Ford and Stalin.
How to Live in Humaneness
Alternative Principles
of Globalization
St. Petersburg
2004
INTERNAL PREDICTOR
OF THE USSR
Ford and Stalin.
How to Live in Humaneness
_____________________
Alternative Principles
of Globalization
St. Petersburg
2004
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CONTENTS
The Preface to the English Edition
The mother tongue of the authors of this work is Russian. The translators of this edition are native Russian speakers as well.
Text comprehension implies matching a definite word or sentence order with particular images, imaginative notions, whose foretypes (protoplasts) are located either in life (when narrating about it), or inside the authors’ mentality (when fantasizing or designing the future).
Considering the fact that the authors largely focus on the topics that are not traditionally discussed in historically established cultures, Russia or the rest of the world, including the West, which is caused by inertia of thinking, there are quite a few new notions that are not common knowledge in Social Science as yet. According to Kozma Prutkov, «Lots of things are incomprehensible to us not because our notions are poor but because these things go far beyond our notions». That is why a reader of this text is supposed to labor hard even if he is a native Russian speaker, and it gets even harder due to specific style of the Russian original. As a result, the interpreters had to cope with both word choice and grammar structures to make the translation sound adequately and transmit the same message as the original version. Moreover, different chapters were translated by different people. And despite we tried to do our best when editing the translation and attempting to gain a single style for the book as a whole, it still may happen that the personal differences between the interpreters’ outlooks and their language cultures are expressed differently in different parts of the same book, so the same phenomena may be described with different terminological frameworks.
That is why we apologize to our English-speaking readers for possible inaccuracies, style imprecisions or some difficulties which might occur in the course of reading. The readers having a command of Russian are kindly invited to the web site at the address www.mera.com.ru in case they have a need to adjust their understanding of the text.
If any readers would be so kind as to offer their own version of the translation of a book as a whole or give a revised translation of particular fragments, they can send it to the address moderator@mera.com.ru . Both original Russian text and the English language version belong to the Non-Author culture, which implies their free distribution, so the interpreters, offering their optional translations and corrections, have neither moral nor ethical basis for exclusive copyright for the text, hereby offered to the readers.
The authors thank Russian students Maria Gerasimchuk, Dmitriy Orlov, Julia Shishkina, Yelizaveta Vasserman and Ivan Zuev for their devoted contribution in translating this book into English.
Foreword
This work concerns the outlook on economy and social life belonging to two men who are usually thought to be very different.
The first one is Henry Ford I, founder and head of «Ford Motors Company», one of the world’s largest automotive corporations. The other one is Joseph Stalin — a politician, sociologist and economist, whose world understanding and will were embodied in the foundation and prime of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the «superstate № 2» of the 20th century, the «super concern» state.
Despite what used to be taught at schools about the fight between capitalism and socialism those two people share a similar view on normal social life. The difference lies in Henry Ford’s focusing mainly on microeconomy and relations between people as employees of a single enterprise, avoiding the issues of macroeconomy and building state institutions, while Joseph Stalin concentrated on the issues of developing political economy as a science, on cultural transformation and arranging the macroeconomy by the scheme of a «super concern» state, leaving the microeconomic issues to society’s creative force.
Thus they in fact complement each other and therefore pave the way to uniting the people of Russia and America as well as the people of the world in a common culture based on morals and ethics of a conscientious laborer.
But contemporaries as well as descendants refused to understand both of them. And the world has paid for this reluctance to understand with World War II followed by the «cold war» between NATO and the USSR and with the deformed globalization that is currently taking place.
Though this work quotes both Ford and Stalin extensively where it is necessary, those are merely quotations. Their heritage should be studied not by quotations but by their works in order to form a complete and coherent understanding of who and in what way was wrong or right.
But if the heritage of Ford and Stalin is understood, expanded and realized then the historic perspective of all peoples will acquire a new, a better quality...
Part I
SOCIALLY USEFUL
Management Principles
Have Been Proclaimed Long Ago
1. Globalization
as a Means to Counter Globalization
«Anti-globalists» are people who for various reasons oppose «globalization». But most of them don’t bother about understanding what precisely they are fighting for and what precisely they oppose to. Therefore they get nothing but hooliganism as a result. Given such an essentially vague and purely nihilistic attitude to globalization the «anti-globalists» are no smaller an evil than the historically real «globalization», which they are so unhappy with. In order to choose none of the two evils one needs to become familiar with the social meaning of both the words and the phenomena they signify.