Tumgik
#the great cemetery of riga
lindadigsgraves · 1 month
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
53 notes · View notes
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Lielie kapi (Great Cemetery), Riga, Latvia, April 18, 2023. Photo by D.P.
The cemetery was destroyed by Russian occupation regime after WWII. Tombstones were destroyed or sold and taken away en masse, but the metal fences of the graves were broken...The Russian invaders  tried to erase indigenous culture and its monuments, even cemeteries were desecrated...    
6 notes · View notes
jhlcolorizing · 2 years
Photo
Tumblr media
Major General Lagus in front of his Command Post "Piltsu" at Syväri, 31 August 1943.
Ernst Ruben Lagus (12 October 1896 - 15 July 1959), better known as Ruben Lagus was a Finnish Major General.
Lagus was one of the Finnish Jaeger troops trained and fought in the Royal Prussian 27th Jäger Battalion (1915-1918) during WWI and saw combat at Misse River, Gulf of Riga and Lielupe River. Lagus returned with the main body of the Jäger from Germany to Vaasa on 25 February 1918, joining the Finnish Civil War on the side of the Whites.
During the Winter War Lagus was in charge of the supply of the Finnish troops fighting on the Karelian Isthmus. In the Continuation War he was first the commander of 1st Jaeger Brigade and on June, 1942 he was made the commander of the newly formed Finnish Armoured Division. During the summer of 1944 he led the division with great success in the decisive battles of Karelian Isthmus 1944, where the armoured troops played major role in achieving the major defense victory.
He was the first soldier to be awarded the Mannerheim Cross on 22 July 1941. In his motivation for the award, Commander-in-Chief emphasized Lagus personal courage and successful operations.
Ruben Lagus is buried at Hietaniemi Cemetery, Helsinki. ���•••••••
Kenraalimajuri Lagus komentopaikkansa "Piltsun" edustalla Syvärillä, 31.8.1943.
Ernst Ruben Lagus (12.10.1896 - 15.7.1959) oli suomalainen jääkärikenraalimajuri jonka sotilasura alkoi vuonna 1915 hänen lähtiessään vapaaehtoisena veljensä perässä Saksaan saamaan sotilaskoulutusta Kuninkaalliseen Preussin 27. Jääkäripataljoonaan. Hän otti osaa taisteluihin ensimmäisessä maailmansodassa Saksan itärintamalla Misse-joella, Riianlahdella ja Aajoella. Helmikuussa 1918 Lagus palasi Suomeen jääkärien pääjoukon mukana höyrylaiva Arcturuksella Vaasaan ja aloitti uransa Suomen valkoisessa armeijassa ja oli mukana mm. Tampereen valtauksessa keväällä 1918.
Talvisodassa Lagus toimi Kannaksen Armeijan huoltopäällikkönä ja osallistui myös taisteluihin vt. rintamakomentajana. Jatkosodan sytyttyä kesällä 1941 Lagus sai komentoonsa 1. jääkäriprikaatin ja pääsi toteuttamaan Saksasta välirauhan aikana opittua salamasotaa Aunuksen Karjalassa. Lagus osallistui Petroskoin valtaukseen, jonka seurauksena hänet palkittiin kenraaliylennyksellä.
Hyökkäyssodassa Laguksen maine oli noussut erittäin korkealle että hänet määrättiin kesällä 1942 perustetun Panssaridivisioonan komentajaksi, näin syntyi sankaritarina suomalaisesta panssarikenraalista. Laguksen johtamasta Divisioonasta muodostui kenties iskukykyisin joukkomme ja oli keskeisessä roolissa mm. kesän 1944 rankoissa torjuntataisteluissa. Panssaridivisioona osallistui myös Lapin sotaan.
Sotapalveluksensa ansiosta hänet on nimitetty Mannerheim-ristin ritariksi numero 1.
”Puolustusvoimain Ylipäällikkö on pvm:llä 22.7.41 nimittänyt Vapaudenristin 2. luokan Mannerheim-ristin ritariksi eversti Ernst Ruben Laguksen henkilökohtaisesta urhoollisuudesta ja suuriin tuloksiin johtaneista sotatoimista.”
Lagusta pidetään yhä yhtenä merkittävimmistä sotilasjohtajista, jonka perintö elää vieläkin suomalaisten panssarijoukkojen keskuudessa.
Panssarikenraali Ruben Lagus on haudattu Helsinkiin Hietaniemen hautausmaalle. ••••••••
[ sa-kuva | 136080 | Aunio ]
12 notes · View notes
grille-thrill · 1 year
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media
The Great Cemetery, Riga
1 note · View note
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media
128 notes · View notes
lacrimis · 5 years
Photo
Tumblr media
Pokrov Cemetery - Latvia
The cemetery was built in 1773 following Russian Empire's prohibition of burials within city territories. Together with Vagaņkaand Novodevičja cemeteries, Pokrov Cemetery was among Russian Empire's largest five cemeteries. In 1773 a wooden Proclamation Chapel was built, and in 1777 under Pskov's archbishop's order Pokrov church was built, which burnt down in 1875. On April 29, 1845 the first sermon in Latvian was held by priest Jēkabs Mihailovs, former domain factor of Piebalga's count Šeremetjevs. In 1858 Latvian congregation was established in the church. The current church was built in 1879 designed by architect R. Pflūgs, sanctified on September 9, 1879.
Pokrov Cemetery became Riga's Russian community's main cemetery. The base of this commune had been established from centuries of Russian families living in the land, as well as cultural workers and scientists escaping the USSR in the early half of the 20th century. The members of community held the cemetery in high standing, for example, the former writer and commandant of Daugavgrīva stronghold Jurijs Gončarenko-Galičs secured himself a spot in the cemetery before shooting himself knowing that after Soviet occupation he would be harshly prosecuted.
The burials were suspended in 1964, and in 1967 the cemetery was administratively joined with Great Cemetery of Riga to establish a memorial park. In 1991, the ownership over the cemetery was restored to Latvian Orthodox Church, who restored the cemetery operation.
11 notes · View notes
yda2021 · 3 years
Text
About capitalism and communism. Comparative analysis experience
Was Lenin a dissident of his era, i.e. a person who did not think like the majority, including the majority of Social Democrats? Undoubtedly, he was. How did his struggle end? A grandiose, unprecedented victory of the working class, first of all, over the big bourgeoisie in Russia. What, besides moral satisfaction, the opportunity to combine the requirements of objective laws with the life of society, unprecedented respect from the majority of the inhabitants of the Earth, did Lenin receive? Nothing else.
Was Solzhenitsyn a dissident? Undoubtedly, yes. How did his struggle end? His personal victory over the friendship between the peoples of the USSR. That is, it was not Stalin who was defeated, because "the dead will not have shame" and, even, not the memory of him, as evidenced by systematic sociological surveys, but simple-minded ordinary workers who, thanks to the victory of the anti-communists, became guest workers, at best. What did Solzhenitsyn get as a result of his victory? The Dynamite King Award and the right to reside in the United States, a country that planned to be the first to use nuclear bombs in all major cities of the USSR as early as 1957.
Both after the Great October and after the Solzhenitsyn victory, the bourgeoisie unleashed a civil war in the country and promoted foreign intervention.
It is true that in two years Lenin forced the bourgeoisie and the foreign interventionists to be defeated in the civil war they had unleashed, and mobilized the party, the intelligentsia, and the workers to develop and implement the GOELRO plan. Three years after the end of the civil war, in terms of industrial production, Russia again reached the figures of 1913. And by 1922, the peoples of the largest regions of the former tsarist Russia voluntarily decided to unite in the Soviet Union. Lenin, by his consistent international policy, ruled out the emergence of fascism on the territory of the USSR, while, in almost all the civilized countries of Western Europe, the first fascist parties had already been created.
After the victory of Solzhenitsyn and his followers over the USSR, the revived bourgeoisie and religious clans provoked a resurgence of fascism and a new civil war between the peoples of the former USSR, which continues to this day and, at the time of writing, has lasted for 25 years. The peoples of Central Asia, Georgia, Moldova, Azerbaijan and Armenia, and the peoples of the North Caucasus are at war. For more than a year, there has been a civil war on the territory of Ukraine.
The problem is compounded by the fact that, even in the boldest hypothetical theory, it is impossible to formulate any objective reason why, in a market democracy, the civil war of all against all could stop. In the conditions of capitalism, civil wars are an organic continuation of the competition of entrepreneurs, which first develops into individual contract killings, and then into fascism and world wars. And for this reason, too, the volume of production in the democratic Russian Federation has not reached the level of, at least, the 80s of the RSFSR.
Under the blows of constantly increasing domestic difficulties, the harmfulness of the" arrangement " of the USSR according to Solzhenitsyn's advice is felt more and more strongly, and the consistency of the Leninist-Stalinist model of human development is gradually becoming apparent to an increasing number of young people around the world. But in the absence of a full-fledged Bolshevik party in the global political space, that is, personnel for scientific explanation of the reasons for the deterioration of living conditions, the inhabitants of the whole world come to an increasingly enraged state, as a result of which there are movements like ISIL. Religious speculation cannot overshadow the fact that the world order established after the collapse of the USSR does not suit the vast masses of the peoples of the world and, without looking far into the future, they are firmly convinced of the need to destroy the existing system of dependence of peoples, first of all, on the oligarchs of the United States.
From the point of view of internal consequences, the past twenty-five years of the genocidal policy of the oligarchs on the territory of the former USSR caused, in the Russian Federation alone, a reduction in the population, on average, by one million people per year. The situation is even worse in the other republics of the former USSR. In particular, Estonia has become a sex tourism zone for the countries of North-Western Europe and, according to the UN, has taken one of the first places in the world in terms of the number of HIV-infected citizens. Latvia is depopulated due to the mass migration of citizens to Western Europe to such an extent that Russian-speaking subjects began to enter state and elected posts in Riga. The population of Armenia, taking into account the number of emigrants to the Russian Federation, without the slightest participation of the Turkish janissaries, again fell to the level of the beginning of the twentieth century.
True, in the Russian Federation in 2015, the birth rate for the first time exceeded the death rate, but this, due to the general market trend, only contributes to an increase in the reserve army of labor with a fall in the pace of economic development, and this means a new wave of extinction of the unemployed and the growth of senseless and merciless frenzy among the inhabitants.
Thus, if we compare the consequences of dissidence on the basis of communist theory with dissidence on capitalist grounds, they are just as opposite as, for example, the May Day demonstration of workers and the gathering of Satanists in the cemetery.
About the most important thing in the capitalist economy?
One of the paradoxes of modern public consciousness is the fact that after two world wars, the genocide of Russians, Armenians, Poles, Gypsies, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Jews, an endless series of local wars and global economic crises, it is necessary to explain to intellectuals, like the picket vests of the glorious "Chernomorsk", what is wrong with capitalism, and whether it was necessary to "put your fingers in his mouth". It turns out that significant masses of the intelligentsia, to some extent, assimilate differential and integral calculus, are able to read the works of Ilf and Petrov, endure to the tenth page of Solzhenitsyn's novel, but they cannot assimilate the truth that capitalism is the main source of wars and all forms of genocide.
But, since it is still not obvious to many, it will have to be proved again and again.
As history shows, capitalism, to a much greater extent than previous socio-economic formations, is synonymous with the continuous war of ALL against ALL, without any exceptions, in ALL spheres of public life, for the sake of even greater enslavement of the losers.
There are two opposite states of the human psyche in relation to the reflected object: love and hate. Capitalism is a word adopted to denote a social structure in which mutual hatred is the main driving motive for the violent activity of the subjects. It is not without reason that many languages have a word for a non - malicious way of comparing people's abilities-competition, and for a competition to the death - competition.
Even under slavery and feudalism, the level of antagonism between members of agricultural patriarchal communities, between latifundists and slaves, between feudal lords and peasants was significantly lower than between all social types of the population under capitalism.
The slaveholder and the feudal lord understood and were forced to consciously spend money on the maintenance of workers in such a volume that their working capacity and professional skills did not decrease, because the main volume of workers had to be replenished by new wasteful wars or to reproduce them naturally, multiplying and training. After all, the power of slaveholders and feudal lords, the senseless luxury of their palaces and castles, their position in society was adequate to the current number of strong warriors, efficient and skilled slaves and serfs.
Under slavery and feudalism, the territory and population were assigned to private individuals by the supreme political and religious authorities, and for a long period there were no ways to assign the property of one owner to another without the decision of the pharaohs, priests, emperor, senate, king. Therefore, especially from feudalism, there is a lot of evidence of the faithful service of small-scale nobles, knights, samurai to their suzerains, shoguns, up to reckless self-sacrifice in battle and hara-kiri by the decision of the master. If the suzerain lost the war, then both he and his vassals often paid for their weakness with their lives. The victor always had enough of his vassals.
Under capitalism, the market not only involves the purposeful destruction of competitors, but also, due to the significantly increased productivity of labor and the primitivization of labor operations, a multi-million-dollar reserve "army of labor" has emerged in all developed countries, and the peoples of most of the colonial dependent countries have turned into free plantations of "black wood" for slave traders.
The owner of the means of subsistence and the means of production under capitalism no longer had to think about the living conditions of wage slaves. Hired slaves must pay the master for a bed in the barracks, although even the slaves of Athens and Rome received a place in the barracks for free. The excess of the commodity "labor force" on the market led not only to the disregard of the owners for their workers and slaves, but also to the fact that competition arose between hired slaves, turning into a fight, which is especially noticeable during the battles between strikebreakers and striking proletarians who beg for a salary increase from their master.
As we know from modern history, the transformation of the consciousness of the English lords in relation to their peasants was once so rapid that the entire mass of serfs, almost in one day, was thrown out to "freedom", and the lords lost any interest in them. The days when lords with dogs caught runaway peasants were replaced by the mass export of peasants to Australia under the guise of vagabonds, shirking work.
Under capitalism, any kind of joint life activity, corporatism is forced, conditional, most often, cynical (Against whom are we friends?), and the state of universal competition, the focus of partners on mutual destruction, is absolute.
In the USSR, the process of humanization in a number of aspects has already gone so far that all normal people have forgotten, for example, what a marriage contract is. Love among Soviet citizens was the main, and most often, the only reason for applying to the registry office for a piece of paper that had a poetic and symbolic meaning for lovers. Under capitalism, the bulk of marriages in non-proletarian families are an ordinary commercial enterprise, and therefore the couple needs a legal document in the form of a contract, slightly insuring in case one spouse "throws" the other, which happens in more than half of the cases.
Under capitalism, if you don't measure, weigh, and cheat your partner, it means that they purposefully beat you, i.e., measure, weigh, and cheat you. In the life of entrepreneurs, it is difficult, if at all possible, to find an event or a period of time in a person's life when he would be outside the process of mass deception, robbery, self-deception and self-enslavement.
Surprisingly, most of the modern intellectuals of the technical and humanitarian profile who lived in the USSR pretend that they still do not understand that it is much more practical to "squeeze out" a ready-made business by committing a contract murder, raider seizure, or acquiring a controlling stake through front people, in terms of the time frame for achieving the goal (making a profit), than to create a business from scratch. Therefore, throughout the civilized world, the practice of raiding is carried out in parallel with the propaganda of the idea that the capitalist differs from the proletarian, first of all, by increased diligence. But this myth has been refuted by the practice of many decades in all countries, especially in the era of the initial accumulation of capital under the "Colt" law, and has acquired an international character in the era of stock exchange imperialist globalism, when oligarchs "squeeze" entire countries from each other. Today, in particular, under the slogan of the struggle for the "nezalezhnost" of Ukraine, there is a struggle between the oligarchs of the United States, Germany and the Russian Federation for the possession of its resources.
Such Marxist cogs as, for example, Abalkin, Bunich, Shmelev, Gaidar, having memorized the brief definition of bourgeois political economy, which states that political economy is the science of the forms of production, i.e., economic relations, did not bother to understand and answer the question, and what is the nature of the relations indicated by Marx? Why did Engels include this definition among the brilliant discoveries of Marx?
In the most commonly used version, Marx's definition states that bourgeois political economy is the science of relations between people arising from the production, appropriation, exchange, distribution and consumption of the material and spiritual conditions of human existence. If we CONCRETIZE the character of each of these forms of relations, AND EACH OF THE BRILLIANT TRUTHS OF MARXISM is CONCRETE, we must admit that bourgeois political economy is the science of relations between people, primarily in the form of mass VIOLENCE and general mutual DECEPTION IN EACH EPISODE of these relations. In other words, THE RELATIONS OF DECEPTION AND VIOLENCE ARE THE objective BASIS OF THE CAPITALIST FORMATION. Whether we are talking about production, appropriation, exchange, distribution or consumption under capitalism, if there is a fact of profit, then there was either an act of purposeful, competent deception, or shameless plunder, conquest.
And since deception and robbery sooner or later reveal themselves, it is necessary to unilaterally enforce the results of deception, because otherwise, as is the case among gamblers, the caught cheater is severely beaten in the face and justice is restored.
In order not to be treated like cheaters, entrepreneurs create police and prisons in advance to contain all those who, one way or another, having discovered the fraud, try to compensate for the losses in the shortest way: to return the loot. Therefore, the main task and content of political economy as a bourgeois science is, first of all, to disguise the fact that private land ownership is the result of the forcible alienation of land from primitive and feudal communities by the religious and secular nobility. In the future, imperial and democratic slavery, absolutist and democratic feudalism, democratic and imperialist capitalism are based on the same form of private ownership of Land, once forcibly alienated from direct producers, and, until now, inherited according to the slave-feudal principle of consanguinity. The similarity of all these forms of land ownership is absolute. The differences are absolutely not significant.
The real political economy of bourgeois society is based on private ownership of the Land, after its forcible seizure and forcible retention of the land, on relations of disproportionate exchange in the form of mass deception, i.e., on the state of the land. trade, on the basis of the unfair distribution of the newly created value for a meager salary, on the one hand, and meaningless profit, on the other hand, which, in turn, generates, at one pole of society, material and spiritual poverty, forced asceticism of the vast majority of the world's population, and at the other pole - gluttony, extravagance, stock gambling and many other forms of parasitic consumption of the aristocracy.
Therefore, political economy as a bourgeois science, already in its very first literary models of Moncretien and Petty, and, in the classical Ricardian version, and in the vulgar works of Marshall, Samuelson, Leontief, Keynes, and Mankew, is an exposition of the principles of satisfying the egoism of the usurpers of the means of production, and nothing more. During the period of the formation of bourgeois nationalism, the egoism of the business class was elevated to the rank of the interest of the entire nation, and therefore the youth of the proletarian part of the nation and the middle class were driven to incessant wars for the sake of the victory of the egoism of one national group of entrepreneurs over the egoism of all other entrepreneurs of any nation. In parallel with the international relations of conquest and enslavement, within each nation there was a process of devouring small-minded egoists, i.e. small and medium-sized entrepreneurs of their nation, by more voracious competitors.
All economic relations in class societies based on private property are neither conceivable nor feasible without the use of real violence or the threat of its use. This is the only way to understand Marx's idea that" violence is an economic potency, " i.e., force.
But the use of violence or the threat of violence is possible only when, from the very beginning, the subject who has decided to turn part of the material objects of the planet into his private property, spends financial and material resources on creating tools for violence against people, trains professional rapists, officers and sergeants, and provides them with living conditions that are slightly more tolerable than those of the majority of slaves, plebeians, peasants and proletarians. A well-fed slave, including a manager and an officer, brutalizes, for the time being, with a special frenzy, thus compensating for his conscious insignificance.
Thus, if, for example, Düring deduced the "theory of violence" from the evil will of the rapist, then Marxism proceeds from the fact that the will of the rapist cannot be realized until all the objective and subjective prerequisites have matured, first of all, in the form of "surplus" means of existence, which, taking advantage of mass simpletonism, future exploiters will direct to the creation of their own apparatus of violence. Either the good will be with the fists, or the fist will make you a day laborer and an eternal debtor.
In ancient times, a vague guess about the organic relationship of violence with the slave-owning form of prosperity of the masters came to Aristotle. Later, the idea that the science of market economy should be called political economy, that is, an economy based on the institution of violence, came to the mind of the theorist and adventurer-practitioner, Moncretien, already in the XVI century. He, the first of the French, analyzed the features of the market economies of Holland, and then England, and realized that the market economy of the country works the better, the more fully the legislative, executive and judicial authorities are configured to serve the interests of business, that without the police, prisons, army, officials, secret intelligence services, i.e. without POLITICS, without POWER relations and institutions used in the interests of "owners of factories, newspapers, steamships", private capitalist property cannot function. Moreover, according to the views of Moncretien, who fled from absolutist France to democratic Holland, the better the parliamentary mechanism works, the slower the masses become enlightened, the less the proletarians create problems for entrepreneurs, the more recklessly entrepreneurs can behave in the domestic and foreign markets. It is with the requirement of conformity of economic and political systems that all subsequent versions of the theory of market political economy were developed by its classics, and this is what its vulgarizers tried to disguise.
Having assimilated the cornerstone political economic ideas, the apologists of the market economy proceed from the fact that only by breaking the military-political system of a competitor country, it is possible to take over its internal market. Therefore, each subsequent war of the capitalist era is preceded by more and more grandiose efforts to achieve preliminary military-technical and military-economic superiority over a rival country.
But it may be asked, how can capitalism be considered selfish and aggressive, if we see widely advertised acts of charity, patronage? Aren't these indicators of the breadth and responsiveness of entrepreneurial souls?
But this question would be appropriate if we forget what "dust in the eyes" is, self-promotion, if we do not understand how tempting it is to reduce taxation on money withdrawn to charitable foundations, and if we "forget" that the extra money must first be looted in an amount exceeding reasonable limits, and only then, perhaps, it will turn, one day, into some charity.
Bill Gates has already invested a significant part of his capital in charitable foundations. What is the plan for using these billions is unknown, but they are already protected from large taxes. As the financial speculator Soros admitted, once in his life there came a moment when he no longer knew where to use the profits, and therefore he began to spend them on paying for the services of agents of influence, NGOs in the countries chosen for the color revolutions. Only after, for example, and Rockefeller, there will be amounts that he will not be able to profitably attach, perhaps, and he will have a crazy idea, along with the purchase of a sixth donor heart, to give one heart to a dying child, whose father earned this money, but, foolishly, gave Rockefeller. However, in the history of the Rockefeller family, there was no advertising noise about this form of charity. Money for children's hearts is collected from the world by a thread.
It must be borne in mind that under capitalism, the main source of useless profits, the main deceived, i.e., the subject that is being cheated, weighed down, and measured, is the proletariat mainly of physical labor, followed by the proletariat mainly of intellectual labor.
However, relations within the bourgeois class are built on the same principle: a relatively strong entrepreneur cheats, outweighs, shortchanges, and thus eats up the life time of a weak entrepreneur, and very often takes away his life itself.
The victory of one of the entrepreneurs in the competition, the results of which are summed up not by measuring the ratio of income and expenses of competitors, but by the real bankruptcy of one of them, means that the meanest one who sold a similar product at a higher price or, conversely, at a dumping price won, ruining the competitor in order to gain a monopoly position for himself, first on the local, and then on the world market.
In any case, the operation of the objective law of uneven production and sale of goods in a market economy is caused by the CONSCIOUS desire of EACH of the participants in the market process to take advantage of all the WEAKNESSES, mainly lower education, scanty life experience of young participants in market relations, especially children, women and guest workers.
It must be understood that the operation of the economic laws of capitalism is the real activity of people, conditioned by the level of development of the means of production, the motives of people and the level of their mental and professional development. The lower the level of general development and professionalism of the subject, the less likely it is to win in competition with similar motives and the same means of production.
Meanwhile, as practice has shown, in modern parties with communist names, the vulgarization of Marxism prevails, and the case is presented in such a way as if the objective economic laws of capitalism exist either on paper or by themselves, and do not manifest themselves ONLY through the conscious, malicious activities of the subjects of the RULING class, whose worldview presupposes a PURPOSEFUL, CONSCIOUS robbery not only of the proletarians of mental and physical labor, but also of everything that moves, up to their "classmates".
The Soviet economists extended the law of value, derived by Marx ONLY for the case of the exchange of goods for goods in SIMPLE commodity production, when it is impossible to obtain profit, especially in monetary form, in general, to capitalist production, the essence of which is precisely the violation of the law of value. Marx proved that the entrepreneur, buying from a person only his labor force, knew in advance that a person's personality is not equal to his ability to work alone. However, the entrepreneur pays only for the cost of the person's labor force for the required time, although the entire person and the entire working day are involved in the production process. But the personality of the worker does not interest the entrepreneur, on the contrary, the entrepreneur is interested and seeks to ensure that the personality in the hired slave is a completely insignificant value. Entrepreneurs all over the world understand that if the personality of his hired slave is limited by the desire for beer and football, then such a proletarian will always be sure that the owner pays him fairly.
The market existence has transformed, if not disfigured, the social consciousness of the masters and their employees to such an extent that it has created an atrophy of most of their personality. After all, physiologists and the practice of life have proven that in a person, over time, any part of the body, any area of the nervous system, atrophies if they are not loaded with functions for a long time. Such is the fate of the most important human complex itself, which in the works of psychologists and sociologists is called the human personality.
What capitalism does to the person, first of all, the person of wage labor, was convincingly described by Lord Churchill in his book "The World Crisis". After the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on the division of the German colonies between England and France, Churchill wrote:
"for almost six months, on average, about 10 thousand people left the military service every day. This huge number of people, equal to one peacetime division, was collected daily on all fronts of the war, brought to ships, taken from trains, their weapons and equipment were taken from them, demobilized, they were paid off and dismissed to their homes in the interval between sunrise and sunset. I believe that this was a strong proof of British organizational ability. Armies were built gradually; soldiers were enlisted in single file; but they were dissolved at once, in huge masses, and, nevertheless, almost all found work and returned to their families. The story proudly tells how 20-30 thousand "iron soldiers" of Cromwell laid down their military armor and returned to peaceful pursuits. But how can this be compared to the dignified conduct of the nearly 4 million British soldiers who, without any confusion or excitement - if only they were treated as they deserved - quietly poured back into the mass of the people and again began to restore the thread of their lives that had been interrupted? After being methodically instilled with brutality and barbarism during the five years of the war, it was expected that murder, looting, brutality and violence would flourish in the country for several years. But thanks to the power of civilization and education and the great qualities of our people, the opposite happened: the number of violent crimes decreased, and prisons had to be closed and sold for scrap, when 4 million trained and skilled murderers, or one third of the entire male population of the nation, returned home and became civilians, citizens of their country."
The funny thing is that this idyllic picture of sheep's resignation is preceded by several pages describing more than 30 cases of riots that arose and were suppressed in the British army during these weeks, about the arrested instigators, etc.
Only the mass atrophy of the individual in the conditions of the market can explain the fact that when the entrepreneurs of the world needed not workers, but soldiers, as Churchill frankly writes, easily trained killers, they easily managed to drive millions of proletarians of mental and physical labor into the trenches and turn them into cannon fodder, not identifiable, minced meat. The corporal's whistle was enough to send these impersonal masses rushing at each other with bayonets at the ready for the purpose of killing, while suppressing with prayer the bitterness and fear of their own possible death.
This behavior of the masses can only be explained by the fact that during the decades of the previous market existence, the proletarians of mental and physical labor formed a worldview even much narrower than that of the nobles of the era of mass dueling, when their own life, due to its emptiness, was of no value to a person. The long-term functioning of an individual in a system of rigid and narrow specialization of monotonous tedious work, and there is no other in a market economy, excludes the formation in his mind of any strategic values, creative plans, etc. specific personal orientations. They, for the most part, did not understand that without all this, the life of a person loses its essential difference from the stay of an animal in a herd. A sheep simply exists, and the "meaning" of its life is not much different from the meaning of the life of a bacterium.
Moreover, numerous cases of deaths of representatives of the ruling class in the course of their extreme air, automobile, alcohol and drug "entertainment", prove that they do not have adequate ideas about the real value of life. Most often, when solving the dilemma: life or capital, entrepreneurs prefer money, a killer's bullet, a prison cell, but not life, because the modern bourgeoisie, for the most part, does not think of life outside the monetary dimension.
It is not difficult to model the direction of a person's thoughts in a society in which the standard of everyday, especially "movie", well-being is the samples of the life of the Arab oil sheikhs, especially for individuals born and raised, for example, in the family of a turner, a car assembler or a farmer. The proletarian child, formed in a democratic market country, always dreams of eating, drinking, and fooling around like an oligarch or a sheikh. And, with modern family education, he has something to hang himself from, because by the age of 40, he comes to a full understanding that the American miracle with him, as with hundreds of millions of other proletarians of mental and physical labor, as with the middle-class class, simply did not happen and will not happen anymore.
But it is not so far from the time when humanity is clearly aware of the idiocy of that part of its history, when the lords for centuries managed to send to the slaughterhouse not only millions of flocks of sheep, but also millions of flocks of bipedal upright mammals.
The senselessness of such behavior, of all the military exploits of the era of the rule of private property, became more apparent after the soldiers of the victorious countries, returning home, became, simply... unemployed and homeless. But this evidence did not arouse any reaction in the majority of the proletarian masses. This is how far the market existence leads consciousness into a stall. Many former American soldiers today, returning from Iraq or Afghanistan, Libya or Ukraine, meekly stand in queues for charity soup or die on the warm manhole of the American sewer. In the developed capitalist countries, this course of events accompanies every war, and every time people brought up by the market life do not see anything illogical in this.
Russian Russian proletariat, which was the first in the world to realize the idiocy of this state of affairs and to throw off from its shoulders not only the power of the main scapegoat, the tsar, but also the provocateurs of the participation of the Russian peasants and proletarians in the First World War, i.e., its bourgeoisie, which also dreamed of becoming completely European, i.e. imperialist, in the full sense of the word, on the bones of the Russian workers and peasants.
Many vulgarizers still think that the whole theory of market economy, marketing, management theory, and econometrics are aimed at harmonizing market relations, and not at teaching EVERY entrepreneur the art of cheating and robbing the weakest. Present, for example, at a group lesson in marketing, modern students do not notice that they are studying the "science" of how they themselves, outside the walls of the institute, should be fooled, cheated and weighed down... each other, but so that all of them... didn't notice it. The winner, of course, is the most arrogant, especially diligently memorized the principles of cheating, for example, Dale Carnegie.
In the Soviet economic literature, published with the blessing of the CPSU, since the time of Khrushchev, of course, the words about the predatory nature of capitalism were present, but they were presented so indiscriminately, deliberately scientific, like a prayer over the deceased, when the priest himself is sure that no resurrection will happen.
The topic of market competition was considered very primitively in the Soviet economic literature. Nor has the Soviet literature adequately reflected the fact that it is only through the extermination of businessmen by businessmen that capitalism makes its most significant leaps in the concentration, centralization of local and world wealth and, consequently, the monopolization of the market by a narrow circle of people who fit into the list of Forbes magazine and have a personal relationship to the emergence of all crises, local and world wars. Especially specifically, thousands of entrepreneurs from the post-Soviet republics who have ordered each other have learned this in their own skin, among which, for example, Khodorkovsky, Gusinsky, Karasev turned out to be the funniest, and Berezovsky and Patarkatsishvili were somewhat more tragic. From their university lectures, they all learned something about competition for the political economy exam as an innocent competition for product quality, but they didn't think about what monsters of mutual destruction they would all be reborn into when the stakes rose to billions.
In all cases when Lenin's work on imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism was cited, it was overlooked that this book was written by Lenin in the conditions of bourgeois glasnost and, consequently, in the language of a slave, as Lenin himself said in such cases. In assessing the capitalism of the imperialist era, an additional "translation" of Lenin's work from Rabye into uncompromisingly scientific language was required, but this did not happen. Soviet economists considered it a great achievement to be able to reproduce the five signs of imperialism by heart in a lecture as the greatest wisdom, and they did not understand at all that future intellectuals needed to chew convincingly, especially on the experience of the Second World War, that capitalism, having reached the monopolistic stage, ceased to differ from slave-owning or feudal imperialism, and therefore fascism in practice and talk about democracy for fools were formed throughout Europe in the 1920s.
Due to the theoretical and propagandistic weakness of party academics, the vast majority of ordinary social scientists and members of the CPSU, in their hearts, laughed at the thesis of decaying capitalism, and, in fact, believed that the growth in the number of 300 kilogram Americans and a fleet of passenger cars with an abundance of nickel-plated gadgets, films about Rambo and terminators, casinos and McDonalds, "huge" unemployment benefits are absolute proof of the prosperity of capitalism, and not its decay. Raisa Maksimovna and her Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachevs were especially convinced of this. By the time of the heyday of Andropovism, there were practically no social scientists left in the CPSU with a holistic, deep understanding of the theory of Marxism, especially its subtleties on the question of the decay of imperialism. As perestroika showed, they were ready to rot themselves.
After Stalin, the party formation of the party reserve in the USSR increasingly broke away from political practice, and the discussion of complex socio-political problems did not go beyond a narrow circle of people endowed with great formal power, but who did not have a serious Marxist self-education and, consequently, scientific authority. The development of Marxist theory in universities, including the "humanitarian" orientation, in the era of Khrushchev was reduced to formal memorization of simplified schemes, mainly in retrospect.
Therefore, most of the Soviet economists who received their education during the "thaw" did not know that Marx had published his study entitled "Capital, a Critique of Political Economy" in several separate volumes and books only because the volume of the study exceeded ALL the theoretical works devoted to one problem in the entire history of mankind. It is impossible to understand anything in the third volume of Capital without mastering the first volume. Most Soviet social scientists did not understand that, technically, it was impossible to combine the entire work of Marx with a single "bible", so that even the most stupid theorist would understand: the essence of real capital is disguised by the bourgeoisie in such a Templar way that it can only be understood by studying all six volumes as a single and inseparable DEFINITION of the reactionary essence of capital.
The collapse of the CPSU proved in practice that its academicians did not understand Marx because they were COMPLETELY ignorant of the diamatics, in particular, of the methodology of the ascent from the scientific abstractions of the first volume, surplus value, in which even the capitalist, according to Marx, uses only the instrument of " wages "(i.e., paying only the cost of the consumer basket of the unassuming proletarian), to profit, as a form of the real" common stock " of all capitalists, which is described only in the third volume.
From volume to volume, revealing the essence of capital, Marx goes back to the specifics of the capitalist form of plundering not only the proletarians, but also all "consumers", i.e., the capitalists themselves through the mechanism of speculative monopolistic pricing, inflation, artificial bankruptcies, etc. There is no doubt that if Marx had written, as he planned, all six volumes of his CRITIQUE of political economy, then perhaps the leaders of the CPSU would have been more convincing and offensive in their criticism of the decaying capitalism of his day. But where death forced Marx to put a comma, the propagandists of the CPSU put a bold dot and, due to intellectual laziness, could not awaken either in themselves or among the working class a deep understanding and a sense of sincere disgust for the commodity-money, capitalist, i.e., corrupt form of relations between people.
Many" scientists " of the CPSU, in the course of perestroika, "voucher", i.e., the plundering of Soviet public wealth, knew, but concealed from the people, that the "initial accumulation of capital" in Europe, the United States, and the democratic Russian Federation was and will be carried out at the expense of an unprecedented primitive PLUNDERING of the property of the USSR, belonging to ALL citizens of the Soviet Union, including infants, and it will go only to the creature of Chubais-Gaidar. Before this plundering, everything that both the book Koreiko and the real Khoroshilov and Vasilyeva did pales.
One does not need to have a gray matter in the cortex of the brain to think that private property is concentrated in the hands of the oligarchs without any conscious goal-oriented aggressive strategy on their part, but only by the magic action of objective economic laws, like a pike's command.
Today, the zone of influence of the Russian oligarchs is deliberately extended to South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Crimea, and in the near future, to the size of the territory of the DPR and LPR. It is easy to see how much blood there is in the redistribution of the modern world between groups of oligarchs. The NATO countries have again set their eyes not only on Ukraine, but also on the whole of North Africa and West Asia. It is not difficult to understand how the North African and some Asian countries will weaken as a result of the civil wars unleashed there with American money, and how this senseless Arab revolt is used by the US oligarchs, while the German and French oligarchs are bogged down in the problems of digesting Eastern Europe and the influx of migrants.
All these facts prove that the main objective economic law of the accumulation of private property is the law of its violent rejection and preservation.
But the Marxist interpretation of this law differs fundamentally from that of Düring in that Düring did not seek objective reasons and prerequisites for SUCCESS in the forcible expropriation of other people's property. Duhring considered the violent expropriation of material values as a consequence of moral causes, without bothering to ask how the object about which the relations of violence are formed arises, while Marx proved that successful violent expropriation is possible only if the object of expropriation itself is present and, most importantly, the economic superiority of one of the competitors clinging to the same "bone".
The fact is that diamatics, unlike all other methodological schools, proceeds from the internal objective material causality of everything that happens in society, and all other methodological schools "dance", at best, from the statement of an external fact, and at worst, from the expression of the will of the subject, often of mythical origin, i.e., from the fact that it is not the case. god, and therefore they cannot master the simple truth that, before appropriating any value, it must first be produced, and, secondly, it will only be private if it can be protected from the encroachment of ALL other sufferers. And "non-attraction" is possible only if EACH producer has at his disposal all the necessary means of existence and development, or if a special organization is created, a STATE that stands guard over the very principle of private property, regardless of whether other individuals have the means of existence or are dying of hunger, that is, if a system is established in the person of completely purchased bodies and persons, i.e., the police, courts and prison authorities.
From the point of view of diamatics, this means that material values, before being appropriated by one, i.e., being alienated from all other entities, must exist in a ready-made form and "in excess" quantity, for example, in the form of land, fossil resources, or be produced. But without the relations of violence, the produced material wealth and spiritual values, in the form of private property of one particular person, cannot exist. Today, this is especially evident in connection, for example, with the adoption of copyright laws in the Russian Federation, which are defended by very real investigators and prison sentences.
Material and spiritual values, i.e. the means of human existence, arise outside the sphere of violence, but become private property to the extent that the economic basis of the system of violence is developed. It is no coincidence that the most private property-rich country in the world, the United States, has both the largest prisons in the world and the largest contingent of prisoners who, in one form or another, have tried to loot what has already been looted.
The idea of personal, egoistic consumption of surplus food, that is, the idea of private property, which first appeared in the consciousness of primitive man, immediately gave rise to the need for relations of violence. The relationship that existed under primitive communism between a thinking man and a senseless animal, i.e., the transformation of the meat of an animal belonging to an animal into food for the hunter, due to the lack of ideas about possible consequences (because one always wants what is best), was transferred to the relationship of man to man and to the products of his personal labor. But after the first act of violent robbery of a neighbor in the name of alienating his property and himself, in the name of multiplying the private property of the invader, the objective initial primacy of labor private property loses its monopoly, and a typical continuous diamatic spiral arises, in which the relations of private property generate violence, and violence gradually turns into the main means of centralization of the growing masses of the means of subsistence of ALL mankind in the hands of an ever-decreasing number of tyrants,, local and world wars in the name of satisfying the Midas syndrome.
Strictly speaking, the official economic thought of the CPSU gave rise to such herostrats as Kantorovich, Andropov, Abalkin, Aganbegyan, Gaidar, and Gorbachev because the textbooks emasculated the class essence and the diamatics of the economic laws of capitalism. Whether consciously or because of the stupidity of the official academics who were elected to these posts by vote, the chapters on the theory of violence from Anti-Düring were interpreted by them not as chapters on the dialectical-materialist theory of violence, but as chapters that ridiculed not so much the stupidity and subjectivism of Düring, but rather the role of violence in the emergence, multiplication and monopolization of private property on a global scale. Many intellectuals still find it somewhat uncomfortable to admit that private property and violence are inseparable concepts and realities in the history of mankind. As was often the case, the opportunists used the results of their superficial reading of Marx's writings to vulgarize Marxism.
However, the beauty of objective economic laws is precisely that they do not depend on the statements of outside observers, even in academic caps. Objective economic laws are real forms of relations, relations that capitalists are forced to enter into among themselves in order to remain capitalists in the conditions of increasing concentration of capital. They are forced to enter into a conscious relationship of competition with all capitalists, since ALL capitalists, regardless of their consciousness, reduce the purchasing power of the population with each successful sale and, consequently, as it were, prohibit the buyer from making a purchase from another capitalist.
But production and sales are inseparable parts of the capital cycle, and only the entrepreneur who has surpassed all other competitors wins in competition, first of all, in the degree of exploitation of HIS hired employees of mental and physical labor, starting with the loader and ending with technologists, marketers and managers. The entrepreneur, in any branch of the economy, if he is not able to maximize the relations of exploitation with the employees of HIS nation, is ultimately doomed to defeat in competition with the capitalists of other nations, who are able to milk more "last juices"out of their patriotic proletarians and managers. Of course, the mercilessly fleeced proletarians can organize strikes and even the seizure of enterprises, and the losing competitors can organize a contract murder, and the entrepreneurs of a colonial country can try to raise a national liberation uprising… But in order to neutralize all such actions of the oppressed, the UNLIMITED use of organized VIOLENCE, i.e., the state, is provided for.
Thus, the relations of private property, which give rise to relations of exchange, which, in turn, give rise to relations of deception and fraud, naturally develop into relations of the most brazen and boundless violence, especially on the part of the strongest.
In other words, the longer and more intensive the development of market relations towards capitalism and, consequently, monopolism, the more clearly the organic, objective, indissoluble link between private property and violence becomes apparent. Violence becomes the main condition for keeping the productive forces of society within the framework of private property relations.
Conversely, the longer a society functions within the framework of communist industrial relations, the more completely the remnants of the elements of an aggressive attitude towards one's neighbor die out in the minds of people. This is quite clear in the history of the USSR. Despite the bestial behavior of the proletarians of the capitalist countries during the outbreak of the Second World War, whose consciousness was determined by the market existence, part of the population of the USSR had to be convinced of the need to destroy the German proletarians who attacked the world's first country of the dictatorship of the working class.
And in 1991, the GKChP failed to force the depoliticized, i.e. declassified, forces of the KGB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Soviet Army to use weapons against the anti-communist rebels, i.e., as it became clear a little later, outright fascists. But the capitalist, clerical, nationalist forces, as soon as they tasted permissiveness, without hesitation, unleashed civil wars in the Caucasus and Transcaucasia, in Central Asia, in Moldova. And in the Baltic States, since there was little that could be seized and restored, there was simply a mass fascist movement to fight against monuments and aimlessly squeeze out foreigners from the region.
In 1993, when capitalism in the Russian Federation had already reached a sufficient degree of inveteracy, it did not hesitate, unlike the pampered "Gebists" of the USSR, to use machine guns in Ostankino, and tank guns in the center of Moscow, and then the entire army in Tajikistan, the Caucasus, and Moldova, where part of the population, especially local entrepreneurs, mullahs, believers, and Nazis wanted to take as much sovereignty as they could ... they wanted to. Today, there is a similar squabble around the "national" riches of Ukraine. The oligarchs of the leading countries of the world allocate money and more and more weapons, they are ready to spend any number of Ukrainian serfs for the sake of finding out the question of which of the world's oligarchs will own the "national" wealth of Ukraine. A similar scenario was recently tested in Armenia.
Therefore, while absolutely not idealizing or absolutizing the primitive communal communism that still exists, for example, among the Bushmen of Africa or the Indians in the wilds of Latin America, it should be noted that the male hunters of these tribes did not stoop to the relations of exchange, measurement and body kit of their tribesmen, but provide the products of hunting, the objects of existence to the entire tribe without the slightest signs of deception, and all male children perceive such an "economy" as the only reasonable one, preparing themselves not for a parasitic existence, but for debilitating, but the only wise function of the breadwinner for the ENTIRE tribe. But the women of such tribes are engaged in gathering in the interests of the ENTIRE tribe, moreover, according to modern archaeological data, the total contribution to the food of the tribe of women engaged in gathering is not less than that of hunters, but often more. Studies of the remains showed that roots, berries, mushrooms, and so on made up more than half of the diet of these people.
In modern tribes that use wooden and stone hunting tools, even children understand that of all the factors of nature surrounding them, SOCIETY itself is the main factor that relates constructively to each individual, making it possible for people to reproduce continuously. And this understanding has accompanied people for thousands of years, without generating antagonistic relations between members of tribes, and even more so, clans. Moreover, the society of the Bushmen does not bypass its mercy and those who do not have sufficient natural inclinations of the hunter. Some young Bushmen are not given accurate archery, some are not given stayer distances, but this does not make them despicable unemployed outcasts. Simply, the best hunter of the tribe knows that he is the best, and the objective role of the best breadwinner of the tribe, the consciousness that the tribe owes its existence to him in many ways, fully satisfies a person who is really intelligent and talented.
But, for example, in the modern Maasai tribes, where relations of private ownership of the means of subsistence have already been formed, there have also been relations of exchange, and zealous views on the proportions of exchange, and with them there have been sharp disagreements about this, especially about the size of the wedding kalym. Therefore, for the Maasai, not hunting tools are typical, but cold weapons, since the Maasai have long been animal breeders and, practically, do not hunt. Every Maasai, starting from adolescence, is armed with a mace and a dart, solely to find out whose proposals for the proportions of exchange are preferable. Along with the establishment of private ownership of livestock in the life of the Maasai, there is also the institution of systematic theft, and the means of neutralizing the owner of the robbed herd, as well as the means of protecting their cows from their own tribesmen.
Members of tribes that have gone even further in the development of private property relations and exchange with the help of money, for example, in Ethiopia, Yemen or Afghanistan, are already fully armed with firearms, ready to use them against any outsider and even a tribesman.
Thus, thanks to the relations of private property, primitive communism was transformed into a typical armed barbarism, and from there to bourgeois civilization, with its prisons, regular armies, organized crime, tax systems, protection and wars - just around the corner.
In the literature published under the control of the CPSU, one can find such a sweeping statement that the appearance of each new, more progressive formation was accompanied by the appearance of new forms of private property relations. The readers ' attention was not focused on the fact that these formations were only relatively progressive, while remaining EXPLOITATIVE, and it was with each new formation that the efficiency and magnitude of exploitation absolutely increased. The change of "awl to soap", i.e. This is explained by the fact that, each time, the private property of the exploiters remained more and more developed productive forces of society and, consequently, just the institution of private property, which was unchanged in principle, entered into an increasing confrontation with the growing social character of the productive forces, so the growth of antagonisms was a noticeable component of the history of the development of society on the basis of private property relations.
The slave system did not give way to the feudal system in connection with the victorious slave revolts. The replacement of slavery by feudalism occurred in the confrontation between the nascent class of feudal lords and the degenerate class of slaveholders. However, the feudal system collapsed already with the active participation in this process of significant peasant masses and other lower classes of feudal society. In the era of the replacement of capitalism by communism, the struggle unfolded with an unprecedented increase in the activity and role of the class of wage workers of physical and mental labor. Moreover, at times the illusion was created that the replacement of capitalism with socialism would occur as a result of the rapidly growing economic struggle of the industrial proletarians. Nevertheless, it is precisely the increase in the conscious participation of the proletarian masses in the direct struggle for their own political power that precludes the repetition of that historical "rule" when the class of direct producers shed blood during the "storming of the Bastille," so to speak, and a new exploiting class crept to power and... stole it.
Strictly speaking, social progress occurred in spite of the development of forms of private property relations, and it was NTP (scientific and technological progress) that formed everything necessary to negate such an anachronism as private ownership of the main means of production. To rigidly link the progress of mankind with forms of private property is like explaining the victory of the bourgeoisie over feudalism in France by replacing the low-productive axe of the feudal executioner with a highly automated democratic guillotine. There is no fundamental difference between feudal and capitalist property, for example, land. If the principle of private property is really given full, unrestricted freedom of expression, then in every country there will inevitably be a full-fledged Nazism, slavery, with its obligatory mutual "holocausts".
However, to the satisfaction of the Marxists, the objective nature of the development of the means of production, i.e., the development of the means of production. the steady increase in the automation of material and spiritual production, including in agriculture, changes the share and role of the personal advantages of owners, especially in industries that produce vital products, and the very limited purchasing power of the population, makes, time after time, meaningless exploitative talents of entrepreneurs, and therefore their business activity, generated by greed, leads only to overstocking the world market and generates economic crises that develop into local and world wars.
In other words, the automation of production, i.e., the radical change in the role of science in the production of material and intellectual products, the transformation of scientific and technical personnel into a decisive factor in the organization of production, makes the figure of the owner of the enterprise a completely unnecessary anachronism, just as in the Renaissance in Europe the noble and religious nobility became noticeably superfluous.
In the new historical conditions, when the figure of the oligarch is practically no different from the feudal lords, the Marxists only propose to rid the public, scientifically rich, richly automated material and spiritual production of a completely unnecessary, weak link in the system of production of material and intellectual goods, that is, from entrepreneurs, giving them a mental and physical socially useful feasible load. After all, the English realized that if the Queen of England is not allowed to do anything, then there is no harm from the monarchy. People still do not understand how much the world economy will benefit when the oligarchs are banned from playing on the stock exchange, but are allowed to play the fool ... at home.
Utopian socialists had to strain their imagination in order to justify the possibility of extremely comfortable relations between people in the conditions of the domination of manual low-productive, tedious, monotonous, uncreative work, in which, as a rule, a person has too little physical strength left to feel warm, friendly feelings for his neighbor. But, thanks to scientific progress, even modern capitalist technology makes it possible to significantly reduce the working day for all direct producers, to fundamentally reduce the intensity of labor in all professions, without exception, and, thus, to turn all types of labor into a kind of creativity. Even today's level of scientific development makes it possible to implement the principle of expanded reproduction of communist society: from each according to his abilities, to each everything necessary for development and, consequently, for happiness.
However, the capitalist mode of production is entirely subordinated to the production of profits for the oligarchs, i.e., zeros in their bank accounts due to the high intensity of unpaid labor of hired workers of mental and physical labor, the exhausting tension of which is due to the presence of a multi-million army of unemployed people breathing down the backs of those who are" lucky " to sell their labor. The formation of the prerequisites for universal happiness is not the concern of the capitalist. The more stable the army of the unemployed, i.e. the outcasts, the more steadily the profits of the oligarchs grow.
Thus, if we answer the question of what capitalism is, we must recognize that it is a socio-economic formation, which owes both the brilliance of the highest achievements of the material well-being of individual oligarchs, and the labor self-torture of wage slaves, first of all, to an unprecedented system of violence, an extremely low level of mental development of the majority of the population, as a result of which the source of income growth of the class of entrepreneurs is systematic deception and shortchanging of the class of subjugated direct producers of material and spiritual goods.
This is the stick of the capitalist way of life. And what is the carrot? In the minds of the vast majority of exploited people, there is a hope that if you work selflessly and save on everything, you can become an oligarch, or at least live better than your neighbor. Moreover, every year, ONE lucky person, for example, in the United States breaks the million-dollar "Jackpot", and each of the other 299,999,999 Americans are imbued with a firm belief that next year he will be lucky too. And this unrealized dream accompanies tens of generations of billions of wage slaves of capital around the world until their death.
About the most important thing in communism?
The study of the problems of building communism is partly facilitated by the fact that most advocates of capitalism and entrepreneurs themselves recognize that capitalism and communism are opposites. Therefore, it is enough for a theorist to make a list of the vices and virtues of capitalism, to subtract ALL the vices from this sum, and he will have a list of the prerequisites of communism by the time history begins to solve the problems of the first phase of communism, or, to use unscientific language, the problems of the era of socialism.
If capitalism is the highest stage of the development of competitive relations between people, i.e., the war of all against all, then communism can be nothing more than the highest stage of maximum humanity, peace, absolute spiritual comfort, creative romanticism. Of course, a person who has adapted to the market life will say that this can not be because it can never be. But we are not talking about pimples that will pop up in undesirable places and under communism, but about the fact that no one will have any motives or tools to consciously influence the individual in order to cause her undoubted harm. Conversely, each person will have a lot of motives and tools to improve society, i.e., the most important element of the environment in which a person can only become a Person.
If capitalism is a society of irreconcilable private interests, sick passions, then communism is a society of universal harmony, built on the basis of laws derived by science, confirmed by historical practice, including the laws of beauty.
It is quite obvious that the growing computerization of all aspects of society is one of the directions for the penetration of science into the smallest and most private moments of production and everyday life of billions of people already under capitalism. Hitherto unattainable accuracy and rigor, which is a prerequisite for the operation of computer technology, is an important prerequisite for the purification of market practice from the domination of errors, forgetfulness, secrecy, isolation and secret passions of subhumans.
All modern aviation and space systems function only because in them, the further away, the more designers get rid of the influence of the weaknesses of the human personality on the functioning of complex precision devices. Most modern aviation and space disasters are a manifestation of one or another side of the "human factor", most often, its venality. Thanks to computerization, systems that resist not only technical failures, but also fools and professional scammers are already developing today. We can only regret that today both active fools and patent scammers, worthy of the strictest computer accounting and restrictions, are represented by the figures of entrepreneurs. As Berezovsky said, there are no entrepreneurs who, to put it mildly, would not violate the laws.
Of course, in commodity-money relations, fraud will not be completely avoided, but capitalism, without knowing it, is working towards automating the accounting processes, identifying subjects and objects of management, filing another "branch" on which the market prosperity of the oligarchs rests. Ignorance in the field of diamatics does not allow the banker to understand that by fighting for the exclusion of fraud in his bank by his employees, the banker himself creates a precedent and forms the technical prerequisites that make fraud more and more difficult. Capitalism itself replaces easily bribed people with incorruptible machinery. By saving himself from the fraud of competitors and his own managers, our banker deprives himself of the opportunity to cheat. Another question is that, as long as there is an entrepreneur, there will be a struggle between, figuratively speaking, hackers and anti-hackers. But it is clear that as a result of this struggle, the compilers of real constructive programs will win. The slight superiority of the potential of creators over the potential of chronic consumers is the most general absolute law of human progress under the rule of private property. If the preponderance of the creators had been more substantial, then full communism would have been built immediately after the Late Neolithic. But the inventors of the wheel were few, and those who wanted to become shamans, priests, and pharaohs were the majority, because the overall progress was so slow.
The need of many modern branches of the economy for the most accurate operation of information and control systems that allow you to track and manage an increasing number of processes in the "online" mode is, in fact, the most important direction of the development of the productive forces of society, in which science, as predicted by Marx, turns into a direct productive force that gives all products and relations the minimum error values. That is why capitalism is the LAST phase of the history of subhumanity, because under capitalism everything was solved and is being solved by the "poke" method, on the basis of "maybe", by mass deception and bloody experiments on society itself.
And communism is the FIRST phase of human history proper, since it is free from the atavism of zero and minus quality of forecasting and programming of public life. Under communism, a person will be able to calculate the main parameters of his biography for decades to come, including the change of occupation, in order to save himself from the stupefying monotony and narrow professional cretinism.
In addition, the disinterested scientific feat of Marx and Engels in the study of the" anatomy and physiology " of capital, not to mention the reflection of the soul of capitalism in the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Malo, Balzac, Zola, Dreiser, Korolenko, Andreev, Gorky, Jack London, John Perkins, Frank Partny, makes capitalism understandable in its most destructive, vile manifestations from both objective and subjective psychological points of view. All this knowledge makes it possible, without vulgarizing, without falling into utopias, to use the dialectical method of moving thought "from the contrary" and very contrary to the true, i.e., from the true to the true. to the contrary, creating a theoretical model of a society free from the main idiocy of capitalism - from the domination of manic misanthropy and, resulting from it, slavery, militarism and wars.
Those who are familiar with the diagrammatic interpretation of the law of negation of negation understand that the contrast between capitalism and communism is formed exclusively along the lines of FORMS, first of all, of production and economic RELATIONS between people. Objective, irrevocable natural laws, such as physics and mathematics, operate in the same way under capitalism and under communism. These are mathematicians, physicists, and lyricists, very often, arguing about the high or the dark, in fact, thinking about money, selling with more enthusiasm than geisha. Only objective laws act incorruptibly. Therefore, communism, while not denying the objective laws of the development of nature and society, denies only the unconsciously formed system of disgusting bourgeois relations between people and the handiwork of legal laws that have served only the sick interests of exploiting minorities throughout the past history of mankind.
Therefore, the diamatic understanding of the law of negation of negation presupposes not only the disappearance of the form, but also the continuity, for example, of the objective production base in the negation of the forms of relations generated by it. The negation of the obsolete form of production relations is, at the same time, bringing the form of production relations into line with the achieved state of the productive forces, and not replacing the form with formlessness, and not in the way that the actionists thought of themselves during the "Red Guard attack on capital": "the main thing is to declare nationalization, and there, even if the sun does not rise."
The fact is that form exists only as an inseparable attribute of matter. Each material content, in one way or another, is designed, each form is materially meaningful. The same content can take different forms. If there is matter, there is form. No matter , no form. A serious discrepancy in the depiction of the gods proves that no one has ever seen their form due to the impossibility of its non-material existence.
Only the material content generates a variety of successive forms, and the current form expresses, first of all, the essence of this particular content, formed into a specific object at a given period of history. The change of forms is an external expression of the main property of matter - infinite motion, hence internal change.
If the content is relatively unchanged, changing the form changes the object's essence. For example, a child's bicycle and a small artillery shell can be made from the same amount of steel. The first form will delight the child, since the essence of a child's bicycle is a "piece of happiness". The second form, given the same amount of steel, i.e., an artillery shell, will tear the child to shreds, since the essence of the shell, thanks to the form, is literally death.
Similarly, the same productive forces of society, if they function within the framework of market economic relations, necessarily lead to wars of all against all. The same productive forces, once within the framework of the communist relations of production, make the world inviolable. As soon as communism prevails in most of the countries with the largest reserves of resources, their predatory use will cease, environmental threats will disappear, and the opportunity for oligarchic despotists to start wars will disappear. That is why the classics of Marxism considered the problem of the liberation of peoples from capitalist oppression simultaneously in all countries as the best option for the successful construction of communism, in which the corrupting influence of market relations would be reduced to zero.
In the unconscious nature, the change of form occurs spontaneously, literally abruptly (especially by everyday standards), as a result of achieving a certain measure of quantitative changes in the content of the object, for example, a volcanic eruption or in the form of an anecdote about the "big bang".
A radical change in the forms of relations between people can occur only when a sufficient part of the population is sufficiently AWARE of the sufficiency of the changes that have occurred in the content of the real productive forces of society and begins the process of transforming the forms of relations, passing all the information about the need for such a transformation through consciousness.
In a society, the transition from one state to a qualitatively different one can last for several centuries. But the leap, when changing the forms of social structure, is not called the miniaturization of the time interval, not the process of movement from one state to another, but the final process, i.e., the achievement by society of a state that is QUALITATIVELY opposite, i.e. different in essence from its previous social content.
So, for example, the proletariat of mental and physical labor is a large part of the urban population, forcibly deprived of the means of subsistence by a minority of the urban population. The proletarian class is organized for a long period exclusively at the discretion of its employers, is endowed with productive functions, and has access to the means of subsistence and development in the quantity and quality that corresponds to the goals of the entrepreneur, and not of the proletarians. If an entrepreneur decides to produce GMOs, then the proletarians of mental and physical labor will both produce and eat this GMO. The TRADE UNION DOES NOT ADD ANYTHING SIGNIFICANT to this class of sellers of its labor force, since it organizes the" struggle " of the proletarians only to ensure that the number of skins that the entrepreneur pulls from them during the working day does not change, so that their product, labor force, sometimes lives up to retirement.
But the same direct producers of intellectual and material products, as soon as they acquire their own vanguard, armed with a scientific worldview, and if the hired workers recognize the leading role of this vanguard, and the vanguard does not beg for respect from the proletarians, but proves its competence and practicality by deeds, such a social stratum ceases to be a class of wage slaves and turns into a struggling and winning working class, guaranteeing all the necessary conditions for the full development of the constructive inclinations of EACH individual.
Thus, if we do not think about the time for which the leap should take place, but fully concern ourselves with the quality of the personnel of the vanguard of the working class, then the time for the transformation of capitalist society into a communist one will be optimal for specific historical conditions.
Of course, not only Marxists and conscious workers are consistent adherents and fighters for communism, but the average person, in principle, does not mind jumping from capitalist society to READY-MADE communism in one day, without changing anything in himself. The peculiarity of the layman is that in both mental and physical labor, he shows shock only in proportion to the blows of the stick or the degree of fear of starvation. The layman does not see himself in the context of the social division of labor, he does not think of himself as a social being, but only as an individual. The average person has no predilection for any kind of work, especially for mental work. He even writes his dissertation solely for the sake of raising his salary. Independent scientific search does not give him the slightest satisfaction, and for this reason alone, conscientious scientific search is not available to the layman. As practice has shown, the average person prefers to take a risk and buy a ready-made dissertation, rather than strain and develop their own brains, and even more so to really move science forward. The layman is so limited in outlook that he is able to work hard only for a particular owner, only under his control, including under the control of the ruble, under the fear of starvation, like a slave on galleys, and only if the owner motivates him with a stimulus, i.e., in translation from ancient Greek, with a stick. The average person dreams, first of all, of such a sum of money that would allow him to get rid of any labor. This is perfectly proved by all the world experience of the "rentier" layer, the experience of the behavior of the majority of philistines who received a relatively large inheritance. Of course, some ordinary people manage to get on the Forbes list, but this is a tiny exception to the rule.
Ready-made communism, of course, attracts ordinary people, because it seems to them a system in which you can not get out of shops and restaurants, without paying for anything. From the prospect of coming to the store and taking everything indiscriminately, the layman usually takes his breath away. But the worst thing for the average person, who is used to the pogroms in the shops of the West, is that he is sure that other ordinary people, snatching up free products, will not leave him anything. That is why in the market-developed democratic countries of the world, in which the majority of the population is made up of ordinary people, every time the alarm system was turned off in supermarkets and bank branches due to power outages, the masses of ordinary people fell out on the streets and subjected shops and bank branches to pogroms and looting, demonstrating what dreams, in reality, the Western man in the street lives.
Socialism in the U.S.S.R. lost out to world capitalism precisely when the educated and settled Soviet philistines, especially among the artistic and technical elite, gained, thanks to Andropov, access to American radio stations, and under Gorbachev and Yakovlev, a monopoly in the Soviet information space. As the saying goes ," and then they popped out." Several absurd ideas of mercantile, religious, and nationalistic content were loaded into the minds of many Soviet citizens by the family upbringing of kurkuls and dissidents. Therefore, when philistine ideas began to be voiced in foreign and Yakovlev media, the illusion of them was formed in the minds of ordinary people... genius. It seemed to them that it was not the media that brainwashed the philistines, but that every philistine was the bearer of extremely valuable, congenial ideas born of his own consciousness, and, moreover, incredibly understandable and recognized by the widest circle of Western experts, prominent Soviet journalists, such as Korotich, and fiction writers, such as Solzhenitsyn, in contrast to the abstruse, incomprehensible dialectic of Hegel, which the philistines did not understand at all, but crammed in order to recite the contents of a chapter from a textbook, which was poorly understood by the teachers themselves.
As soon as the townsfolk discovered this area "genius for an hour", they rushed to overthrow socialism, without having the slightest idea of the plans of their leaders on the day after the victory, not to mention their plans for the next decade. With faith in God, in the national superiority of all their nations over all other nations, with faith in the invisible hand of the market and in fair elections, the masses of actual suicides overthrew the system of reliable social guarantees for every individual in all the republics of the USSR. The situation was similar to that, as if the majority of the country's population was interested not so much in the construction of structures, but in the ingeniously thought-out and organized mass demolition of structures by the method of directed explosion, and only professional sappers were elected to parliaments.
The significant role of the subjective factor in political coups is clearly visible both in the example of the bourgeois revolutions in England and France, and in the example of recent senseless political coups, for example, in Yugoslavia, Kyrgyzstan, Syria, Libya, and Ukraine.
The fact is that the burghers spend most of their lives in a state of dissatisfaction, envy of the more successful inhabitants, so it is easy to provoke this mass to riot and pogroms, pointing out the false reason for their dissatisfaction. Believing in the idea of a "scapegoat", the slaughter of which "opens up" bright prospects for them, flavored with flattering religious or nationalist demagogy, the townsfolk gather in front of the Bastille, in Tahrir, on Bolotnaya Square or on the Maidan... they're making a coup. Whether the "idea" guiding them is formulated extremely abstractly (freedom, equality, fraternity) or concretely (moskal on gilyak), or "exalted" (death to the infidels), in any case, this cry for a while turns into a password that unites ordinary people and young people to solve the simplest destructive task: overthrowing someone for the sake of... someone.
But Marxism does not consider the technology of a political revolution for the sake of changing someone, but a change in the forms of social relations dictated by the maturity of objective prerequisites. As the history of the formation of capitalism shows, at first, without coming into conflict with the prevailing feudal relations, regularly paying taxes to the feudal lords, urban workshops and manufactories spontaneously and slowly turn into the main form of organization and development of the productive forces. But, gradually, on this economic basis, Protestantism emerged as the ideological and organizational basis for the abolition of the biblical statement that all power is from God. Gradually, not only usurers, but also ordinary artisans, although in different ways, begin to understand that, in these concrete historical conditions, all power flows... from money, not from God, but the tales of God, heaven, and hell continue to help exploit suckers. The separation of secular power from the mystical husk led to the replacement of the semi-slave form of production relations of feudalism with commodity-money relations, while maintaining, however, the feudal form of private property relations on the basis of blood.
The diagrammatic doctrine of opposites leads to the conclusion that in all economic formations based on private property, at first, the objective prerequisites for the negation of the former form of production relations are spontaneously formed, and only in hindsight do these changes receive an ideological justification or justification.
But in the period of the formation of the communist formation, the subjective factor becomes absolutely important, since under communism, not only the material and technical base must be transferred to a scientific basis, but, for the first time in the history of mankind, the entire social consciousness of each individual, i.e., the theory of CONSCIOUS scientifically based management of the processes occurring in the basis, must be created and assimilated by the party before the establishment of the dictatorship of the working class.
Meanwhile, in the modern communist movement, this particular line of work is completely corralled. In modern leftist circles, the prevailing view is that the most important and most difficult thing to take political power into your own hands, as they say, is to settle in the Kremlin. What Lenin taught was forgotten. To overthrow the political power of the tsar and the bourgeoisie is an immeasurably simpler task than to build a system of communist relations in a petty-bourgeois country, and everyone should take this into account. The Soviet Union collapsed not during the invasion of foreign interventionists invited by the leaders of the White Guard, not during the invasion of world fascism, fed on the money of the US oligarchs, but 72 years after the political coup of October 1917, at the first congress of People's Deputies of the USSR, at which the entire leadership of the CPSU demonstrated its incompetence, complete inability to lead the construction of communism in the country.
The process of formation of communist relations differs from all previous historical cases of changes in the forms of social relations in that all these changes can occur only with the PRIMACY of the scientific approach. Communism is a form of denial of cave thinking, when humanity has not yet built dwellings, but occupied ready-made caves, taking for granted the "layout" that nature itself has already implemented. Communism will be built when the unsuccessful struggle of capitalism for the quality of governance brings society to the realization that the atavisms of private bourgeois property are incompatible even with forecasting and regulation, not to mention long-term planning.
The world scientific community is gradually beginning to realize that the main objective prerequisites for the exclusion of a destructive and incompetent master figure from the system of reproduction of society according to the laws of happiness have already matured. Hence, the consciously maintained proportionality, i.e., the planned nature of the material reproduction of society, and not just of the means of subsistence, can and should become the leading element of culture, and the world dictatorship of the Russian "maybe" will forever and everywhere be replaced by a universal understanding of objective necessity, an all-pervading scientific calculation, more accurate than modern space ballistics.
Once the broad circles of the intelligentsia realize this, it will not be difficult to bring this clear idea to the consciousness of the majority of modern proletarians, and economic capitalist calculation will everywhere be replaced by scientific calculation, since even today, under capitalism, technology does not put the illiterate owner and his offspring at the forefront, but the scientist, technologist and inventor. They will sooner or later understand that it is extremely shameful for a scientist, a certified person to serve the master.
Having freed themselves from the power of the master, scientists and designers will save themselves from the servile situation, when the fear of starvation forces them to participate in the further development, for example, of means of destroying all mankind in the name of realizing the absolutely sick interests of the oligarchs. The same scientific and technical discovery, for example, atomic energy, was used for the first time under capitalism and was necessarily used in the bomb, and communism was the first to create a nuclear power plant. Capitalism was the first to fly a combat jet into the sky, and communism, which was in the first, primitive phase of its development, was the world's first jet passenger plane. Capitalism was the first to launch a military ballistic missile, and socialism was the first artificial satellite of the Earth in the history of mankind, etc. In just twenty years after the war, socialism has proved its exact opposite in the use of the products of scientific and technological progress and the development of material production in relation to capitalism. And if it were not for the growth of the population of two-legged stomachs within the Central Committee of the CPSU itself, it is clear that socialism would prove not only its opposite, but also its superiority in ALL areas of human existence.
In society, the law of negation operates on the historical material-technical and scientific-theoretical basis that was formed spontaneously on the basis of capitalist relations. This is the creative charm of communism, that it is able to make ALL PEOPLE happy and harmonious on the same material and technical basis achieved by capitalism, which makes people corrupt, i.e. prostitutes, competitors, suicides, alcoholics.
Realizing this, fleeing from Russia, Denikin, in order to slow down the construction of a society of universal happiness on Earth, ordered the White Guards and the Cossacks to leave the scorched earth behind them. The same technique was used by Hitler, destroying 7,000 cities of the USSR and about 70,000 villages, especially during the flight. But there are idiots who pretend that they do not understand where some of the difficulties and delays of the USSR in solving some purely domestic issues came from, such as the quality of toilet paper, a narrow choice of gum, while all the oligarchs of the entire civilized world already chewed gum, and did not wipe themselves with newspapers.
One of the main claims to communism on the part of the serfs of the oligarchy is that communism is supposedly based on the herd and levels the individual. In fact, it is enough to ask the question, what levels people more: the capitalist conveyor belt with its at least 8 hour working day, or the communist, fully automated production, with 2-3 hour working day?
It was capitalism that invented and implemented the factory horn, which, drowning out the ringing of church bells, extracted from the musty factory barracks the gloomy columns of millions of proletarians, who crawled like ants to the machine tools to perform a primitive, labor-intensive, monotonous, stupefying operation for 12 or, as today, at least 8 hours a day. And if we take into account the many millions of FORCED unemployed and, consequently, the complete inaccessibility for them of any form of personal development, if we add to them prostitutes, persons held in prisons, the unfortunate, forced to serve in the bourgeois mercenary army and police, farmers and their children, it is clear that the bourgeois personal diversity is more primitive than the English short-cropped lawn.
They can tell you where you saw a 2-3-hour working day. You can answer, and where did you see communism built? Did not world capitalism make every effort, did not pay for the Sisyphean labor of all sorts of Solzhenitsyns, in order to prevent the construction of communism in the USSR and, thereby, reduce the duration of working time in non-creative types of production, to a maximum of 3 hours?
Under capitalism, regardless of the degree of automation of production, the lengthening of the working day for all categories of employees is the law of increasing the economic efficiency of capital. Everyone knows that in Japan and the United States, labor productivity is higher than in Russia or Brazil, but the length of the working day is the same, and in medium - sized businesses-higher, and in small businesses, the intensity of labor, i.e. the degree of self-torture, is generally a form of suicide. The more hours an entrepreneur forces his hired worker to work FOR THE SAME AMOUNT OF SALARY, the more advantages this entrepreneur will have over his competitor.
Under communism, the reduction of the time of routine, monotonous, tedious, harmful work is an objective condition for a long healthy life of a person, the development of his personal inclinations and talents. Prolonged tedious monotonous work is an effective condition for the destruction of the creatively versatile personality in the individual and its early physical and social degradation.
Communism will be built when the system of education, upbringing and working conditions fills the consciousness of all people with a scientific worldview and permanently removes from the public consciousness the elements of market and religious herd behavior. Under communism, an adult will never act like everyone else, that is, like everyone else. he will no longer be able to blindly copy anything for anyone, especially for all sorts of psaks, posners or illiterate rock zemfirs, because it is communism that is guided by the objective absolute law of the development of society: the creation of all the necessary conditions for the maximum development of individual abilities of EACH individual.
At the time of Lenin and Stalin, most citizens already saw the prospect of becoming a country of heroes, a country of dreamers, a country of scientists, and enthusiastically worked for this goal in the name of their own happiness and the happiness of future generations. Those who were irritated by the prospect of being left without lackeys and hired slaves went under the banners of Kolchak, Denikin, Savinkov to kill their former but rebellious slaves, or sailed in crowded steamers to the West, where there was still room for both masters and born lackeys of the spirit. The remaining supporters of feudalism and capitalism were only forced to do what the grandees themselves had been forcing Russian peasants and artisans to do for hundreds of years during the construction of palaces for the grandees, during the construction of St. Petersburg, Sevastopol, the Nikolaev railway, and the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Modern democrats, on the other hand, portray the matter as if there was something unbearable and shameful in these works, that former priests, tsarist officials, merchants and nobles could not be loaded with the work that they have been loading the Russian peasant with all their history.
The world's material wealth, created at the cost of the suffering of many generations of people, makes it possible already under capitalism to fundamentally displace the slum form of poverty and spiritual squalor of the bulk of the world's population, typical of the era of classical capitalism. Nevertheless, despite the sufficiently developed production base, accumulated resources, market conditions of life were and still are such that capitalism has held and still holds the first place, in comparison with socialism, for example, in the number of hungry, suicidal, raped, divorced couples, street children, drug addicts and alcoholics, the mentally ill and arrested per capita.
Communism, on the other hand, will make it possible to exclude ANY form of material misery from the life of peoples, since it excludes intellectual misery and, consequently, idiotic, first of all, military needs that exude the resources of the planet. In other words, from the materialist point of view, the means of production created by capitalism, already at the industrial stage of its development, allow all forms of human consumption to be carried out at the scientific level and exclude from the life of peoples not only poverty, but also, most importantly, competition and, resulting from it, wars waged to satisfy the absolutely senseless whims of the oligarch class in the growth of the number of zeros in their accounts.
Communism, by eliminating private ownership of the main means of production, thus, in a simple and easy way, frees society from oligarchism, as a vestige of the institution of absolutism, and the oligarchs themselves turn into normal citizens, deprived of the opportunity to buy power and other democratic institutions. But the most important thing is that the transformation of oligarchs into normal citizens with all civil rights and freedoms makes it impossible to start world and local wars at this very moment, since it was large private property that was the cause of all wars in the history of mankind, and oligarchic private property was the cause of two world wars and the approach of a full-scale third world war.
Having built communism, society ceases to spend cyclopean amounts of material and spiritual resources on the development and manufacture of means of mass destruction of people.
Figuratively speaking, the world is worth the Mass.
Thus, if capitalism is a society in which shameless, cynical, all - encompassing deception is a condition for successful competition, which necessarily develops into mass slaughter, then in a communist primitive society, people did not deceive EACH OTHER for thousands of years, did not weigh, did not measure, did not cheat their neighbors, not only because everyone was well-educated and naturally intelligent, i.e. they had not yet read the Bible and were not tormented by the preparation for the Unified State Exam, but also because there was no reason or reason, no tools for mutual cheating. The people of the recent communist past became so fond of Miklukho-Maklay that he lived happily among them for several years, completely unlike life in tsarist Russia among stupid nobles and even more stupid serfs. That is why the image of Dersu Uzal, a man not spoiled by the stupidities of civilization, is especially touching and humanly rich in Arsenyev's memory.
Tumblr media
It may be said that people of the era of primitive communism are frivolously called smart people, because they did not use smartphones. Well, what to call the generation of people who invented it... human speech, i.e. the information field itself, the noosphere, and those who made the automatically returned aircraft, the boomerang? In civilized Europe, warriors often had the problem of using up arrows. The Australian aborigine, in case of hitting the target, was left with the prey, in case of a miss, the hunting tool itself returned to the hunter. Stupid? Is it possible to call a smart generation of people who allowed themselves to create an atomic bomb and learned to plunge the world into systematic crises and wars? Today, the prevailing position is that a huge mass of people have diplomas, but do not have reason and think as poorly as, for example, Psaki, Shenderovich and Christine Lagarde, whose existence the majority of the world's population does not even suspect, but is greatly inconvenienced by its financial illiteracy and human immorality.
But why is it so easy to make modern people live from crisis to crisis, from war to war, in the belief that, for the survivors, each of these shocks is the last? What gives them the illusion of well-being?
As you know, illusionists need special props to guarantee the deception of the audience, who are delighted with how technically they were made a fool of. Capitalists, in order to create the illusion of justice, for example, when paying wages, need money as a prop, creating a complete illusion of fair calculation. The most ingenious trick that sellers have shown to chronic shopaholics for several hundred years is that the product owners themselves, in front of an astonished public, raise prices, and the buyers are immersed in a persistent illusion and believe that prices are rising as a result of inflation. People still do not understand that, if at the dawn of commodity circulation money, in the form of gold and silver bars, sometimes acted as a universal equivalent and did not provoke commodity owners to violate the law of value, then, under capitalism, paper money turns into an INSTRUMENT of unilateral mass systematic short-selling, deception, deceit of a billion-dollar army of buyers. Try it, deny yourself the pleasure and do not take the opportunity to rob the wallets of billions of uneducated people who have denied themselves the right to study Marx's theory.
Therefore, communism offers humanity, in the end, to consciously and decisively get rid of the main tool of modern fraudsters - money. Although, it is easy to imagine what feelings will arise, for example, from card sharps, from leading Forex scammers, from stock speculators, from all entrepreneurs who read the lines that the theory of communism proved the inevitability of the death of money, especially paper money.
Communism, having eliminated the main prop of the illusionist capitalists-money, will devalue the main talent of all entrepreneurs, will deprive them of the main, if not the only, pleasure: fooling, humiliating and oppressing their neighbors. It is clear that in a society in which everyone strives for mutual deception, not everyone succeeds, and therefore there is a very high degree of mutual discontent. Some are extremely annoyed if they failed to deceive society on the scale they wanted, while others are enraged when they realize the content and scale of their loss. On this basis, there are contract murders, domestic theft, organized banditry, mass pogroms with elements of vandalism and hysterical struggle in the manner of English, American and Ukrainian parliamentarism - the change of bourgeois parties at the helm of the enticement of the masses of the inhabitants, for even greater deception.
Therefore, given the tendency of the mass of modern philistines to mysticism and illusions, a comparison is acceptable in which capitalism differs from communism as hell from heaven. But then the question arises, why do some people prefer to live in a capitalist hell? For the same reason that devils prefer to live in hell rather than heaven.
Hell, according to the fairy tales, is just as pleasing to God as paradise. One is meaningless without the other. If there were only hell, there would be no need to keep God's commandments. You'll still go to hell. If there were only paradise, there would be no need to keep God's commandments. You'll still go to heaven. Only by complementing each other, fairy tales about heaven and hell give the inhabitants a sweet right to choose, turn into a real motivation for the most gullible parishioners, forever deceived investors, shareholders, shareholders and other weak-minded people. They are able, for example, to strenuously select a banker from the Forbes magazine list who they think is more honest than others, without wondering how this curiosity, an honest banker, is even possible. Why, for example, is Gref so sarcastic and pessimistic in his speeches at major forums? But because the size of the state participation in the work of Sberbank will not allow it to implement such an adventurous debit and credit policy, which can be decided by a small private bank. Gref, most often, is sad, melancholic and sarcastic because, being a player by nature, he is forced to restrain himself by the norms of his functions, control, and publicity of his position, while a private banker is guided only by a thirst for profit and ... will get into the media and Interpol lists, only when there is nothing left for depositors from deposits in his bank.
But, despite the fabulous stupidity, the idea of paradise is good because there are no devils in paradise and there are no means for carrying out their devilish activities, and therefore paradise for them is as uninteresting as kvass for a drug addict. Hell is a paradise for devils, because it involves merciless, unlimited mockery of people, their souls, as it happened, for example, during the Holy Inquisition, and today in the God-loving ISIS, without the slightest responsibility to anyone, especially to the almighty. After all, it is not that God created hell, but that in order to maintain the idea of "God", there must be a legion of sadists. All cauldrons and boiling pitch are harmless until God creates a special type of celestial beings whose function is to inventively, continuously, eternally, mercilessly abuse people, copied from the real slave-owning practices of the era of the creation of the Christian and Muslim religions.
In the model of heaven, unlike hell, it is provided that everyone is in bliss, because it is impossible to break the commandments there at all, because there is no form of private property, there are no donkeys and the neighbor's wife, there is no possibility to raise the price of manna from heaven. You will not kill anyone, since everyone is immortal, you will not steal, you will not covet, because, apart from singing hymns to God, no other entertainment is provided in the Christian paradise. In fact, the absence of problems is the attractive force that turns people's dream of getting to paradise into a strong enough motive, especially in a Muslim paradise, in which the heroes will be presented with 70 virgins, so that the hero can use them as a prize for cutting off many heads of the infidels, destroying Mosul, Palmyra, until, not yet... I stepped on an anti-tank mine, which, oddly enough, is a portal to paradise for the most gullible.
Thus, if we use the ancient children's folk religious tales as an illustration, we have to admit that the branch of hell on Earth is capitalism, and entrepreneurs perform the functions of devils at the will of God.
But those atheists who have understood Marx's teaching about production relations as the basis of socio-economic formations of the era of the domination of the UNSCIENTIFIC worldview, who have studied the real system of productive forces of modern society, the main trends in the development of material production and socio-demographic trends, know that modern monopolies, born of the market, create all the necessary conditions for the extinction of private ownership of the main means of production and, consequently, for the elimination of the commodity-money form of relations between people. the brilliant guesses of the utopian socialists about the possibility of ridding society of all forms of tyranny, the oppression of intelligent Man by bipedal, erect mammals, have acquired a historically mature and logically proven theoretical basis, which has turned the humanistic fantasies of individual thinkers of antiquity, their good wishes, and speculative constructions into a completely engineering project that requires people not so much the emotional impulse that underlay all pre-communist coups and revolutions, but exclusively strict scientific calculation.
Why, in all the pre-communist revolutions and coups, did the rebellious masses move from one form of exploitation to another, to an increasingly sophisticated and parasitic form of exploitation? Because in all pre-socialist formations, the number of illiterate, mentally undeveloped people was many times greater than the number of educated people. Therefore, by destroying the old forms of exploitation, the bulk of the uneducated population was plunged by the leaders into an even more perfect, exquisitely packaged form of exploitation.
But competition, i.e., the desire of educated capitalists to absorb the capital of equally educated capitalists, led to the fact that the owners were forced to spend money on increasing the scientific and information superiority of their staff over the staff of their competitors, both domestically and internationally. And this is how the majority of competitors and, consequently, almost all businessmen think, unwittingly, from concentrating their gravedigger in the person of the proletarian masses of physical labor, they also move on to forming significant masses of proletarians, although with narrowly professional, but often with the skills of realistic thinking. In this regard, mass deception will meet more and more difficulties in its path.
It's getting harder for marketers to cheat... marketers of their competitors. The increase in the degree of protection of the growing masses of the population from deception and self-deception, as mentioned earlier, is the objective condition that significantly facilitates the struggle for the construction of a communist society on a global scale. One of the consequences of this trend is a steady real decline in the degree of religiosity of the population of the most developed countries of Europe, where Catholic churches have never been closed in such numbers as today. True, this is not because of the good educational work of atheists, but because capitalism itself has put silver coins and information technology on a height that is inaccessible to God. There is not much left, and it is quite achievable: to fill the information channels and the consciousness of individuals with scientific content on all issues. For the Party of Scientific Centralism, this is quite a feasible task.
Therefore, if we briefly express the essence of the main task, the solution of which can lead to the construction of a society of universal happiness, then communism is a combination of the practice of social and individual development with a scientific theory that covers all areas of existence.
Instead of a conclusion.
Capitalism - a social structure that is possible only if the majority of the population DOES NOT POSSESS either a scientific methodology of thinking, or knowledge of all that is valuable, confirmed by socio-historical practice, that the scientists of the world have already developed about the objective laws of the development of nature and society. Only with the low mental development of the majority of the population, the exploited do not understand that they are not free and are deceived at every turn.
Communism - such a structure of society in which the main concern of society itself is, first of all, to fill the consciousness of EACH individual with knowledge of the objective laws of the development of nature and society and, consequently, the impossibility of any restrictions on the part of anyone in the free realization by EACH individual of all the constructive inclinations of his personality.
1 note · View note
royal1979 · 3 years
Text
Faberge Eggs
Tumblr media
Who was the creator of the famous Faberze eggs?
On September 24, 1920, Peter Carl Faberze, the artist jeweler who managed to seduce tsars, crowned, tycoons and plebeans, died in self-exile in Lausanne, Switzerland, creating eggs, Easter eggs, the precious materials of which were take off by his unbridled imagination.
The young Peter Karl, after studying at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts in Germany and the Schloss Commercial School in Paris, returned to St. Petersburg in 1872, at the age of 26, to take over the goldsmith's shop that Gistav's father had founded since 1842. Faberze won't be long before he stands out and becomes sought after in the European royal courts. From his workshop, pioneered by the Swiss craftsman François Berbaum, came elegant artifacts inspired by the time of Louis XVI, for which he used precious metals and rare stones. The Frenchman, ugenotos in origin, was not limited to the creation of jewellery – how could he after all. Watches, miniatures, statuettes, cups, music boxes, were just a few of what he had planned for some of the strongest and richest people of his time.
Given the huge reputation of Faberze House, who will gradually reach 500 employees and have autonomous workshops in Moscow, Odessa, Kiev and London, Tsar Alexander III will address Faberze in 1884, wanting to offer as a gift an Easter egg to his wife, Maria Feodorovna, motivated by the fact that in childhood he had been enchanted by an egg belonging to her aunt , Princess Vilhelmine Marie of Denmark.
The golden egg – known today as "Kota" – will be offered on May 1, 1885 to the tsarina, which will be impressed by the "ordinary" white egg, the shell of which was covered with enamel, while in its gold "crocus" was hidden a hen of platinum and gold. A diamond miniature of the imperial crown and a ruby egg pendant was the last surprise hidden by the "Kota", elements that have now been lost.
Maria's enthusiasm will anoint In six weeks Faberze supplier of the imperial house of Russia and the jeweler will undertake to create a new egg every Easter for the tsarina. With absolute freedom of movement and only limiting the uniqueness of each egg, which in addition had to contain a surprise, Peter Carl Faberze will create masterpieces.
After the death of Alexander III, on 1 November 1894, his son Nicholas II will continue to offer from a Faberze egg to his wife Alexandra Feodorovna and his mother, Empress Maria Feodorovna, until the October Revolution of 1917. According to the Faberze family's records, a total of 50 imperial Easter eggs were created and their reputation was so great that similar ones were ordered by prominent clients of the house, including the Duchess of Marlborough, the Rothschild family and the Yussovs.
In the spring of 1916, Tsar Nicholas II will offer his mother the Easter egg "The Order of St. George". Particularly unassuming compared to the previous ones, as the First World War is underway, it will be the last egg that tsarina will receive and the only one she will be able to take with her abroad before the October Revolution breaks out.
The "Karelian Birch", the egg to be delivered to the tsar in 1917, was completed after his resignation on March 15, 1917. The invoice that Faberze will send to Nikolaos II on 25 April will be addressed to "Mr Nikolai Aleksandrovic Romanov". After his discharge, the egg will be sent to the palace of Grand Duke Mikhail Aleksandrovic, but he will leave before receiving it. The precious object will remain there and be stolen after the October Revolution.
The Bolsheviks will nationalize the workshops and the Faberze estate and the company will close. In September 1918, Peter Carl Faberze would escape in disguise as a diplomatic postman. His steps will lead him to Riga, Germany and finally to Lausanne, where in 1820 he died of a heart attack, having first surrendered to an unspeakable grief. Later, his ashes will be transported, along with his wife, Augusta, who died in 1925, to the Grand Jas cemetery in Cannes, France by his son Eugne.
Back home, his masterpieces fell into the hands of people who couldn't appreciate their value. The revolutionary government began selling them for a short time, first in the shops of St. Petersburg and then abroad, resulting in the traces of many of them being lost.
It is typical that, using as a pretext that he wanted to help with his mobile practice in the fight against typhus, an American barrel, named Armandos Hammer, managed to return to America with 13 Easter eggs, bought by illiterate and ignorant rebels who had stolen them when they occupied the palaces. Having been acquired at noble prices, they gave Hammer mythical sums when they were sold to collectors.
Of the 69 known Faberze eggs, 57 survive to date. Of the 50 imperial eggs, 44 have been rescued, while there are photos of three of the six lost. Ten of the imperial Easter eggs are on display at the Kremlin's Moscow Armory, where they were transported along with other treasures of the imperial family, at Lenin's behest.
The remaining eggs are scattered in museums and private collections around the world, and every time one is available for sale, prices soar. After the Kremlin's collection, it was Malcolm Forbes who had managed to collect the largest number of eggs: a total of nine, along with about 180 other Faberze creations.
Shortly before Forbes' collection was auctioned by Sotheby's in February 2004, it was bought entirely by Russian oligarch Viktor Wekelberg, who, in a BBC Four documentary in 2013, revealed that he had spent more than $100 million to buy the nine Faberze eggs. Considering that the collection is important for Russian history and culture, Wekelberg founded a private Fabergé Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, which opened on November 19, 2013.
Valuable to art lovers as well as a piece of popular culture, Faberze eggs are all over the place: in James Bond films but also in episodes of "Scooby Doo", "Peaky Blinders" and "Simpsons". After all, as poet and art critic Sir Sarver Sitwell said: "It seems unlikely that the world will regain a jeweler like Carl Faberze. These objects of imagination he made are never going to happen again."
Source: www.lifo.gr 
Tumblr media
Peter Carl Faberge.
1 note · View note
aerotrekka · 4 years
Text
Latvia is the central of the three Baltic states, bordered by Estonia to the north, Lithuania to the south and Belarus and Russia to the east. From Riga, you can go west and take in the historical fortress and market town of Kuldiga, the busy seaport of Ventspils, and the seaside town of Liepaja – with its previously secret Soviet naval base – in a manageable loop drive of about 500km in total. This western part of Latvia – Courland or Kurzeme to the Latvians – was originally ruled by the pagan Baltic Curonian tribe, who were conquered by the German military orders active in the medieval Baltic States. This later became the Duchy of Courland, part of the Duchy of Lithuania, and was later annexed by Tsarist Russia in 1795. Many of the cities were part of the Hanseatic League, which you can read about here https://www.aerotrekka.com/full-hansa-lubeck-rostock/. Start your trip in Riga and head past its own seaside town of Jurmala west towards Kuldiga.
Source: Google Maps.
Kuldiga
Kuldiga owes its start in the 1240s to the development of a fortress overlooking the River Venta, which provided connections to other rivers while being a short distance to the coast. The river is traversed by a 19th-century brick bridge – one of the longest of it’s type – that is the venue for traditional midsummer night running races. Just upriver from the bridge is a set of rapids, evocatively referred to as the Ventas Rumba.
The city joined the Hanseatic League in 1368 which gave connections throughout the Baltic and Eastern Europe. The Aleksupite River runs through town and to match the midsummer night runners over the Venta Bridge, has another annual race where the runners go along the river bed.
The eastern part of town overlooking the river and the Ventas Rumba has a large set of mounds on which the fortress and associated medieval buildings – including a convent – stood until their destruction in the great Northern War with Sweden in 1702. It’s now a rolling park adjoining the river, populated with stone sculptures by Livija Rezevska, a Latvian artist. The city museum (Pils Iela 5)(https://www.kuldigasmuzejs.lv/eng), in a manor house by the river, is worth checking out.
The town itself lies further west and was developed later in the 17th-20th centuries after a major fire consumed earlier wooden structures.  It’s a good place to stop off on your way to Ventspils or Liepaja from Riga, to grab lunch around the main square at Baznicas Iela and have a wander round. Kursas Zeme (Baznicas Iela 6) is a good cafe or if you want the cellar experience try Pagrabins (Baznicas Iela 5).
Kuldiga retains an older feel to it – plenty of houses in town have a traditional rural style with small landholdings now superseded by the local supermarket. The city’s synagogue (1905 Gada Iela 6), built in 1875 and now the public library, is worth seeing to understand Kuldiga’s Jewish past.
If you ignore the cars, the 19th century is still going strong here.
Ventspils.  Continuing northwest to where the Venta River flows (or spills) into the Baltic, Ventspils is a major port city and a good way to access Sweden if you prefer alternative sea-routes in and out of the country.
Ventspils has a small downtown so it’s most likely good for an overnight, although livelier in the summer. There is a cow-themed waterfront promenade that starts at the old city and works it’s way west along the Venta and up to the seawall.
You can park at the base of the seawall which is worth taking to the end for some bracing weather and to check out the ocean-going trawlers mounted on their plinths.
Walking west of the city center along the waterfront will take you to the main historical attraction in town, the Livonian Order Castle (Jana Iela 17 – http://muzejs.ventspils.lv/en/the-castle-of-the-livonian-order/) – the site of Ventspil’s main fortress since around 1250 but which was progressively modernized since and so today looks like a large manor house, but has a good museum explaining the region’s history. You can then head out to the beach and waterfront to complete your concrete cow tour:
There are a few small hotels and guesthouses in town as this is a low-key place. I stayed at the Raibie Logi Hotel (Lielais Prospekts 61) which was comfortable and a 15-minute walk from the center.
The city center is just south of the ferry terminal around Skolas Iela. Skroderkrogs (Skroderu iela 6) is a good traditional Latvian restaurant and the Ventspils alus Darītava Courlander (Tirgus iela 9) is a good place for a beer – however it (along with much of the other venues) closes on Monday nights.
Liepaja and the Karosta Soviet Naval Base. Heading further south, Liepaja is a major Baltic seaside resort and a good place to spend a couple of days. It has good hotel and catering options since it has to cater for the busy summer season; most of these are concentrated south and west of the Promenade Hotel, facing and back from the canal, as well as along Liela Iela south of the Tirdzniecibas Canal. The new Great Amber concert hall has a busy schedule and it’s worth seeing what’s on, with a classical and jazz emphasis : http://lielaisdzintars.lv/en
Liepaja is an interesting town to walk around and absorb a range of influences.
Other things to see in Liepaja are the city museum in a former mansion, the beaches and waterfront, with an obligatory bracing walk  along the harbor wall – Liepaja is a windy city year round. The waterfront on the south side of the river heading west has a varying collection of historical vessels as well as naval base containing more modern craft.
Liepaja’s main attraction – for those interested in the other side of the Cold War fence – is the former Soviet Naval base just north of town in Karosta (War Port in Latvian). Originally constructed around the turn of the 20th Century, you can start at the former Tsarist-era prison that was later used by the Soviets and the Germans, and as such is a grim picture into the totalitarian tides that have swept over Latvia. The museum (http://karostascietums.lv/en/) also offers ideas as to what else to see in the area as well as guided tours. Check opening times before you go as they reduce off-season.
Liepaja is a major year round ice-free port and so was valuable to the Tsarist Russian and Soviet Navy given how other major ports such as Leningrad could experience icing, as well as being a forward base against the west; Karosta was a closed city during the cold war. The area west of the dockyard basin around Virssardzes Iela – now a commercial dockyard so not accessible – is full of naval administration, storage and accommodation areas.
As with any former Soviet base, there is an Orthodox Cathedral and a challenged housing block complex on the base, located west of the administration area around Katedrales Iela.
Heading east along Generala Baloza Iela, you’ll find the Tosmale Cemetery, the final resting place for a mostly Russian civilian and military population, both in peacetime and war.
The main attractions are the Tsarist-era defense bunkers along the coast and at the north end of the site, now collapsing into the heavy Baltic surf.  First off are the Northern Forts, reached by going north along Atmodas Bulvaris and then turning west along the Krasta Iela track to the beach.
You can then head further north along Libiesu Iela and turn west along the Jatnieku Iela track to see the more extensive complex around the Ziemuju Fort (look for the single huge wind turbine at the end of the parking lot). Karosta, as a major naval base and westerly outpost against Imperial Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, was defendable both from the sea and from inland.
The Ziemuju Fort complex also runs inland from the sea along the  track – it was here that Latvian troops broke through the defensive line in 1918 to eventually take Karosta. If you are heading back in the direction of central Karosta and are not yet sick of seeing Tsarist fortifications, drive south along Libiesu Iela and turn southwest along 14 Novembra Bulvaris for about 1,200 metres to a bastion configured for all-round defense, protecting for inland attack from the northeast.
On a serious note, the memorial to Jewish Victims of Fascism is located further north at Wrede Beach, which was a Nazi execution site for the Jewish citizens of Liepaja in July 1941. Exiting Jatnieku Iela, go 800 meters north along Libiesu Iela and take the first track left to the beach where you’ll see a large memorial.
Liepaja Logistics. I stayed at the excellent Promenade Hotel (Vecā Ostmala 40), which is a converted brick dockside building facing the canal and in the town center. It has a really nice level of fit and a good breakfast. There are plenty of restaurant options, mostly covering traditional Latvian offerings, with MO Liepāja (Friča Brīvzemnieka iela 7) being a bit more higher end, and Postman’s House (Friča Brīvzemnieka iela 53) or Hot Potato (Jāņa iela 1) being a bit more traditional and along the lines of a pub restaurant venue.
For craft beer, don’t miss the excellent Miezis & Kompānija (Kuģinieku iela 5) craft beer bar, an outpost of Riga’s Labietis brewery. This area, along and behind the waterfront south of the canal and west from the Promenade Hotel has a collection of bars and restaurants. In the summer, there are plenty of options west of the beachfront Jurmalas Park.
      The Latvia Loop Latvia is the central of the three Baltic states, bordered by Estonia to the north, Lithuania to the south and Belarus and Russia to the east.
0 notes
goldeagleprice · 7 years
Text
Coin find may link to earlier find
A find of 18 early modern Polish coins hidden in a castle may be associated with a similar find in a nearby cemetery during the early 20th century. The find may also be the remainder of a much larger hoard that was discovered and looted by a worker in either the late 19th or 20th century.
According to Polish historian Konstanty Koscinski, the worker may have used proceeds from selling the find to finance his emigration to the United States. He did not name the worker in his writings.
Dr. Michal Starkski of the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Warsaw said a similar hoard discovered in a nearby cemetery during the early 20th century may have been part of this same group.
Archaeologist Maciej Kurdwanowski discovered the recently encountered coins. The coins were found in a tower at Czluchów Castle in northwestern Poland. The coins were hidden inside the defensive tower located in the second ward. The structure was standing at one of the gates leading to the third ward. The tower was in use until the end of the 18th century.
It is likely that the coins were hidden during the Swedish siege of 1655 to 1656 in a period of Polish history known as The Deluge. The Deluge was the invasion and occupation of part of the Commonwealth of Poland during the Second Northern War of 1655 to 1660.
According to Starkski, “The Czhuchów fortress resisted the Swedes for a long time. The siege lasted for several months – ultimately, in winter of 1655/56, when the surrounding lake fortress froze, the invaders captured it. The defenders were unable man the whole, very extensive system of walls.”
He added, “Because of their great value in the 17th century, [the coins] are rare archaeological finds.”
The find is comprised of orts of King Sigismund III Vasa of Poland (king of Poland 1587-1632, king of Sweden 1592-1599); King Jan Kazimierz of Poland (ruled 1648-1668); George William, Duke of Prussia (ruled 1619-1640); and a single 10-kreuzer coin of Archduke Leopold V of Austria (1586-1632). Each of the coins is composed of silver.
According to Starski, these coin denominations were introduced for use in foreign trade during the early 17th century. Each ort could have purchased about one dozen chickens at that time.
During the reign of Sigismund III, the ort or quarter taler and the poltoraki or 3-kreuzer denominations were added to the existing system that included the taler, half taler, 6 groschen, and 3 groschen in silver. Billon composition 1- and 1/2-groschen, schilling, and dinar coins were also struck at this time. The coinage had been unified and had good purchasing power under the previous king, Stefan Batory (ruled 1576-1586). The value of the silver coinage declined during Sigismund’s reign in part due to the import of large amounts of silver from the Americas, but also due to debasement and rampant counterfeiting, especially originating from Swedish-controlled mints in Elbing and Riga. Poland controlled the mints at Bromberg, Krakow, Lublin, Marienburg, Olkusz and other more minor mints.
Due to wars with Sweden and Russia that, among other things, resulted in a shortage of silver, the primary coins in circulation were devolving into debased groszy denominations as well as the commonly encountered copper shillings called “boratinki” by the time of Jan Kazimierz.
An extensive gold coinage was issued during the reigns of both Sigismund III and Wladislas IV. A now rare diminutive gold solidus of the same diameter as the boratinki was issued during the reign of Jan Kazimierz. No coins from the reign of King Wladislas IV (ruled 1632-1648) were found in the recently discovered hoard.
The coins are planned to be conserved and studied in Warsaw, then be returned to Regional Museum of Czhuchów where they were on display at the time this article was being written.
  This article was originally printed in World Coin News. >> Subscribe today.
   More Collecting Resources
• The Standard Catalog of World Coins, 1601-1700 is your guide to images, prices and information on coins from so long ago.
• Start becoming a coin collector today with this popular course, Coin Collecting 101.
The post Coin find may link to earlier find appeared first on Numismatic News.
0 notes
lindadigsgraves · 1 month
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
19 notes · View notes
readbookywooks · 7 years
Text
... Somewhere behind a screen a clock began wheezing, as though oppressed by something, as though someone were strangling it. After an unnaturally prolonged wheezing there followed a shrill, nasty, and as it were unexpectedly rapid, chime - as though someone were suddenly jumping forward. It struck two. I woke up, though I had indeed not been asleep but lying half-conscious. It was almost completely dark in the narrow, cramped, low-pitched room, cumbered up with an enormous wardrobe and piles of cardboard boxes and all sorts of frippery and litter. The candle end that had been burning on the table was going out and gave a faint flicker from time to time. In a few minutes there would be complete darkness. I was not long in coming to myself; everything came back to my mind at once, without an effort, as though it had been in ambush to pounce upon me again. And, indeed, even while I was unconscious a point seemed continually to remain in my memory unforgotten, and round it my dreams moved drearily. But strange to say, everything that had happened to me in that day seemed to me now, on waking, to be in the far, far away past, as though I had long, long ago lived all that down. My head was full of fumes. Something seemed to be hovering over me, rousing me, exciting me, and making me restless. Misery and spite seemed surging up in me again and seeking an outlet. Suddenly I saw beside me two wide open eyes scrutinising me curiously and persistently. The look in those eyes was coldly detached, sullen, as it were utterly remote; it weighed upon me. A grim idea came into my brain and passed all over my body, as a horrible sensation, such as one feels when one goes into a damp and mouldy cellar. There was something unnatural in those two eyes, beginning to look at me only now. I recalled, too, that during those two hours I had not said a single word to this creature, and had, in fact, considered it utterly superfluous; in fact, the silence had for some reason gratified me. Now I suddenly realised vividly the hideous idea-revolting as a spider - of vice, which, without love, grossly and shamelessly begins with that in which true love finds its consummation. For a long time we gazed at each other like that, but she did not drop her eyes before mine and her expression did not change, so that at last I felt uncomfortable. "What is your name?" I asked abruptly, to put an end to it. "Liza," she answered almost in a whisper, but somehow far from graciously, and she turned her eyes away. I was silent. "What weather! The snow ... it's disgusting!" I said, almost to myself, putting my arm under my head despondently, and gazing at the ceiling. She made no answer. This was horrible. "Have you always lived in Petersburg?" I asked a minute later, almost angrily, turning my head slightly towards her. "No." "Where do you come from?" "From Riga," she answered reluctantly. "Are you a German?" "No, Russian." "Have you been here long?" "Where?" "In this house?" "A fortnight." She spoke more and more jerkily. The candle went out; I could no longer distinguish her face. "Have you a father and mother?" "Yes ... no ... I have." "Where are they?" "There ... in Riga." "What are they?" "Oh, nothing." "Nothing? Why, what class are they?" "Tradespeople." "Have you always lived with them?" "Yes." "How old are you?" "Twenty." "Why did you leave them?" "Oh, for no reason." That answer meant "Let me alone; I feel sick, sad." We were silent. God knows why I did not go away. I felt myself more and more sick and dreary. The images of the previous day began of themselves, apart from my will, flitting through my memory in confusion. I suddenly recalled something I had seen that morning when, full of anxious thoughts, I was hurrying to the office. "I saw them carrying a coffin out yesterday and they nearly dropped it," I suddenly said aloud, not that I desired to open the conversation, but as it were by accident. "A coffin?" "Yes, in the Haymarket; they were bringing it up out of a cellar." "From a cellar?" "Not from a cellar, but a basement. Oh, you know ... down below ... from a house of ill-fame. It was filthy all round ... Egg-shells, litter ... a stench. It was loathsome." Silence. "A nasty day to be buried," I began, simply to avoid being silent. "Nasty, in what way?" "The snow, the wet." (I yawned.) "It makes no difference," she said suddenly, after a brief silence. "No, it's horrid." (I yawned again). "The gravediggers must have sworn at getting drenched by the snow. And there must have been water in the grave." "Why water in the grave?" she asked, with a sort of curiosity, but speaking even more harshly and abruptly than before. I suddenly began to feel provoked. "Why, there must have been water at the bottom a foot deep. You can't dig a dry grave in Volkovo Cemetery." "Why?" "Why? Why, the place is waterlogged. It's a regular marsh. So they bury them in water. I've seen it myself ... many times." (I had never seen it once, indeed I had never been in Volkovo, and had only heard stories of it.) "Do you mean to say, you don't mind how you die?" "But why should I die?" she answered, as though defending herself. "Why, some day you will die, and you will die just the same as that dead woman. She was ... a girl like you. She died of consumption." "A wench would have died in hospital ..." (She knows all about it already: she said "wench," not "girl.") "She was in debt to her madam," I retorted, more and more provoked by the discussion; "and went on earning money for her up to the end, though she was in consumption. Some sledge-drivers standing by were talking about her to some soldiers and telling them so. No doubt they knew her. They were laughing. They were going to meet in a pot-house to drink to her memory." A great deal of this was my invention. Silence followed, profound silence. She did not stir. "And is it better to die in a hospital?" "Isn't it just the same? Besides, why should I die?" she added irritably. "If not now, a little later." "Why a little later?" "Why, indeed? Now you are young, pretty, fresh, you fetch a high price. But after another year of this life you will be very different - you will go off." "In a year?" "Anyway, in a year you will be worth less," I continued malignantly. "You will go from here to something lower, another house; a year later-to a third, lower and lower, and in seven years you will come to a basement in the Haymarket. That will be if you were lucky. But it would be much worse if you got some disease, consumption, say ... and caught a chill, or something or other. It's not easy to get over an illness in your way of life. If you catch anything you may not get rid of it. And so you would die." "Oh, well, then I shall die," she answered, quite vindictively, and she made a quick movement. "But one is sorry." "Sorry for whom?" "Sorry for life." Silence. "Have you been engaged to be married? Eh?" "What's that to you?" "Oh, I am not cross-examining you. It's nothing to me. Why are you so cross? Of course you may have had your own troubles. What is it to me? It's simply that I felt sorry." "Sorry for whom?" "Sorry for you." "No need," she whispered hardly audibly, and again made a faint movement. That incensed me at once. What! I was so gentle with her, and she .... "Why, do you think that you are on the right path?" "I don't think anything." "That's what's wrong, that you don't think. Realise it while there is still time. There still is time. You are still young, good-looking; you might love, be married, be happy ...." "Not all married women are happy," she snapped out in the rude abrupt tone she had used at first. "Not all, of course, but anyway it is much better than the life here. Infinitely better. Besides, with love one can live even without happiness. Even in sorrow life is sweet; life is sweet, however one lives. But here what is there but ... foulness? Phew!" I turned away with disgust; I was no longer reasoning coldly. I began to feel myself what I was saying and warmed to the subject. I was already longing to expound the cherished ideas I had brooded over in my corner. Something suddenly flared up in me. An object had appeared before me. "Never mind my being here, I am not an example for you. I am, perhaps, worse than you are. I was drunk when I came here, though," I hastened, however, to say in self-defence. "Besides, a man is no example for a woman. It's a different thing. I may degrade and defile myself, but I am not anyone's slave. I come and go, and that's an end of it. I shake it off, and I am a different man. But you are a slave from the start. Yes, a slave! You give up everything, your whole freedom. If you want to break your chains afterwards, you won't be able to; you will be more and more fast in the snares. It is an accursed bondage. I know it. I won't speak of anything else, maybe you won't understand, but tell me: no doubt you are in debt to your madam? There, you see," I added, though she made no answer, but only listened in silence, entirely absorbed, "that's a bondage for you! You will never buy your freedom. They will see to that. It's like selling your soul to the devil .... And besides ... perhaps, I too, am just as unlucky - how do you know - and wallow in the mud on purpose, out of misery? You know, men take to drink from grief; well, maybe I am here from grief. Come, tell me, what is there good here? Here you and I ... came together ... just now and did not say one word to one another all the time, and it was only afterwards you began staring at me like a wild creature, and I at you. Is that loving? Is that how one human being should meet another? It's hideous, that's what it is!" "Yes!" she assented sharply and hurriedly. I was positively astounded by the promptitude of this "Yes." So the same thought may have been straying through her mind when she was staring at me just before. So she, too, was capable of certain thoughts? "Damn it all, this was interesting, this was a point of likeness!" I thought, almost rubbing my hands. And indeed it's easy to turn a young soul like that! It was the exercise of my power that attracted me most. She turned her head nearer to me, and it seemed to me in the darkness that she propped herself on her arm. Perhaps she was scrutinising me. How I regretted that I could not see her eyes. I heard her deep breathing. "Why have you come here?" I asked her, with a note of authority already in my voice. "Oh, I don't know." "But how nice it would be to be living in your father's house! It's warm and free; you have a home of your own." "But what if it's worse than this?" "I must take the right tone," flashed through my mind. "I may not get far with sentimentality." But it was only a momentary thought. I swear she really did interest me. Besides, I was exhausted and moody. And cunning so easily goes hand-in-hand with feeling. "Who denies it!" I hastened to answer. "Anything may happen. I am convinced that someone has wronged you, and that you are more sinned against than sinning. Of course, I know nothing of your story, but it's not likely a girl like you has come here of her own inclination ...." "A girl like me?" she whispered, hardly audibly; but I heard it. Damn it all, I was flattering her. That was horrid. But perhaps it was a good thing .... She was silent. "See, Liza, I will tell you about myself. If I had had a home from childhood, I shouldn't be what I am now. I often think that. However bad it may be at home, anyway they are your father and mother, and not enemies, strangers. Once a year at least, they'll show their love of you. Anyway, you know you are at home. I grew up without a home; and perhaps that's why I've turned so ... unfeeling." I waited again. "Perhaps she doesn't understand," I thought, "and, indeed, it is absurd - it's moralising." "If I were a father and had a daughter, I believe I should love my daughter more than my sons, really," I began indirectly, as though talking of something else, to distract her attention. I must confess I blushed. "Why so?" she asked. Ah! so she was listening! "I don't know, Liza. I knew a father who was a stern, austere man, but used to go down on his knees to his daughter, used to kiss her hands, her feet, he couldn't make enough of her, really. When she danced at parties he used to stand for five hours at a stretch, gazing at her. He was mad over her: I understand that! She would fall asleep tired at night, and he would wake to kiss her in her sleep and make the sign of the cross over her. He would go about in a dirty old coat, he was stingy to everyone else, but would spend his last penny for her, giving her expensive presents, and it was his greatest delight when she was pleased with what he gave her. Fathers always love their daughters more than the mothers do. Some girls live happily at home! And I believe I should never let my daughters marry." "What next?" she said, with a faint smile. "I should be jealous, I really should. To think that she should kiss anyone else! That she should love a stranger more than her father! It's painful to imagine it. Of course, that's all nonsense, of course every father would be reasonable at last. But I believe before I should let her marry, I should worry myself to death; I should find fault with all her suitors. But I should end by letting her marry whom she herself loved. The one whom the daughter loves always seems the worst to the father, you know. That is always so. So many family troubles come from that." "Some are glad to sell their daughters, rather than marrying them honourably." Ah, so that was it! "Such a thing, Liza, happens in those accursed families in which there is neither love nor God," I retorted warmly, "and where there is no love, there is no sense either. There are such families, it's true, but I am not speaking of them. You must have seen wickedness in your own family, if you talk like that. Truly, you must have been unlucky. H'm! ... that sort of thing mostly comes about through poverty." "And is it any better with the gentry? Even among the poor, honest people who live happily?" "H'm ... yes. Perhaps. Another thing, Liza, man is fond of reckoning up his troubles, but does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it. And what if all goes well with the family, if the blessing of God is upon it, if the husband is a good one, loves you, cherishes you, never leaves you! There is happiness in such a family! Even sometimes there is happiness in the midst of sorrow; and indeed sorrow is everywhere. If you marry YOU WILL FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF. But think of the first years of married life with one you love: what happiness, what happiness there sometimes is in it! And indeed it's the ordinary thing. In those early days even quarrels with one's husband end happily. Some women get up quarrels with their husbands just because they love them. Indeed, I knew a woman like that: she seemed to say that because she loved him, she would torment him and make him feel it. You know that you may torment a man on purpose through love. Women are particularly given to that, thinking to themselves 'I will love him so, I will make so much of him afterwards, that it's no sin to torment him a little now.' And all in the house rejoice in the sight of you, and you are happy and gay and peaceful and honourable .... Then there are some women who are jealous. If he went off anywhere - I knew one such woman, she couldn't restrain herself, but would jump up at night and run off on the sly to find out where he was, whether he was with some other woman. That's a pity. And the woman knows herself it's wrong, and her heart fails her and she suffers, but she loves - it's all through love. And how sweet it is to make up after quarrels, to own herself in the wrong or to forgive him! And they both are so happy all at once - as though they had met anew, been married over again; as though their love had begun afresh. And no one, no one should know what passes between husband and wife if they love one another. And whatever quarrels there may be between them they ought not to call in their own mother to judge between them and tell tales of one another. They are their own judges. Love is a holy mystery and ought to be hidden from all other eyes, whatever happens. That makes it holier and better. They respect one another more, and much is built on respect. And if once there has been love, if they have been married for love, why should love pass away? Surely one can keep it! It is rare that one cannot keep it. And if the husband is kind and straightforward, why should not love last? The first phase of married love will pass, it is true, but then there will come a love that is better still. Then there will be the union of souls, they will have everything in common, there will be no secrets between them. And once they have children, the most difficult times will seem to them happy, so long as there is love and courage. Even toil will be a joy, you may deny yourself bread for your children and even that will be a joy, They will love you for it afterwards; so you are laying by for your future. As the children grow up you feel that you are an example, a support for them; that even after you die your children will always keep your thoughts and feelings, because they have received them from you, they will take on your semblance and likeness. So you see this is a great duty. How can it fail to draw the father and mother nearer? People say it's a trial to have children. Who says that? It is heavenly happiness! Are you fond of little children, Liza? I am awfully fond of them. You know - a little rosy baby boy at your bosom, and what husband's heart is not touched, seeing his wife nursing his child! A plump little rosy baby, sprawling and snuggling, chubby little hands and feet, clean tiny little nails, so tiny that it makes one laugh to look at them; eyes that look as if they understand everything. And while it sucks it clutches at your bosom with its little hand, plays. When its father comes up, the child tears itself away from the bosom, flings itself back, looks at its father, laughs, as though it were fearfully funny, and falls to sucking again. Or it will bite its mother's breast when its little teeth are coming, while it looks sideways at her with its little eyes as though to say, 'Look, I am biting!' Is not all that happiness when they are the three together, husband, wife and child? One can forgive a great deal for the sake of such moments. Yes, Liza, one must first learn to live oneself before one blames others!" "It's by pictures, pictures like that one must get at you," I thought to myself, though I did speak with real feeling, and all at once I flushed crimson. "What if she were suddenly to burst out laughing, what should I do then?" That idea drove me to fury. Towards the end of my speech I really was excited, and now my vanity was somehow wounded. The silence continued. I almost nudged her. "Why are you - " she began and stopped. But I understood: there was a quiver of something different in her voice, not abrupt, harsh and unyielding as before, but something soft and shamefaced, so shamefaced that I suddenly felt ashamed and guilty. "What?" I asked, with tender curiosity. "Why, you ..." "What?" "Why, you ... speak somehow like a book," she said, and again there was a note of irony in her voice. That remark sent a pang to my heart. It was not what I was expecting. I did not understand that she was hiding her feelings under irony, that this is usually the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded, and that their pride makes them refuse to surrender till the last moment and shrink from giving expression to their feelings before you. I ought to have guessed the truth from the timidity with which she had repeatedly approached her sarcasm, only bringing herself to utter it at last with an effort. But I did not guess, and an evil feeling took possession of me. "Wait a bit!" I thought.
0 notes
lindadigsgraves · 2 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Pokrov cemetery and The Great Cemetery in Riga, Latvia. April 2024
10 notes · View notes
grille-thrill · 1 year
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media
The Great Cemetery, Riga
1 note · View note
lindadigsgraves · 3 years
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media
13 notes · View notes
lindadigsgraves · 4 years
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Riga Great Cemetery
147 notes · View notes