she suffered for falling behind, for her backwardness.
She was beaten by the Mongol Khans [ID]. She was beaten by the
Turkish beys [ID]. She was beaten by
the Swedish feudal lords [ID]. She was beaten by the
Polish and Lithuanian gentry [ID]. She was
beaten by the French [ID] and
British capitalists [ID]. She was beaten by the Japanese
barons [ID]. All beat her--for backwardness, for military backwardness, for cultural
backwardness, for political backwardness, for her industrial backwardness, for
agricultural backwardness. She was beaten because to beat her was profitable and went
unpunished.... In the past we [Soviet working peoples] had no fatherland and could have none. Now, however, that we
have overthrown capitalism and the workers wield power in our country, we have a
fatherland and shall defend its independence. Do you want our Socialist fatherland to be
beaten and to lose its independence? If you do not want that, then you must abolish its
backwardness and develop a really Bolshevik pace in the establishment of its Socialist
economy.... We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make
good this lag in ten years. Either we accomplish this or we will be crushed."
[The hyperlinks are to plausible historical events behind Stalinist
fear of defeat at the hands of foreign armies. Commentators have taken note of the fact that ten years after this speech, USSR was
invaded by Hitler Germany] [BNE:248-55]
<>1931my31:Pope Pius XI issued Quadragesimo Anno
[TXT],
referring to the 40th anniversary of Rerum
Novarum and bringing the message into line with the authoritarian and
anti-secular temper of the depression era [BPE:669-99]
*1937mr14:Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge
[TXT], criticized Nazi anticlericalism and
paganism, then =
*1937mr19:Restated anti-communism, Divini Redemptoris
[TXT] [BPE:585-604]
<>1931se18:Manchuria invaded by Japan
*--By 1932ja:Japan declared puppet Manchukuo state there
*1932se:League of Nations Commission head, English Lord Lytton, delegated to study situation [BNE:268-70]
*1933fe24:League tried to intervene, but failed [DPH:469-72]
*--Japan withdrew from the
League
of Nations and waged
war against China for 14 years, until 1945
<>1932:1933; Ukraine experienced collectivization
of agriculture and famine, statistically the most murderous dimension of Stalinism [93je18:MNe#25:15]
*1932:1934; Documents of Soviet History, v6 [DSH,6]
<>1932:English writer
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) published
Brave New World,
a nightmare vision of a totally managed -- a "scientifically" managed
-- culture,
government, and society. This famous anti-utopian novel was provoked less by
this or that monstrous ideology of the inter-war years than by a much more
ubiquitous industrial modernization and the erosion of old-fashioned European
values. Huxley felt that advanced technologies and pop-art culture were
displacing traditional European humanist civilization. He felt a vast cultural disenchantment
with 20th-century mass society, in certain ways like that perceived by
Weber [ID] and, to some degree,
Zamiatin [ID] and Ortega y Gassett [ID]
<>1932:German/Swiss
novelist Herman Hesse published Morgenland Fahrt [Journey to the east]
and concentrated on completing Glasperlenspiel [The Glass Bead Game or
Magister Ludi], not published until 1943. Both works reflected a desperate
search for cultural identity in a dispirited or disenchanted era
*--German physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976)
won Nobel Prize, largely for his role over the previous five years in the elaboration of
the Principle of Indeterminacy or Uncertainty in the new quantum physics
*1931:English
scientific theorist Herbert Dingle endeavored to explain the wider meaning of relativity
and quantum theory in the new physics [CCC2,2:1042-60] In the
same year his fellow countryman John Scott Haldane (1860-1936) lamented that "the
attempt to place biology on a physico-chemical basis has been far from encouraging"
[BMC1:596-8]
*1955:Heisenberg himself endeavored to compare medieval and modern ideas of
nature, and to explain quantum physics, in his Das Naturbild der heutigen Physik
[translated as "The Physicist's Conception of Nature"] [BMC4:704-8]
*--Heisenberg's versatility is suggested in this original German-language
"Diskussionen über die Sprache" [TXT].
\\
*--[W#1]
[W#2] [W#3]
[W#4]
[W#5]
<>1932:Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, "The Political and
Social Doctrine of Fascism" [TXT]
[Excerpts = BNE:261-4
| CWC:219-33 | CCC2,2:1147-60
| BMC1:646-9 |
BMC4:744-7]
*--More Fascism
<>1932:Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget published The
Moral Judgment of the Child [CCS,1:455-79] in which he
continued to expand psychology beyond its main fixation on sexuality and the study of
psychic pathology. He sought to illuminate how in general the human brain works,
especially how adult consciousness grows from earliest childhood
<>1932:USA Protestant
theologian Reinhold Niebuhr argued in his
Moral Man and Immoral Society for democracy using the concept
of "original sin" to justify checks and balances and the concept of choice to
justify hope for human progress [CCS:552-70 | CCS,2:839-57]
*--Niebuhr began his ministerial career in Detroit where he sided regularly with
autoworker unions in their conflicts with management. Eventually a famous
"liberal" in public life, Niebuhr was equally famous as a conservative
theologian who adhered to the "Pauline Doctrine" and
insisted on the inherent sinfulness of humanity. He rejected the popular "social
gospel" found in suburban churches of his day, with its casual, maybe even smug,
neglect of "original sin". His strong support of institutional restraint
("checks and balances") in political life and justice in social and economic
life, thus to minimize the constant threat posed by humanity's wayward ways,
harmonized his secular liberalism with his Christian conservatism. His writings
influenced many "New Deal" liberals [EG]. In
this ideologically intense epoch, Niebuhr also encouraged the more
practical-minded, less righteous and "ideological" theorists of international
relations [EG]
*1933:English historian Christopher Dawson published Enquiries into Religion and
Culture, in which he described the failure of secularization [P20:211]
<>1932:USA social/economic theorists
close to FDRs New Deal administration, Adolf Berle, Jr. (1895-1971), and Gardiner
Means published The Modern Corporation and Private Property [CCS:729-53
|
CCS,2:222-46] This "became the most acclaimed book of the
depression decade, if not of the first half of the twentieth century". It was "a
manifesto for augmenting a system of private planning with a system of public
planning". These were the central ideas: The corporation "transferred control
over property from the owner (the stockholder) to management". Berle saw in this the
danger of near constant violation of the very foundation of laissez faire
market economics, fiduciary trust [those who accept responsibility for
the management of resources belonging to others cannot work to make this benefit
themselves]. This subtle point became a matter of
great public interest when Berle showed what a huge part of USA national wealth was
concentrated in a few managers' hands (e.g., Andrew Mellon) [Jordan Schwarz, Liberal, p. viii]
*--The famous liberal "public intellectual" Walter Lippmann explained why a free
but democratic USA had to guarantee minimal prosperity under 20th-century
conditions of hyper-industrial productivity [Rimlinger
provides 2 paragraphs of TXT]
*--Popular self-organization and self-help groups, emphasized one hundred years
earlier in Tocqueville's famous study of USA
[ID], now were much weaker, though
they still played a role, for
example in the Townsend Movement [Rimlinger
provides 5 paragraphs of TXT]
*--In this way, the New Deal may be thought of as a renewal of the "Progressive
Era" under conditions of economic collapse and under the shadow of the
managerial revolution in corporate administration
*--The historical irony here may be that "The West" experienced a crisis-ridden 1930s
in which an intense assault on the
nearly two-century tradition of market economics came from two very different
directions =
(1) large business enterprises themselves and
(2) totalitarian statism
*--Some opponents of the US "New Deal", accused it of siding
with the first, and some of siding with the second [EG]. Berle and other "New
Dealers" sought to tip-toe between these two threats and to bring the USA
out of economic collapse
*--Berle kept a meticulous record of his active life, which included serving as
"Russian expert" with President Wilson's delegation to the
Versailles
conferences, published as
Navigating the Rapids, 1918-1971
(1973)
<>1932ja:Soviet journal Kul'tura i byt [Culture and Everyday life] became
the organ of "Obshchestvo bor'by s alkogolizmom" [Society for the struggle with
alcoholism] and absorbed the journal Kul'turnaia revoliutsiia [Cultural Revolution]
*--Lenins and Stalins styles of struggle for revolutionary culture
were illustrated
in this transition from Lenin's call for more culture & retreat from revolutionary extremes
of War Communism, from that to Stalins struggle against alcoholism; from Beethoven
for the proletariat to no booze -- from literary dreams to Socialist
Realism
<>1932fe:League
of Nations Disarmament Conference convened. Representatives of USA and USSR
participated. The goal was to define means to limit and control expenditures by
nation-states for military weaponry and to reduce numbers in uniform. France
rejected the draft treaty that came out of these meetings. Germany suggested
that all nation-states should reduce their military to the levels imposed on
Germany at Versailles, a powerful idea but one accompanied by an unsettling
threat = Accept this German plan or Germany would rearm
*1933mr:As the German Nazi Party ascended to power (via elections), the
Disarmament Conference adjourned. Disarmament was
perhaps the most significant initiative of the League of
Nations, and it clearly was in jeopardy from the very beginning
<>1932mr:Leon Trotsky journal
Bulletin
of the Opposition (Bolshevik Leninists) contained powerful letter
<>1932jy30:German
physicist
Albert Einstein wrote a letter
to the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in which he explored the question of
why humans go to war
*1932se:Freud replied [the two letters in RWP1,2:21-35
and RWP2:19-32]
*--Freud had already over the previous
third of a century made his great contributions to psychoanalytic theory
*--Freud was soon forced to flee from the spread of Nazism in Austria. He
emigrated to England, where he died in 1939
*--His intellectual influence was great from 1900
up to a point of rather precipitous decline at the end of the 20th century when
his psychological views came under wide and severe criticism
<>1932au21:USSR | Riutin's "Appeal" [Tucker,Stalin in Power:211-12]
<>1932oc27:London | Hunger marchers converged on
House of Commons, as described by Wal Hannington [Eye:504-5]
*--In this same year, German writer Heinrich Hauser described his experience
among Germany's unemployed [P20:160 |
PWT2:336-9]
*1930:Austrian social scientist reported on impact of depression on everyday life in the
small industrial town Marienthal [CWC:446-63]
*--English governmental figure and academic economist, active in the design of modern welfare policies in the first half of the 20th century, William
Henry Beveridge, assessed the economic collapse in the Great Depression
[CCC2,2:1129-43]
*1942de06:Ten years later, during WW2, Beveridge put up a strong
defense of social insurance [CWC:503-15]
<>1932no09:Joseph Stalin's wife Nadia killed herself
<>1932de27:USSR | Internal Passport Re-established [SGv:74-7
|
PS&C:164-6]
<>1933:1937; USSR Second Five-year
Plan lasted four years

1932 New Years postcard created by N. I. Dormidontov
depicting "Moscow-Narva House of Culture" in Leningrad
[SOURCE]
<>1933:USSR Foreign Commissar Maksim Litvinov proposed
definition of "aggression" to League of Nations.
League members were but little interested in the Soviet proposal, even though it
might be said to have defined international revolutionary activities as
aggression, as well as the traditional military actions of "states" =
Litvinov's proposal stipulated that aggression
cannot be justified by "the alleged absence of certain attributes of state
organization" in the country attacked, or by "the establishment or maintenance
in any state of any political, economic or social order". Clearly Litvinov
aimed to restrict threats to the USSR and not to restrict actions of the
Comintern [ORW:198-9]
*--Nonetheless, these formulas carried the seeds of the notion of "peaceful co-existence" and
might have restrained both the new nation-state militarism of the time, as well
as the
actions of the Comintern. The world, however, was
spiraling in directions not likely to be altered by this or any other
"definition of aggression"
<>1933ja:1941; USA President Franklin D.
Roosevelt [FDR] & "New Deal" in
eight pre-WW2 years introduced a dramatic
series of emergency measures to combat the devastating consequences of the
Great Depression and, then in a steadier sequence of legislative acts, to
restore and rebalance the US market economy
*--English economist John Maynard Keynes was the
most influential spokesperson for New Deal style Anglo-American
social democracy
*--In the first two years
of FDR's administration, this and other powerful measures were taken =
*1933mr09:Emergency Banking Act
*1933mr12:Agricultural Adjustment Act (1936:US Supreme Court declared AAA
unconstitutional)
*1933mr31:Civilian Conservation Corps Reforestation Relief Act established work
camps for 250,000 young men who were compensated with room and board plus $30/mo
salary. The CCC was much expanded with time
*1933my12:Federal Emergency Relief Administration [FERA] created with
wide discretionary authority and headed up by FDR's most trusted administrative
lieutenant, Harry Hopkins. A $500 million budget was devoted to
state-administered rations of food and other commodities for those in desperate
need. It's programs reached all the way to Alaska Territory
*1933my18:Tennessee Valley Authority Act [TVA] (which, like the next
three on this list, issued from Congress rather than from the White House)
*1933my27:Federal Securities Act
*1933je06:National Employment Service Act, designed to facilitate bringing those
who needed labor together with those who needed to work
*1933je12:Home Owners Refinancing Act allocated $2.2 billion to refinance about
one million mortgages on private homes
*1933je16:Glass-Steagall Act which created the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation [FDIC]. Bank failures were drastically curtailed
*1933je16:National Industrial Recovery Act, the act of broadest significance,
creating the "National Recovery Administration" [NRA]. (1935:US
Supreme Court declared NRA unconstitutional)
*1933je16:Emergency Railroad Transportation Act which sought to ramp up railroad
regulation, building on the original and continuing close ties between
government and enterprise in this branch of the industrial economy
*1935:Social Security Act [ID]
[TXT]
*1935:1939; Works Progress Administration, later called Work Projects
Administration. Headed by Harry Hopkins, the WPA lasted de jure
until 1943, but anti-New Deal Congressional opposition (fearing the spread of
"socialism") reduced its operations to nearly nothing in 1939. Before its
abolition, WPA expended $11 billion to employ 8,500,000 otherwise unemployed in
useful public projects. All across the land, WPA constructing 116,000 buildings,
78,000 bridges, 651,000 miles of hard-surface road, and 800 modernized airports.
WPA also administered a Federal Art Project (creating 10,000 works of art, most
notably decorative murals in public buildings), Federal Writers' Project (which
produced a remarkable series of guidebooks, state by state), and a Federal
Theatre Project (sponsoring an estimated 4,000 performances a month during the
depression years) [Knight
Library Holdings]
*1935:"Wagner Act" & National Labor Relations Board [NLRB]
built on the principle that membership or non-membership in a labor union cannot
be a condition of employment. This principle was first articulated in the act
creating the NRA. Labor
unions, which had been considered something close to illegal political conspiracy in the
USA since the great Homestead Strike [ID],
were now recognized.
*--USA was the last of the
"Western" nations to adopt modern welfare legislation.
It lagged behind Russia, imperial and Soviet. English and USA tardiness in part influenced
by "Social Darwinism" [ID],
in part by an obdurate US reluctance to vouchsafe a place for
wage-labor
interests and organizations in the emerging modern industrialized political
economy. GO 1947:USA Taft-Hartley
*1935my27:USA Supreme Court, however, declared the New Deal "National
Industrial Recovery Act" (a key element of the NRA plan) unconstitutional. Still, the
New Deal moved ahead in its struggle against economic
collapse
*--FDR redefined US liberalism, adding a large dose of
what in Europe might be called social democracy. However, some called it by
other names which variously implied managerial bureaucratic statism ("planned economy"; in this case
the planning was by a nationally elected
government rather than self-administered corporate boards or industrial CEOs) [Howard Zinn, ed.,
New Deal Thought]
*--Ex-Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon remained until his death in 1937 a
bitter critic of FDR’s “socialistic”
New Deal. The Roosevelt Administration began to pull the US capitalist economy out of the swamp into which it had
driven itself in the years of Mellon’s service as Secretary of the Treasury. Many whose chestnuts were thus pulled
from the fire nurtured until their deaths an angry and thankless hatred for the progressivism of the New Deal.
Those who thought this way felt it was sufficient condemnation of the "New Deal"
to equate it with the European (could we say "Western") social-democratic
tradition
*--Building on an inherited family fortune, Mellon individually achieved a
vigorous and astonishing half-century-plus business and public service career
\\
*--Rimlinger on Roosevelt's background [TXT];
on the depression era [TXT]
*--LBH,3:380-7
<>1933ja11:USSR Machine Tractor Stations nationalized and
centrally administered large farm implements. Agriculture mechanized or industrialized as
agricultural collectivization advanced [SGv:334-6]
<>1933fe22:Germany, Berlin | D. Sefton Delmer described
Hitler's reaction to the burning of the Reichstag [Eye:507-9].
From the beginning, the Nazis counted on its being the work of communists. Thus
they sought to exploit public concern over a terrorist act in order to rouse
the electorate to vote for their right-wing party. It appears now to have been a Nazi
setup, and it worked
<>1933fe28:Nazis persuaded ineffective President Hindenburg to issue an ordinance
"for the protection of the people and state", on the basis of which Hitler was
able to attack all political opposition to his party in upcoming elections [DPH:420-1]
<>1933mr05:1945ap30; Adolf Hitler elected head of German
State, the beginning of 12-year "Thousand Year Reich" in Nazi Germany
*--Ended with Hitlers suicide and, two days later, the
surrender of Berlin to the Soviet Red Army and the end of WW2 in Europe
*--But over the next dozen years, Hitler reshaped
European history
<>1933mr07:Austrian Premier Engelbert Dollfuss (Christian
Socialist Party) suspended parliamentary government, ousting Social
Democrats. He sought support from Fascist Italy, but he nonetheless tried to keep
native-born Austrian Nazi Party
activists at arms length. Dollfuss assumed dictatorial power
<>1933mr24:German "Weimar Constitution"
suspended in emergency "enabling law" which gave Hitler unchecked authority
"to relieve the distress of the people and the Reich". Only the SDs voted
against this measure. Liberalism appeared politically
inert.
Other laws followed in quick succession over the next few months in which
Hitler carried
out his "revolution after power", establishing a dictatorship for himself and
his Nazi Party [DPH:421-4]
<>1933ap:USSR Metro-Vickers Trial
<>1933ap16:USSR | Sholokhov letter to Joseph Stalin re.
excesses of Collectivization [Tucker, Stalin in Power:194]
*--Stalinist policy in this epoch has reminded some commentators of English
policy in the early industrial era. Stalin's "primitive accumulation of capital"
meant heartless squeezing of the domestic population of the northern Eurasian
continent, all in a very brief historical period, about one decade. It meant a
hurried transfer of the economic resources of Russian and all other people under
direct Soviet rule, and especially traditional rural populations. These
resources were gathered into the hands of Party bureaucratic and managerial
elites for purposes of investment in Soviet industrial development, and the
comfort of the gathering elite.
English "primitive accumulation" was much slower and came from two sources.
First,
common agricultural lands under traditional village authority were
"inclosed" (or "enclosed")
by landowning elites. This meant the expropriation and concentration of economic
resources into the hands of a privileged aristocracy and crown administration
for their own comfort and expanded opportunities through investment in the
dynamic new global market economy. Thus the second source of English "primitive
accumulation of capital" =
exploitation of overseas imperial domains
*--Collectivization disrupted and transformed forever the Russian rural landscape. The
destruction of traditional village ways and the introduction of modern, urban, mechanized
means of production has been variously painful everywhere it has happened,
whether managed by entrepreneurial aristocrats, Commissars or corporate executives. In contrast to
other moments in the history of the European "agricultural revolution"
in preparation for
industrialization, Soviet Collectivization was an intense and purposeful telescoping of
the misery and dislocation into a brief historical moment -- mostly in the first
five years of agricultural collectivization between 1927 and 1933
-- in which levels of suffering and loss were staggering, even when judged by
the standards of the statist-managerial 20th century, in fact, they were nearly
unprecedented in the history of domestic governmental policy
<>1933ap26:English ambassador to Germany Horace Rumbold
sent to London a clear description of what Hitler and his Nazi Party
meant, "Pacifism Is the Deadliest of Sins" [BNE:270-3]
<>1933ap28:USSR Central Committee directive re. Communist
Party purge [Tucker, Stalin in Power:221-2
| SGv:167-70]
*--A political culture of denunciation crept into the everyday life of the
Soviet citizen [SWL:154-7; 207-81]
*--Over next five years, Stalinist purges also eradicated leading Bolsheviks and
other Communist Party members [ORW:208-10]
<>1933my10:German university students burned books which
the Nazis identified as objectionable. In Berlin, the local Associated Press bureau chief
Louis P. Lochner observed and reported on book burning [P20:177]
<>1933je:USA consul general at Berlin George S. Messersmith reported, "The
Nazis were after...unlimited territorial expansion" [P20:218]
<>1933se01:Germany | Nuremberg Nazi Party rally, became an
annual event of high theatre
*--Leni Riefenstahl Produktion,
Triumph of the Will [80 min. videorecording] Direction and artistic organization, Leni Riefenstahl ; camera director, Sepp
Allgeier ; musical composition, Robert Windt. Original German language version with
English subtitles Videocassette release of the 1934 motion picture Winner of Germany's
National Film Prize ; awarded first place at The Paris International Exhibition. Parental
discretion advised. A film commissioned by Adolph Hitler as the official record of the
Nuremberg Party Rally of 1934. Produced as an important piece of political propaganda to
introduce the new German leaders to the nation and to impress foreign audiences
*1937:German supporter of Hitler who later broke with him, Kurt G.W. Ludecke, described The
Demagogic Orator [P20:168]
*--USA medical doctor Alice Hamilton visited Germany and reported what she saw
with precision and vitality = "To understand Hitler's
enormous success with the young we must understand what life has meant to the
post-war generation in Germany, not only the children of the poor but of the
middle class as well. They were children during the years of the war when the
food blockade kept them half starved, when fathers were away at the front and
mothers distracted with the effort to keep their families fed. They came to
manhood in a country which seemed to have no use for them" [P20:172
| PWT2:342-4]
*--GO oc14
<>1933se02:Winnipeg Free Press.
An article by Frank H. Williams on conditions in western Canada during the
Depression = "How families in stricken prairie areas have managed to live during
these trying times. Those too proud to accept relief have exhibited considerable
ingenuity in devising ways and means of augmenting the family income. For one
thing the old spinning wheel has come back into use again. In a small Manitoba
town a blacksmith took advantage of this sudden demand for spinning wheels to
revamp his shop into a spinning wheel factory and business boomed so quickly he
had to take on additional help. In the Edenwold district, east of Regina, one
family with butter and eggs to sell debated whether it was worth while to spend
the money for gasoline to take their produce to Regina. They solved the problem
by filling the old Model T Ford with cut firewood and the sale value of the wood
paid the expenses of the trip. Another farmer near Rouleau, Sask., despaired of
selling his hogs in the ordinary way for the price was at rock bottom. He
conceived the idea of manufacturing the entire hog into sausage and the word
spread that his sausage was good, so he was forced to go out and buy the hogs of
his neighbors. The spinning industry was revived because the price of wool was
so low as to make it unprofitable to sell. The government instructors quickly
adapted their training to the changed conditions and showed the farm
women how
to make blankets out of the raw wool. Unable to buy new cars and by the same
token unable to buy gasoline for the old car, or even to buy a buggy, the
farmers have taken the engines out of their old Model T Fords, hitched a tongue
and whiffle-trees to the front axle and called it a "Bennett" buggy. Others have
put a seat on the front wheels of a Model T and have christened this an
"Anderson" cart. Probably Premiers Bennett and Anderson will not feel flattered
at the use of their names in this connection, but it is a reflection of the
spirit of the times.... One item of expense the farmer has eliminated is that of
flour. With thousands of bushels in his granaries that the market price doomed
to remain there, the farmer took five or ten bushels to the small grist mill for
his own flour. If he had no money to pay for the milling he left the bran and
shorts with the miller in payment. The average farm family has limited its
purchases to sugar and tea, for which no substitutes can be found on the land. A
few dozen eggs or a few pounds of butter can take care of these requirements.
Some enterprising businessmen, such as local theatre and skating rink managers
offered to take wheat and barley as payment for admission prices. They tell the
story of a Manitoba farmer who met two acquaintances outside a beer parlor.
"Lets go in for a beer," he suggested. The three quaffed their bottles of beer
and when the host arose to go he turned to the hotel-keeper. "I'll bring you ten
bushels of barley to pay for that." he said. Until organized relief measures
came to the aid of the farmer the fuel problem was his greatest worry. You can
drive a day at a time in some parts of Saskatchewan and never see a tree or a
bush. Those farmers burned coal in the good days, but in their necessity they
had no money with which to buy coal. So they burned barley. But they have caught
a vision of better times, with the upward trend of the wheat market. Those
courageous enough to hold their crop over from last year have sold it this
summer, mostly in small lots, for a carload shipment would excite comment and
perhaps invoke a seizure order from the bank, the implement agent or the
mortgage company. So they have sold a lot of their grain a hundred bushels at a
time and they are paying their small debts, preferably their store bills. They
feel the banks, the implement companies and the mortgage companies can wait a
bit longer for their money.... There will be money to spend in western Canada
this year if the market price of grain keeps up. The farmer is starved for
everything that contributes to the comfort and well-being of his family and as
soon as he gets some surplus cash he will turn it loose into the avenues of
trade" .... [SOURCE]
<>1933oc14:Germany, under Nazi rule,
withdrew from League of Nations and from its Disarmament
Conference [DPH:472-3]
*--The Disarmament Conference was just then
reconvening. Perhaps we should say "just then coming too" after being knocked
out in its first phase
<>1933no:USA-USSR diplomatic relations restored based on USA formal recognition
of USSR that summer [related documentsRFP2,2:59-67]
*--Fifteen years of non-recognition
and, in general, USA isolationism in
relationship to European problems was now coming to a close. A perception spread
that the world was dividing along lines perceived as "progressive" on one side
and "fascistic" on the other. Reluctantly FDR's administration saw
itself forced to position itself in this starkly bifurcating world. By
now, however, the devastated US economy placed severe limits on just how
effective US involvement could be
<>1933de:Japanese-Russian international relations described by USA Ambassador William
Bullitt [Senn,2:]
<>1934:English philosophical historian Arnold Toynbee
helped make sense out of confusing times for countless readers when he first published A
Study of History [BMC1:688-94 | BMC4:782-8]
*--Toynbee, in a time of decline, helped
popularize the notion of "The West" as an ascendant civilization [i.e.,
northwestern Europe and its North American off-shoot].
The concept had emerged over the previous
half-century. The notion came to full blossom in the
half century of Cold War at
the end of the 20th century
<>1934:French
artist André Breton, What is
Surrealism? [CWC:368-86]
*--Breton rejected Tristan Tzara's
"Dada" movement, with its
influential two-decade-long emphasis on the unconscious, chaotic and
irrational elements of creativity in the fine arts
<>1934:1937; German classicist Werner Jaeger, Paideia:
die Formung des griechischen Menschen (3 volumes, Berlin and
Leipzig:1934-1937;
English translation)
<>1934:German physicist and Nobel Laureate Johannes
Stark urged scientists to embrace Nazi racist doctrine and pitted "Jewish
Science" versus "German Science" [P20:175]
<>1934:German-born (USA émigré) theoretical physicist
Albert Einstein, "What
is the Theory of Relativity?" [BPE:723-6]
<>1934:Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-) wrote "Archetypes of
the Collective Unconscious" [BMC4:718-22 (includes excerpt
from later work)]
*--Selections from Jung's works [TXT#1]
[TXT#2]
*1908:Jung met Freud [ID] and was thrown into the psychological movement of the early
20th century. He soon found his own voice and broke with Freud. For one thing,
he did not accept the nearly exclusively sexual inclination of Freudian
analysis. He was more mystical, religious and anthropological in his psychology.
He sought to understand what he called "the collective unconscious", a cluster
of archetypical emotions, images and inclinations that helped identify the
individual within the larger collective of general human consciousness and subconscious
\\
*--[W]
[W]
<>1934:USA public intellectual Lewis Mumford published
Technics and
Civilization [CCS,2:18-39]
<>1934:1935; USA athlete, scholar, actor, singer, and
increasingly an activist on behalf of blacks and other oppressed minorities,
Paul Robeson, accepted an invitation from Sergei Eisenstein to visit the USSR.
This was the beginning of a complex and troubled epoch of activism in Robeson's
life [W]
<>1934wi:French political crisis threatened
possibility of right-wing takeover [DPH:328-36]
<>1934ja:Stalin speech on relations of USSR with Capitalist States [RFP2,1:118-28
| ORW:205-7]
<>1934fe04:USA New Deal agency,
FERA
[ID], received report on the feasibility of
establishing an agricultural colony in the Alaska Matanuska Valley. FDR ordered
an end to the spontaneous settlement that had been filling Alaska habitable
places since the days of Russian dominion. The Valley experienced 110 frost-free
days. Sunshine was ample, 24 hours worth on June 21. Three years earlier, USA
Department of Agriculture, working closely with the Alaska Railroad, supported
experimental stations in Fairbanks and the Matanuska Valley. But by 1934, only
about 100 families could be found scattered in the Valley. FDR now authorized
Harry Hopkins to create a New Deal colony, the Alaska Rural Rehabilitation
Corporation, and to fund it out of the Federal Treasury until it got on its own
feet. FERA seized all previously abandoned claims to Matanuska land and began to
design and build a colonial settlement and to recruit settlers from
depression-hit Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan
*1935my22:Seward-Palmer train delivered the second group of immigrants. Now each
of the 200 resettled families, by lot, was assigned a 40-acre plot
*1935je06:Anchorage Daily Times editorialized, "It would be li