As promised earlier today, the second batch of .pdf documents have been uploaded to the Digital Library of The Fourth Estate. This batch includes the source materials that went into my arguments regarding the origins of Socialism and why my arguments for why the Soviet Union collapsed in the manner that it did. For those who do not know, they were two consistent arguments that appeared in both Editions of The Work-Standard.
Socialism, as this term is formally understood here and elsewhere, did not begin with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Rather, it began much earlier as a distinct Prussian development of economic life known as “Cameralism.” If the precursor to Capitalism was Mercantilism, then Cameralism was the precursor to Socialism. Another important factor which convinced me that Cameralism preceded Socialism pertained to various historical figures and political movements who were open to certain ideas from Socialism but deviated from Scientific Socialism. The most important example in which this occurred was over questions of economic governance and what sort of role should a national civil service play under those conditions.
As for the other major topic, there is historical evidence to suggest that a massive drop in the prices of Crude Oil and Petroleum in 1985 had not only made Perestroika inevitable, but it also brought the Soviet economy into the throes of an economic recession. The Soviet Union, like its post-Soviet Russian successor decades later, was vulnerable to price fluctuations in the prices of Crude Oil and Petroleum. This is due to the fact that Soviets were dependent on a Western Europe whose high living standards cannot be sustained without steady influxes of Petroleum from somewhere. Without Petroleum, the Western world cannot survive under Liberal Capitalism because the latter depends on access to cheap sources in order to maintain its high-consumption way of living. If anybody was ever going to write favorably of Planned/Command Economy, they need to understand that economic recessions can happen, and contingencies need to be prepared in advance. In the case of The Work-Standard, I especially argued that the Socialist Nation should rely on non-petroleum sources of fuel.
Categories: Compendium
The Fourth Estate 
Leave a Reply