NEW MARXISM
FOR THE 21st CENTURY
(A Vademecum of the Democratic Left
in the Post-Communist Era)
London - Berlin – Prague
2008
2
Second revised edition 2008
Printed by Urania Publishers 2008
Distributed by Zero International as a methodical material for
revisiting theoretical programs of contemporary left-wing, centrist and
liberal parties.
Zero International is a theoretical group of intellectuals without firm links to
political parties but founded to address governmental authorities with
initiatives in crucial social causes of the present-day world. It offers unbiased
scientific theoretical platforms with a constructive program defending
progress, humanity, democracy, rationalism, emancipation and human rights. It
functions as a non-political spiritual community uniting intellectuals against
the post-modern wave of religious fundamentalism and the crusade of occult
sciences in modern academic studies. It publishes manifestos enforcing
pioneering trends in philosophy, science, literature and arts. It brings statistic
maps of cultural development describing periodicity in human history. It
diagnoses disorders of social psychopathology characteristic of the postmodern irrationality. It proposes programmes of reforms for recovering
sciences, culture and society from diseases of irrational thought.
© Zero International 2008
ISBN 80-86580-10-5
3
CONTENTS
Preface ...............................................................................................................5
ALTERNATIVES TO THATCHERISM..........................................................8
From Thatcherism to Blairism ...........................................................................8
The New Middle Ages.....................................................................................13
Constructive Politics vs. Manipulative Ideology .............................................17
POST-MODERNIST IDEOLOGY: Political Systematics ..............................21
Cultural Periodicity..........................................................................................21
Ancient Roots ..................................................................................................22
The Golden and Dark Ages .............................................................................24
The Past and the Present ..................................................................................34
Categories of Political Regimes.......................................................................36
NEO-LIBERAL MONETARISM: Political Economy....................................40
Parallels in Economic History .........................................................................40
Economic Cycles .............................................................................................41
The Perspectives of Neo-Liberal Monetarism .................................................47
Conclusions .....................................................................................................51
NEW OLIGARCHY: Political Anatomy.........................................................55
Units of Social Culture ....................................................................................55
Political Anatomy ............................................................................................56
A Dynamic Typology of Elites and Masses.....................................................58
GLOBALISATION: Political Geography .......................................................63
Political Geography as a Field of Political Sciences........................................63
Global Geopolitics ...........................................................................................64
External Integration .........................................................................................68
Autonomy and Heteronomy.............................................................................72
Conclusions .....................................................................................................74
NEW FEUDALISM: Political History ............................................................79
The Marxist Interpretation of History..............................................................79
Economic Formations ......................................................................................82
Stages in Economic History.............................................................................83
Political Stages.................................................................................................85
Ancient Civilisations .......................................................................................88
Conclusions .....................................................................................................97
BERLUSCONISATION: Political Typology................................................102
Political Parties ..............................................................................................102
Political Trends..............................................................................................104
Systematic Classification...............................................................................105
4
POSTMODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM: Political Ideology..................108
Political Psychopathology..............................................................................108
Systematic ideography...................................................................................109
An Ideological Diagnostics of Political Diseases ..........................................116
Conclusions on Post-Modernist Fundamentalism..........................................121
References .....................................................................................................127
DEMOTIST CREDO.....................................................................................131
DEMOTIST CREDEMUS ............................................................................134
LEXICON OF COMMON POLITICAL MISNOMERS ..............................138
5
Preface
Most Socialist parties are found in a pitiable state since they have been
bereft of the traditional Marxist theoretical outfit and nobody can offer them a
tantamount substitute to show them guidelines out of this crisis. New
approaches to left-wing ideology agree in emphasising individual freedom and
dismantling the strong authoritarian state. Herbert Marcuse started rethinking
the Marxist doctrine by his critique of modern capitalism in his book OneDimensional Man (1964). Besides being worshipped as an icon of Rudi
Dutchke’s student revolt in 1968, he was greeted as ‘the father of New Left in
the United States’. He influenced Eric Olin Wright (1992, 1997) who proposed
solutions of Neo-Marxism integrating Marx with Weberian class sociology.
His minute analysis of modern capitalist society allowed him to develop the
theory of contradictory class locations.
Noam Chomsky (2003, 2004) became the most influential thinker of our
times by his work on generative linguistics and Libertarian Socialism. His
political philosophy coincides with Anarchism in attempting to maximise
individual freedom and human rights at the expense of minimising the coercive
authority of the centralist bureaucratic state. It refuses ‘wage slavery’ and
corporate business as well as state ownership because they all become
instrumental in reinforcing the economic control of working masses.
Chomsky supports reforms carried out by President Hugo Chavez who has
nationalised several foreign companies exploiting raw materials in Venezuela.
Chavez propagates the teaching of Simon Bolivar and spreads the Bolivarian
Process in Latin American countries. His upholders regard him as the founder
of the 21st Century Socialism and refer to his ideas as Bolivarianism, Chavism
or Chavezism. His political theories were developed by his consultant Heinz
Dieterich Steffan who launched a New Historical Project (2006) defending
social reforms in Venezuela. Its core consists in four main pillars of Socialist
statecraft: equivalence economy, plebiscite democracy, basic participative
democracy and citizen-oriented legislation. His book The Socialism for the
21st Century (2006) warns against dangers of American globalism as well as
Soviet tendencies to bureaucratic etatism. Alternative proposals have been
made by the American Marxist Alan Woods. His book Reformism or
Revolution (2008) critiques Dieterich’s ideas as reformist but considers the
Bolivarian Process as the beginning of a new world revolution.
Modern democratic parties are passing away at the very end of history
(Fukuyama 1992) with inaudible war cries on their lips: up with democracy,
down with tyrannies, totalitarianism and terrorism! All are at a loss as to
confused terms and past issues that lost their sense: socialism vs. capitalism,
totalitarianism vs. democracy, Keynesianism vs. monetarism, protectionism vs.
6
Neo-Liberalism … Who cares for these slogans in a dying age of extinct
ideals, dead desires, fatigued dreams and extinguished causes? All political
ideas are being covered by a thick layer of grease due to frequent use and
abuse. Their sense may be explained only by a careful analysis and comparison
to similar movements in human history. Some terms may be restored to life
only by new coinage, by resuscitating ‘democracy’ in Pericles’ sense and
referring to ‘demotism’ instead of many current misinterpretations. Some have
to be redefined by comparative analysis and tables of historical periodicity.
Demotism as a purer derivate of democratism in its original sense is a new
clear reformulation of classic democratic policies defending the standpoint of
civic society in the coming global epoch. Paternalism, liberalism, anarchism or
communism pretend to be ‘eternal ideologies’ supported by stable standard
political parties but in fact they offer only limited strategies for short-time
periods and narrow social groups. Their historical role is confined to a decade
of a short economic cycle that repeats only once in every century. Each
prescribes recipes for one state of the social automaton where we need sets of
strategies to pass dynamically from one state to another and steer its engine as
experienced drivers in all historical conditions. Narrow ideologies burn all
their fuel for one beat of the economic engine, and vanish through exhaust–
pipes. Demotism is a generalisation of cultural strategies of democratic parties
from ancient times up to now and hence it does not cover other ideologies.
Therefore we speak of a program of New Marxism as a scientific theory
explaining all historical varieties of ideology as reflections and stimulations of
economic growth.
Demotism does not offer any brand-new political utopia describing a bright
future to come or amazing projects of an ideal society to be built. It does not
concern with what there should be or there might be but with a minute
description of what there has been and what there is accordingly going to be. It
does not prescribe a program for one all-saving political party but an antiprogramme elucidating the general space of all possible political strategies and
warning against their usual extremes and deformations. It is antidote to all
ideologies that reveals their ‘social roles’ and neutralises their poetic lies by
revealing them as lures disguising real economic needs. It is politics
depoliticised and ideology deideologised, it is political politology turning
subjective social ideologies into objective science and positive knowledge.
Apart from explaining general theory in historical tables of our cultural
past, its maps give also a clear elucidation of the present stage and our present
position in history. Owing to this the following pages may be read also as a
gloomy itinerary guiding all political parties on a voyage through the economic
cycle 1997-2040. It gives them an unbiased explanation of their probable roles
and fates as well as usable means and strategies. It gives them help by advising
7
optimal routes and warns them against wrecking between the insidious cliffs of
Scylla and Charybdis. It does not foretell Lyotard’s ahistoire or Baudrillard’s
posthistoire, let alone a new Armageddon prophesied by sects preaching finde-siècle catastrophes. A scientific prognosis need not sound optimistic but it
should never be hysterical. Its predictions are based on parallels to the cycle
1891-1945 setting the nearest historical example of a private oligopolistic
corporative economy developing from the decentralised pluralistic market to a
new revival of Keynesian state-control paternalism. They envisage present
trends on a wide screen of historical curves covering most of human history.
This booklet is intended for modern political parties as a mirror of
theoretical self-reflection helping them reformulate their programs by
projecting our historical situation on a cobweb of many similar events in the
past. Our opinions are distorted by false ideological illusions that let us waver
and grope our way like the blind, who have lost their glasses in the thicket of
the darkest night. This booklet does not offer any encouraging consolation but
sheds dim light like a lighthouse illuminating dangerous cliffs and reefs. It
provides liberal, centrist and social democratic parties with an itinerary guiding
their sailing along the cliffs of our Post-Modern Global Age thanks to maps
drawn by many similar periods and cycles of history. It does not oblige them to
adopt any subjective attitudes but elucidates their historical positions on a wide
scale of possible political and economic strategies. It does not provide any
prophetic visions but clarifies all terms by a systematic taxonomy of all
historical movements. It does not incite any new passions but lets them
understand their feelings thanks to a manual of psychopathology explaining
diagnoses of all possible passions. It integrates all internationals into a zerodegree zeroth international but does not want them to fill in any application
forms because science is a boundless realm of all mankind.
8
ALTERNATIVES TO THATCHERISM
From Thatcherism to Blairism
Modern politics looks like a phoney mime show with pretty manikin
faces, smiles learnt from toothpaste advertisements and moving fairy-tales told
about brilliant personal careers. Naïve people can see only the visible top of
the iceberg, faces, personalities, elections and parties without understanding
the hidden economic springs and ropes. A deeper look can discern the
ideological level of the political discourse and descend to the depths of warring
political trends. It regards politics as a battlefield of ideas, as a boxing ring of
conservative, liberal, labourist, anarchist or communist ideologies. Ideologies
act as ‘social visions’, ‘political fashions’ or ‘cultural patterns’. They cut
across politics, journalism, philosophy as well as art but do not clearly
manifest their very gist, the underlying patterns of economic values generated
by financial booms and crises. The real political science must refuse false
illusions and conduct the political discourse in terms of raw economical
processes. Where political patients speak about love, desire and justice, the
political psychiatrists scrutinise them as symptoms of economic diagnoses.
The crucial point of the present-day political scene seems to be posed by the
issue enraging the opposite camps of Thatcherites and Blairists. Some people
tend to personify these trends and neglect their lawful parallels in all other
countries. Others emphasise their links to their traditional programs. But there
is hardly any durable continuity in their political views and strategies because
in the 50s both Atlee and Macmillan spoke about nationalisation, paternalism
and state control while in the 90s both Thatcher and Blair spoke about free
market and private ownership. Both parties are obviously mounted on one
untameable stallion of the same economic market, and though they pull the
bridles frantically in opposite directions, in fact they exert only little influence
on the course of its wild gallop.
Modern political parties of today are historical fossils associated with some
past long-forgotten social causes, their old programs get covered slowly with
moss but from time to time they wake up to fulfil a new historical mission.
New times do not care for their worn-out original ideas but engage them to
meet new needs. Most post-war political parties had to carry out similar
reforms dictated by the same scenario of social development regardless of
original programs. The economic sense of communism and British
“Butskellism” coincided with the needs of post-war reconstruction 1948-1955,
”Little Englandism“ in Britain and Khrushchov’s socialism in Russia meant a
transition to everyday private life and a little man-in-the-street’s cares, O. Šik’s
reforms in eastern countries chimed in with the efforts of white-collar expert
9
technocracy of the western 60s and W. Brandt’s Sozialmarktwirtschaft with the
eastern ideals of consumers’ society of the early 70s. Each of these eras had its
own political illusions and put on airs that it had reached the highest stage of
political justice but real life knew better and continued marching its own way.
The economic depression 1975-1977 brought ominous signals that the
common consumers’ market was saturated and the rapid post-war industrial
growth was declining to an end. For expert economists this turning-point was
an unmistakable token of the twilight of state control and industrial planning.
New conditions required urgent reforms of decentralisation and a transition to
private economies. National governments set out on a journey into the dark
depths of a long-term stagflation, a period of industrial stagnation
accompanied by a growing inflation, higher prices and high unemployment.
The heralds of new economic strategies were Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher whose conservative politics took over initiative in three stagnating
cycles between 1975 and 1997. Their political thought relied on an economic
program preached by F. A. von Hayek and Milton Friedman’s Chicago School.
They defended economic measures of New Monetarism or Neo-Liberalism
where the state resigns from interventions and keeps an eye on a balanced
budget of public finances. Critical voices called their platform Reaganomics
(Reagan + economics) and nicknamed their conservative cultural program
Reaganetics (Reagan + poetics). They had a bitter response in a number of
negative by-effects of the 80s, the rising spiral of unemployment and inflation,
high prices, corruption and criminality. The speculative fever in finances made
many banks and national currencies go bankrupt and fall an easy prey to big
international companies. After fusing big international monopolies the boom
of financial speculation let out the djinn of global expansion.
This catastrophic development threw us into a state of confusion and
shattered all illusions we had about our future and past. All prognoses and
programs of the European Social Democracy and the Second International
broke down and left us down without any sophisticated advice or help. The
end of the century brought a gloomy fin-de-siècle atmosphere described by
Francis Fukuyama’s telling title The End of History (1989). Its excesses
launched an avalanche of prophets foretelling a historical stalemate in the
ultimate deadlock of posthistoire (J. Baudrillard 1983). In France J.-F.
Lyotard’s manifesto La Condition postmoderne (1979) baptised the new
situation as the Post-Modern Age. The postmodernist discourse resigned from
the scientific study of history, put science aside as rubbish and turned to New
Hermeneutics. All intellectuals started muttering incantations of Christian
tradition, eternal Zeitlosigkeit and metaphysical ahistoire.
The postmodernist transition from rational science to J. Derrida’s
’deconstructed metaphysics’ indicated a deep change in intellectual elites. The
10
age of reason and common sense departed to give way to astrology, alternative
medicine, parapsychology and irrational speculation. Their prophet was Fritjof
Capra whose book The Turning Point (1982) announced the death of
Christianity under the heels of new oriental religions of the coming New Age.
The wave of apocalyptic raving culminated when sects started arousing
suicidal moods at the prospect of the doomsday dated at the end of 2000.
In the end of the 90s the free market suffered a heavy blow since high
economic criminality began to choke fair enterprising businesses. Most
countries began to reconsider means of moderate economic regulation and
turned to remedial programs strengthening the mechanisms of public control.
In Milano the incorruptible prosecutor Antonio di Pietro opened investigating
a series of suspicious business transactions involving Silvio Berlusconi and his
brother Paolo. His activities won a wide repute as a campaign of „clean hands“
(mani pulite) and set a good example for similar investigation in other
countries. Admirable results in lowering the rate of criminality were reached in
New York by strict measures taken by the Republican mayor R. Giuliani. In
Russia a daring prosecutor opened the case of illegal practices used by ‘new
oligarchs’ (B. Berezovsky, V. Gusinsky) concentrated around Boris Yeltsin’s
daughter and their Semya (Great Family). His failure could not prevent V.
Putin and new politicians from taking the path of stricter discipline.
The crisis of European history ended with the defeat of Thatcherites and its
staunch followers by Blair’s people in 1997. Whatever parties might take part
in sanative programs against high economic criminality and political
Berlusconisation, it was the Social Democratic leaders Tony Blair, Lionel
Jospin, Gerhardt Schröder and Manfredo Prodi who breathed life into the
program of new social recovery. In Great Britain the counter-movement started
with Blair’s program of the Third Way that closed Wilson’s era and started
New Labour. Its intention was to correct the wildest excesses of Thatcherite
extensive privatisation but also to acknowledge that her economic reforms
were irreversible. A similar centrist position was adopted by G. Schröder’s
politics of Die Neue Mitte in Germany. Without resigning openly from
Sozialmarktwirtschaft, he openly admitted that a return back to W. Brandt was
unthinkable. Other parallel movements with a similar bias appeared in
Clinton‘s New Democracy, the Spanish nueva via and the Dutch polder model.
When we compare our political present with a similar cycle of corporative
economy in the 20th century, we may draw a realistic diagram of post-war
politics segmented into cultural trends and cycles (Table 1). Probable prospects
of New Labour in next decades are sketched in close analogy with a parallel
development of Liberal, Centrist and Labourist parties in the beginning of last
century in Britain (Lloyd George, lord Asquith, J. R. MacDonald) and France
(É. Combeau, G. Clémenceau, R. Poincaré, J. Jaurès, E. Hérriot).
11
1873
1874
1875
1876
1877
1878
1879
1880
1881
1883
1884
1885
1886
1887
1888
1889
1890
1891
1892
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1899
1900
1901
1902
1903
1904
1905
1906
1907
1908
1909
1910
1911
1912
1913
1915
world crisis
Anti-Utopianism
Anti-Darwinism
Technocracy
FORMALISM
L. Carroll
Herbartism
FABIAN
REALISM
Shaw, Gissing
Democracy
Sociologism
Economism
Regionalism
DECADENCE
Hermetism
Unionism Balfour
Imperialists Chamberlain
Anarchism
NEW UTOPIANISM
H. G. Wells, G. B. Shaw
Liberal Radicals
George, Asquith
Syndicalism
Physical Relativism
ANTI-UTOPISM
H. Belloc
G. K. Chesterton
Distributism
Bellicism
GEORGIAN VITALISM
Bridges, Noyes, Binion
Jaurès’s Pacifism
Diffusionism
1961
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
crisis 1961-2
generative
grammar
Formalism
STRUCTURALISM
Technocracy
French students’ revolt
New Left
MAOIST LEFTISM
Sociologism
Punk
THATCHERITE
CONSERVATIVE
TRADITIONALISM
Thatcher, Reagan
Ecologism New Age
POSTMODERNIST
CATASTROPHISM
Derrida, Paul de Man
Lyotard
New Hermeneutics
POSTMODERNIST
HERMETISM
Berlusconism
Yeltzin, Klaus
Anarchism
BLAIRIAN
NEW LABOUR
The Third Way
Blair, Schröder
Clinton, D’Alema
12
1916
1917
1918
1919
1920
1921
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
1927
1928
1929
1930
1931
1932
1933
1934
1935
1936
1937
1938
1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
Geographism
E. M. Forster
D. H. Lawrence
Biographic Vitalism
MODERNISM
Joyce Woolf Elliot
Left cabinets
MacDonald Hériot
Sociologism
Formalism
Wienerschule
Technocracy
Anti-Fascism
Auden
Spender
TRADITIONALISM
conservatism
APOCALYPTIC HERMETISM
Holist Perspectivism
Metaphysical Poetry
Treece Thomas
Militantism
Agrarianism
POST-WAR
CLASSICISM
C. P. Snow
G. Greene
Encyclopaedism
New Right
Russell Kirk MacCarthyism
2002 American
2003 Globalism
2004 Anti-Bush
2005 Pacifism
2006 CIVILISM
2007 Empirism
2008
2009
2010
NEW LEFTISM
2011
students’ revolt
2012
New Labourism
2013
2014
2015
2016 New
2017 Formalism
2018
2019 CONSERVATIVE
2020 TRADITIONALISM
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025 APOCALYPTISM
2026 Ecologism
2027
2028
NEW HERMETISM
2029
2030
2031 World War IV
2032 NEW MILITANTISM
2033
2034
2035
2036
2037
2038
NEOCOMMUNISM
2039
Table 1. The cultural cycle 1997-2040 compared to years 1871-1996
13
The New Middle Ages
Naïve political observers can see this development only in terms of divine
justice, commenting that the post-war socialism proved to be a failure doomed
to eternal perdition while the two-thousand-year-old tradition of Christian
values again celebrated a deserved revival. They do not realise that there was
one scenario of economic changes operating in all post-war countries with a
few local differences peculiar to the West-European, Scandinavian, Soviet and
Afro-Asiatic zone. Sooner or later one chain of social changes and economic
reforms reached all countries as if all states obeyed a synchronous rhythm of
advanced or delayed ticking clocks. They could not escape parallel
development because their inner pace was synchronised with tides and ebbing
waves of the whole world’s booms and crises.
What political parties need is not a utopian romance preaching ideals of a
blissful future promising social justice but realistic contours of political models
that may be awaited in next few years, with alternative choices that may be
taken by the forthcoming economic reforms. Their political programs need an
itinerary guiding their steps along the journey in the darkest thickets of the
deep cultural crisis whose initial incubation phases we are going through.
Realistic shapes of such an itinerary were drawn by influential political
thinkers of our days who find many striking parallels in history. Some find
analogy in the Roman Decadence (Martin C. Putna 2001) and the Baroque
Counter-Reformation but most focus on the Middles Ages (Thurrow 1998a,
1998b) and the crusades of medieval Christianity (Gwynne Dyer (1999). The
metaphor of a medieval revival bringing back to life religious fanaticism and
‘sacred wars’ dates from Nikolai A. Berdyayev (1924) who also prophesied
the coming of new crusaders. His considerations applied to the dark age of
world wars in the first half of the 20th century but new theories emerged again
after the fall of communism. The Modern Age 1892-1946 was clearly an
overture to the Post-Modern Age 1975-2035, whose growth tends to exhibit
similar patterns (Table 1). The awakening of new intolerant religiosity made
its critics again scent ‘New Middle Ages’ and ‘New Feudalism’ (Keller 2002).
Gwynne Dyer (1999) caught a glimpse of medieval crusades in the American
campaign in Kosovo and saw the glory of their banners resurrected in the Iraqi
operation against Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi war accomplished what Samuel
Huntington (1997) foreboded as ‘a disastrous clash between the Christian and
the Moslem civilisation’ and an apocalyptic conflict of two cultural traditions.
Such clashes of religious intolerance represent regular syndromes of dark ages
that periodically return and repeat in every second century.
The first step to a way out of this historical deadlock, called by Fukuyama
(1992) suggestively ‘an end of history’, is clarifying the chaotic turmoil of
14
confused terms that justify ‘our march on the road to hell’. All public enemies
are now labelled as terrorists as if Moslem jihads were principally different
from our Christian crusades and this false label did not cover also partisans in
the Second World War struggle for independence. Both camps demonise the
enemy as the embodiment of Evil and the Great Satan without seeing that they
stand on the common ground of religious neo-conservative fundamentalism
against the powers of culture, rational science and humanity.
Another dangerous self-deception emerges with the question whether
sacred wars against pagans and infidels can instil into barbarians a deeper
sense of democracy. Did we really export democracy to Iraq (G. Bush) and
‘European values’ (J. Solana) to Kosovo, or do we only continue in expanding
our Christian Empire? Are we lawful heirs of democracy in Athens or do we
bury it as oligarchs who sold their city to Sparta? Is the post-modern
plutocracy (and appropriately speaking, also cleptocracy) really a democracy
in the sense of ‘the rule of common people’, or should we properly speak of
new oligarchy as becomes New Oligarchs (S. Berlusconi, B. Berezovsky, V.
Gusinsky) of our days?
Many a busybody worries about the poor in underdeveloped countries, not
attributing their unhappy fates to the financial strategies of the advanced
western world but to a lack of sense of universal Christian values. The Afghan
women will not do any better if they have to take off their burka veils. The
world market trusts virgin countries that remain open to its capital but turns a
cold shoulder to national states that guard their virginity. The poor owe their ill
fortune to the world market that reduced their money to a second-rate
worthless currency, their work to second-rate underpaid goods and themselves
to worthless second-category people. Is our talk about western democracies not
a mere hypocricy and our help to the East a new sort of financial dictatorship?
Table 2 describes our present crisis as a repetition of many similar
syndromes of imperial corporative economy in the past. There has always
existed an Empire, be it Persian, Macedonian, Roman, Spanish or British,
surrounded by its satellites hanging about on its fringes, today as dependent
provinces and tomorrow as independent national states. The world economy
moves forth by elevating new elites as well as by dilating the social wealth, it
grows by expanding empires as well as by liberating their colonies. Historical
evolution perpetually revolves from the renascence of independent national
states to periods of decadence when they loose independence and succumb to a
strong empire. As renascence we may denote all centuries of peace,
reformation and national emancipation when common people retained their
possession and land. As decadence we may denote all centuries of conquests
and genocide wars when they were bereft of their land and the new freedom of
conquering theft confined them to new serfdom.
15
720
740
760
780
800
820
840
860
880
900
920
940
960
980
1000
1020
1040
1060
1080
1100
1120
1140
1160
1180
1200
1220
1240
1260
1280
1300
1320
1340
1360
1380
1400
1420
1440
1460
1480
1500
1520
Whitby theocracy
Whitby scholastics
Carolingian crusades
Carolingian renascence
Arverne scholastic
Auxerre scholastics
Hungarian colonisation
Norman colonisation
Ottonian renascence
Patarian protestation
Cluny counter-reformation
St Anselm‘s scholastics
1st crusade
Feudal decadence
Bernard de Clairvaux’s Inquisition
Valdenses
Albigensian reformation
Albigenses
Dominican decadence
Dominican inquisition
Thomist inquisition
Thomist counter-reformation
Avignon reformation
Ghibellins
Carolingian renascence
Wycliffite reformation
Lollards
Hussite reformation
Hundred Years’ War
The War of the Roses
Gothic decadence
16
1480
1500
1520
1540
1560
1580
1600
1620
1640
1660
1680
1700
1720
1740
1760
1780
1800
1820
1840
1860
1880
1900
1920
1940
1980
2000
2020
2040
Calvinist Reformation
Anglican Reformation
Renaissance
Puritanism
Huguenots
Baroque Decadence
saint wars
Thirty Years’ War
Jesuit Inquisition
Encyclopaedism
Enlightment
Prussian Renascence
Austrian Renascence
Saint Alliance
New Colonialism
First World War
Modern Decadence
Second World War 1960
Soviet episode
Postmodern Decadence
Globalism
Counter-reformation
Crusades, saint wars
Reformation
Utopianism
Popular
movements
Table 2. Reformations and counter-reformations in European history
17
Constructive Politics vs. Manipulative Ideology
Political ideologies are obviously divided as to whether they obscure social
causes and veil them with obscurity or they reveal the hidden pulling ropes and
add to their clarity. Political sciences do not play a fair game with the civic
public unless they translate this phoney mime show back into the original
language of economic terms. Constructive politics is such that provides
citizens social aid rendered by a graduated physician, a learned naturalist and a
qualified scientist, i.e. unbiased objective knowledge regardless of momentary
subjective social needs. Manipulative politics as its counterpart is not simply
a fraud but a wide field of applied social and political technology aimed to
‘repair’ social causes in an indirect, aesthetic, religious or deceptive way.
Even if constructive politics consists in rational knowledge and impartial
science, it cannot abstain from normative judgments and pretend that all
political regimes are equally good for human kind. Scientific medicine cannot
pretend that murder is as valuable a kind of medical treatment as a qualified
physician’s aid, and scientific politics cannot reward recidivist criminals as
generously as law-abiding citizens. It must take care of social health and stand
up for the silent majority of those who produce all the valuable spiritual and
material goods. All democratic parties address as their supporters trade unions,
working class and peasantry, and they seek their voters among engineers,
physicians, scientists and teachers. The former are called working masses
while the latter may be referred to as working elites. Both terms imply a
contradistinction to idling masses (the homeless poor, unemployed beggars,
thieves, prostitutes) and idling elites (aristocracy, financiers, shareholders)
whose productive output is just leisure, pleasure and survival. These four
categories of people exist to a greater or lesser extent in all societies but their
influence and numbers depend on the contemporary state of economic
prosperity. In dark ages of deep crises working classes loose their jobs and
pass into the category of idling classes. Engineers in state-controlled
companies separate and become idling elites, shore-holders, financiers and
factory-owners running their own businesses. Table 3 distinguishes these four
social groups as dynamic variables dependent on economic booms and crises.
Since the ratio of masses and elites is relatively stable, the principal concern
of all political theories is how to make idling and stagnating economies into
constructive societies with growing production and prospering economy.
Rapid-growing economies appear in ‘bright ages’ (saeculum clarum) when
industry prospers, culture flourishes and science is abloom. Their political
system may be called autarchy, i.e. the ‘self-rule’ of working elites and
classes over themselves. In its narrower sense it is more convenient to apply
this term to an autocratic rule of state bureaucracy in national states with a
18
strong centralised government. Owing to such regimes, our diagrams (Table 4)
will denote such periods of renascence as autarcheum. The rule of autocratic
bureaucracy is often interrupted by intermittent movements of popular
reformation that may culminate in a transient rule of democy, i.e. ‘direct
democracy’ governed by popular tribunes and public gatherings of all citizens.
In due course all sound, healthy economies reach a point of saturation and
overproduction that signals a transition to a long-term stagnation. Such ‘dark
ages’ are regularly accompanied by various shades of ‘grey’, dark’, ‘black’ or
brown economy’ that replaces industrial production by mere speculation, theft,
gambling, prostitution and slavery and sooner or later it leads to long-range
military conquests. Such acquisitive economy enthrones a new rich oligarchy
that seizes all public possession, privatises national economy and makes
fortunes by employing slaves imported from barbarian countries. The rule of
oligarchy relies on rich magnates, private corporations and religious funds that
turn native working classes into unemployed idling masses and replace them
by Gastarbeiter from underdeveloped provinces. Their voluntary or
constrained inflow into the cosmopolis of the colonial empire is outbalanced
by a stead outflow of military, commercial and religious corporations into the
barbaricum. The cosmopolis grows into a large colonial empire that bases its
economy on conquests and military expansion. Owing to the prevailing forms
of political organisation, Table 3 denotes dark ages of cultural decadence as a
period of oligarcheum.
Autarcheum
Oligarcheum
centralised state-controlled economy
bright age – saeculum clarum
private decentralised corporative economy
dark age - saeculum obscurum
Autarchy
Oligarchy
Working elites - state bureaucracy
engineers, physicians
Idling elites
Shareholders
Democy
Anarchy
Working masses
workers, peasants
Idling masses
unemployed beggars
Table 3. Masses and elites in bright and dark ages
The social classes, political regimes and economic cycles thus function as
joint vessels in close intertwining interrelation and their shapes rhythmically
change, driven by forces of the society’s economic growth. Oligarchy is
described as a decentralised rule of independent private magnates, rich classes
(plutocracy) and priesthood (theocracy) who influence public causes by high
parliamentarianism (hereditary membership in senates that is conditioned by
19
high census, elected parliaments representing lobbyist groups and sponsoring
businesses). Its rule favours financial and commercial corporations, religious
orders and private legions of soldiers of fortune (militarchy). These classes
take interest in warfare, conquest and expansion as was common in the Roman
Decadence, the Middle Ages and the Baroque Counter-Reformation. In Classic
Athens the rule of oligarchy superseded the reign of democracy in 404/3 BC
after the overthrow inspired by the invasion of troops of Sparta’s military
empire. In modern times the term of ‘democracy’ is widely misused and
abused by being applied erroneously to oligarchic empires with liberal
constitutions and highly-developed parliamentarianism. The term of democy
seems convenient as a new coinage in order to restore its original idea of low
parliamentarianism, i.e. the institute of local public gatherings electing their
tribunes and representatives in higher assemblies. In oligarchy democratic
institutions dissolve and lapse into underground obscurity. They awaken only
intermittently in street riots of action directe as outcries of popular anarchy.
The political regimes of autarchy are remarkable for strong centralised
authority of the ruler, state bureaucracy and court administration (aularchy).
Its heydays in the era of Classic Greece, Hellenism, Augustan Peace,
Renaissance and Aufklärung – Enlightment were accompanied by social peace,
idyllic utopias, secular school systems and flourishing science. People think
that they can make a free choice between autarchy and oligarchy without
realising that they are both preconditioned by the economic machine. All
autarchies lapse into oligarchies once they reach the ceiling of growth and
economic saturation. This is known as the syndrome of stagflation, i.e. longterm stagnation combined with rising prices and steep inflation. Most
autarchies start automatically with the end of long-term wars and end with the
first symptoms of economic stagnation.
Constructive politics is matter-of-factness in positive cycles but it becomes
a poor Cinderella in negative cultural cycles full of wars, plagues and famines.
In dark ages productive work, positive science and constructive politics do not
pay because the civic society disappears and has to give way to the acquisitive
society (stockbroker, soldier of fortune, racketeer, charlatan, prostitute). The
coming of dark ages is announced by the worldwide state of overproduction
and overpopulation when all free sources have been exhausted, all positive
needs have been saturated and economy has fallen into a long-term stagnation.
Dark ages take to manipulative politics and religious fanaticism because they
cannot do without a new privatisation, colonisation, conquest and expansion
and it is only religion that can make claims to property and justify them by
‘sacred wars’ against heterodox pagans. It is only religious fundamentalism
that weaves a holy veil for waging ‘holy wars’ and makes lawful the stealth of
land as well as the extermination of its barbarian, heathen owners.
20
In dark ages the productive elites are replaced by false elites because all
that pays is ‘false work’ (corrupt cleptocracy), ‘false services’ (pornocracy),
‘false medicine’ (charlatanry), ‘false production’ (speculation), ‘false
diplomacy’ (expansive military warfare), ‘false education’ (religious
scholastics) and ‘false science’ (theology, astrology). ‘False work’ requires
‘false ideology’ and ‘false science’. As there are ‘grey’, ‘dark’ and ‘black
economies’, there exist as their indispensable complement also periods of
‘grey culture’ and ‘dark’ or ‘black science’. According as economy abandons
real work and turns to war, conquest and robbery, its culture abandons
scientific knowledge and turns to deceptive charlatanry. According as secular
governments are replaced by theocracy, science is replaced by occult sciences,
metaphysics, religious theology and scholastics. The political ideology decays
into religion, art into idolatry and science into esoteric astrology.
The present-day strategies of demotism as constructive politics in the period
of world globalisation are determined by the rules of dark economic cycles
when the saturated leading economies have to burst out into the neighbourhood
and the underdeveloped third world. The first tide of stagnation 1975-1997 is
now ebbing away but it has spelt doom upon prospects of next three brighter
decades to follow. Even these brighter days will be clouded by the sombre
twilight of a new age with infallible signs of Athenian and Roman decadence.
The western civilisation has become a world cosmopolis with suburbs
overpopulated with poverty wandering from the poor third world. The cheap
immigrant working force has made productive masses futile and unemployed.
In their place there appeared new acquisitive social groups: criminal gangs,
narco-mafias, imported prostitutes, terrorists. As a counterpart of this false
working class, there appeared also new false aristocratic elites, new oligarchs
who have concentrated and wasted an immense deal of national economy.
Globalisation means that rich corporations fuse, concentrate money and
absorb companies in undeveloped countries. The western working-class
disappears and turns into Lumpenproletariat while the unemployed young
intelligentsia enters the services of the big expanding capital and prepares to
become a new elite in the impoverished and underfed third world. Demotism
cannot prescribe a return to autarchy or democy but it should help democratic
parties play their standard role in periods of cultural decadence. It should stand
up for law against high criminality, science against astrology and fair rules of
enterprise against fraud, embezzling, racketeering, gamble and speculation. It
should strengthen federal authorities and fair businesses so that they might
function in a legal environment and compete successfully with narco-mafias
washing out dirty money. It should defend education and science so that they
might cope efficiently with religious fundamentalism that fosters terrorism and
the spirit of cultural, scientific and demographic genocide.
21
POST-MODERNIST IDEOLOGY: Political Systematics
Cultural Periodicity
Crucial problems of today loom much clearer as long as they are depicted
on a large-scale map of similar situations that occurred many times in a similar
way in the historical past. In order to understand modern politics, we need
ordinary statistics that can sum up historical evidence in meaningful categories
and describe statistic tendencies in rational terms. The philosophers W. Dilthey
and H. Rickert, founders of Geistesgeschichte and their irrational approach to
modern humanities, maintained that cultural history consisted of unique
accidental events that were neither recurrent nor repeatable and obeyed no
deterministic laws. Scientific historiography, however, knows better since it
can adduce examples of the regular periodicity of industrial cycles in economic
history. The ups and downs in demographic growth and economic production
shake all branches of culture and produce lawful patterns in the development
of politics, philosophy as well as science and arts. Culture and arts flourish in
peaceful eras of rapid industrial growth but they regularly decay in dark ages
of wars, crusades and famine.
Most issues of modern political life were obscured when medieval
monarchies changed into western civic republics and ancient religions
rationalised into different types of secular political ideology. These changes
concealed that modern socialism is a lawful continuation of Protestantism and
modern Communism functions like the system of political absolutism in the
period of Aufklärung or the Greek tyrannís. Every second century brought a
religious reformation and replaced ecclesiastic theocracy by a secular type of
monarchy. In the Middle Ages the political program of secular autarchies
consisted in ghibellinism that subordinated church, bishops and orders to the
king’s authority and to the strong centralised state. Its adherents Heinrich IV
and Friedrich von Hohenstaufen opposed to the pope and strengthened the
authority of secular administration against the church. In the Renaissance the
ideas of ghibellinism evolved into the political philosophy of absolutism.
Strong absolutist rulers defended centralised administration against rebellious
land-owning aristocracy in regional provinces. In efforts to weaken feudal
magnates, they abolished serfdom and carried out agrarian reforms of
communist stamp. Their political alliance with the peasant community and
urban communes initiated different types of reformation whose program
adjusted religion to rational principles of deism and modern atheism.
Modern communism inherited its totalitarian focus on centralised state
bureaucracy as well as dreams about blissful utopias and hopes in social
justice. Such regimes are now called totalitarian but their layout implied much
22
dualism. It meant that about one half of population converted to secular
atheism and almost one half of the world converted to the Soviet bloc. Most
protestant reformations in the past attempted to create a bilateral balance
between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in internal as well as external politics. In
internal affairs the English reformation under Henry VIII divided England into
Protestants and Catholics. In foreign affairs it helped to split Christendom into
the Protestant North and the Catholic South. The Protestant reformation
movements in England, France and Germany refused to recognise the pope’s
theocracy and seceded from the Roman empire to form autonomous national
states with secular government. Such bilateral dualism was characteristic also
of plebeian secessions in ancient Messenia and Rome.
No autarchy can be understood without noticing its opposition to the global
hegemons. There has always existed The Empire, whether Assyrian, Spartan,
Persian, Macedonian, Roman or British, and its satellites hanging about on its
fringes, today as dependent provinces and tomorrow as independent national
states. Every second century there was secession, Messenian slaves fled to a
fortified stronghold and set themselves free from the yoke of Spartan
aristocracy. Or the Roman plebeians made secession to the hill Mons sacer and
declared their social independence on the Roman nobility. Or the Tudor’s
Britain seceded from the community of the Roman Catholic churches and
turned to Anglican Protestantism confessing Puritan morals.
More obvious parallels link into one neat typological series the dark ages of
cultural decadence. Political thinkers that compare ours days to the Roman
Decadence, the Middles Ages and the Baroque Counter-Reformation perceive
several common traits. Most important is corporative ownership,
administrative decentralisation and a disintegration of national kingdoms into
regional counties. Such political philosophy is typical of medieval guelfism
that entrusted most political power to feudal magnates, bishops, prelates, rich
merchants and religious orders. Its most ardent supporters were clergy,
religious corporations, patricians, guilds and petty feudal princes who backed
up the pope against the king and the church against the state. Their oligarchic
reign brought them more freedom but serfs had to pay dearly for it by harder
bondage. Finally feudal disintegration broke medieval kingdoms into pieces
and merged them into one cosmopolitan realm of western Christianity bowing
down to the pope. Under his auspices the knights of all Europe joined holy
orders and engaged in holy crusades against Moslem infidels.
Ancient Roots
What medieval princes knew as the conflict between the secular investiture
nominating bishops by national kings and the ecclesiastic investiture ascribing
23
this privilege only to the pope, raged in Ancient Greece as the struggle
between µοναρχία and αριστοκρατία. The period of Great Colonisation (750600 BC) resembled the age of medieval crusaders in colonial expeditions,
administrative disintegration and political pluralism. Aristotle called its
political regime aristocracy because from 693 BC the king (archon) was
elected by the aristocratic council of Athens and he could rule only one year.
In the 6th century BC the tyrant Peisistratos attacked this aristocratic senate
called Areopagus with a crowd of highlanders and expelled the land-owning
aristocracy from the city. His age gave rise to the political systems of tyranny
(τυραννίς) that granted rulers an unlimited degree of autocratic power. Under
the reign of Pericles this political system mitigated to δηµοκρατία with a
limited amount of autocratic power granted to the highest military leader
strategos. Pericles was elected strategos several times but his official posts
were immaterial because he managed to influence Athenian politics only by
persuasive addresses to public gatherings (Thucydides, Xyngrafé 2, 65). The
decisive role in democracy was played by public gatherings (ekklesia) and
low-level parliamentarianism. Because the aristocratic senate Areopagus was
abused by Kimon’s oligarchy, in 462 the democratic leader Ephialtes turned it
into a judicial court and gave its competencies to the house of commons (búlé)
consisting of 400 to 500 members.
The Athenian aristocracy had its strongest institution in senatism as a type
of high parliamentarianism relying on hereditary life-time membership and
aristocratic birth. Its Areopagus functioned like the British House of Lords and
its main ambition was to paralyse the central authorities of state by protecting
the interests and economic independence of rich land-owners. The Athenian
democracy took efforts to weaken its influence and replace it by public
gatherings and parliaments similar to the British House of Common. It
attempted to establish participative democracy (or ‘representative
democracy’) with tribunes elected by public gatherings and paid money for
their parliamentary work. They strengthened centralised authorities and
supported them in their radical social reforms.
In 404/3 BC the democratic constitution of Athens was removed by the
oligarchy (ολιγαρχία) whose main concern was to abolish public gatherings
and exclude common people from political life. The new oligarchs revived the
aristocratic senate Areopagus as a tool of diminishing the political influence of
central administration by intricate decision-making in parliamentary
assemblies. They recruited private armies importing slaves from colonies and
founded their riches on slaves’ work exploited in large manufactures
(ergasterion). Athens became a multinational cosmopolis inhabited by
numerous throngs of immigrants (perioikoi) who hustled at its outskirts and
specialised in money exchange. The common craftsmen and shop-keepers as
24
pillars of the Athenian egalitarian democracy went bankrupt because they were
unable to compete with rich oligarchs employing cheap immigrants and slaves.
In a few years the egalitarian social structure split into the unemployed poor
people and the new oligarchs living as rich magnates at their courts with suites
of servants, bodyguards and poets. Aristotle (Athen. Pol.) esteemed oligarchy
as the most appropriate political system but his classification of monarchy,
aristocracy, tyranny, democracy and oligarchy is valid up to our days.
The transition from democracy to oligarchy in Athens set an excellent
example of what befell our western society on the passage from W. Brandt and
H. Wilson’s era to R. Reagan and M. Thatcher’s epoch. All post-war poor
economies cherished utopian socialist dreams and egalitarian ideas needed for
peaceful reconstruction but when they turned into rich well-to-do societies,
they reached a point of decadence when a new conservative aristocracy seized
all the economic and political power and took possession of all national and
public property. The Thatcherite economic reforms have started a long cycle of
private corporative economy and our choice is between two political
strategies. One politics follows Xenophon who fought with his private army in
the services of new oligarchs and monarchs while the other follows
Demosthenes and Eubulos who adjusted the democratic program to the needs
of post-democracy suitable for the dark days of Athenian decadence.
The Golden and Dark Ages
The causes of political organisation should not be sought in the free will of
sovereigns and their subjects but in the economic distribution of material
wealth. Ovid remembered the ancient times of common ownership as a golden
age (aurea proles) abounding in prosperity, political stability and peace. He
could see its live model in Pax Romana, in peaceful welfare established in the
Roman Empire by Augustus. His descendant Nero might symbolise its
opposite, the silvern age (argentea proles) described as a period of hectic
decadence, fashionable life and baroque luxury. Similarly, the medievals
distinguished ‘bright centuries‘ (saeculum clarum) of prosperous royal
absolutism and ‘dark centuries‘ (saeculum obscurum) of papal theocracy and
‘warring princes‘. Table 4 records their periodic returns in even and odd
centuries as the reigns of the autarcheum (renaissance syndrome) and the
oligarcheum (decadence syndrome).
The inner cause of their perpetual alternation (Bartošek 1988: 197) lies in
what was known to the ancients as the conflict between public ownership
(ager publicus) and private ownership (res privatae). Public ownership in
totalities must be protected by economic strategies of protectionism close to J.
M. Keynes’s New Deal or French dirigisme. Private ownership in pluralities
25
must be supported by free-trade strategies in the wake of A. Smith’s
liberalism. Most theorists assume that mankind must firmly pursue one ethical
ideal of inner organisation, but economics and statistic econometry tell a
different story: there is no social growth without changing social values,
political elites and economic strategies, there is no progress without clockwise
revolutions and circular reforms. State interventions must obey the market and
carry out reforms in accord with economic trends in the world.
Much of our present-day political vocabulary becomes clearer when we
elucidate modern terms in past historical situations and establish valid parallels
between ancient, medieval and modern political systems. The diagram in Table
4 demonstrates that deep economic crises periodically transform autarchies
into oligarchies and replace peaceful national kingdoms by expansive
empires. Every autarcheum consists of one culminating rise preceded by one
ascendent cycle and one descendent cycle of social growth. Every
oligarcheum looks like a cluster of three valleys where the deepest valley is
preceded by a defensive oligarchy and followed by an offensive oligarchy.
Defensive oligarchies exhibit a high degree of territorial disintegration and
their administrative decentralisation requires political regionalism. On the
other hand, offensive empires pass from administrative regionalism to new
integration and display new totalitarian tendencies that rely on the military
strength of the army and the strong authoritative state. Their offensive
ambitions usually result in global conquests and destructive wars.
Most oligarchies start their reign with violent overthrows and regimes of
authoritative dictatorship but after privatisations and seizing the economic
power, they usually incline to pluralistic senatism. The latter is remarkable
for a free competition of political parties and high parliamentarianism that
makes use of lobbyist practices, electoral sponsorship, bribing voters and
limitations of census. Economic liberalisation leads to a fast differentiation of
wealth, on one hand there are unemployed masses and on the other hand rich
upstarts with new estates of doubtful origin. The mechanisms of social
mobility drive the poor immigrants from colonies into the cosmopolis and the
rich capital from cosmopolis into the underdeveloped barbaricum. This
circulation of money and working force leads to the syndrome of globalisation
and colonial expansion. Since the deepening crisis and overpopulation foster
hunger for new land and this cannot be procured without strong military
empires, most oligarchies wage expansive wars and their inhabitants depart as
colonists to settle in overseas countries. These economic pressures cause
imperial crusaderism, global expansion, territorial colonisations and sacred
wars that conquer a new Promised Land. Victorious military campaigns are
followed by an exodus of emigrants that relieves the settled population in old
homes and brings longed-for peace.
26
-1270 Minoan autarchy
-1260
Melampus astrology
-1250
-1240
ascendent
-1230
Theseus’ synoikismos
autarchism
-1220
Age of Heracles
-1210
-1200
Calchas astrology
-1190
Troyan War
-1180
-1170 MYCENEAN AUTARCHEUM
-1160
Orestes empire
-1150
Peloponnesos almost united
-1140
descendent
-1130
autarchism
-1120
-1110
-1100 Dorian conquest
-1090 1104
-1080
Ionian
-1070
protestation
-1060
king Kodros
Kodros astrology
-1050
offensive crusaderism
-1040
Ionians beaten and expelled
-1030
Ionian colonisation
-1020
-1010
Glaukos ritualism
-1000
-990
DORIAN OLIGARCHEUM
-980
Messenian serfdom accomplished
-970
-960
Isthmios ritualism
-950
-940
Lykurgos Constitution
-930
offensive senatism
-920
-910
-900
destructive wars
-890
-880
-870
27
-860
-850
-840
-830
Homeric
-820
Renaissance
-810 Spartan renascence
Telecles’
Age of Hesiodos
-800
absolutism
-790
Messenian
Hesiodos decadence
-780
independence
Eumelos theocracy
-770
-760 SPARTAN AUTARCHEUM
-750
Messenian protestation
-740
1st Messenian war
-730
-720
-710
-700
Religious revival
-690
2nd Messenian war
Terpandros, Klonas
-680
Thaletas, Alkman
-670
offensive
-660
senatism
Spartan counter-reformation
-650
Great Colonisation
-640
aristocratic constitutions
-630
-620
Drakon‘s
Epimenides mysticism
-610
oligarchy
-600
-590
Solon’s social reforms
Milesian physicalism
-580
tyrannies flourishing
-570
Anaximenes
Ferekydes mysticism
-560
materialism
-550
Peisistratos Academy
-540 Peisistratos reformation
-530 and his absolutism
-520
Athenian Onomakritos Orphism
ascendent
-510
protestantism?
autarchism
-500
ATHENEAN
Pythagoreanism
-490
AUTARCHEUM
-480
Kimon‘s oligarchy
Persian wars
-470
Pythagorean
Eleatic idealism
-460
counter-reformation
28
Sophist Encyclopaedism
-450 Pericles
descendent
Anaxagoras, Hyllas
-440 democracy
autarchism
Prodikos, Protagoras
-430 Pericles
-420 reformation
-410
Socratic idealism
-400
oligarchies
mystics
-390
ascending - Kritias oligarchy 404
-380
Dionysios oligarchy
-370
Plato‘s metaphysics
-360
Plato’s utopia
-350
Demosthenes
Speusippos
-340
defensive senatism
Academism
-330
-320
popular
Alexander‘s wars
-310
reformation
Macedonian absolutism
-300
Hellenism
-290
Alexandrian philology
-280
Filetas, Zenodotos, Simmias,
-270 Stoics
Kallimachos, Aratos and
-260
Eratosthenes
-250
-240
-230
Kleomenes, Agis
Stoicist decadence
-220
Spartan reformation
-210
Punnic
Analogism
HELLENISTIC
-200
Wars
AUTARCHEUM
Aristophanes of Byzantium
-190
Aristarchos of Samos
-180
-170
-160
Anomalism: Krates
-150
Dionysios Thrax
-140
-130 Gracchus
-120 agrarian reforms
-110
-100
Sulla‘s oligarchy
-90
Cicero‘s Stoicism &
-80
ROMAN
conservative ritualism
-70
OLIGARCHEUM
-60
offensive
Ciceronian senate
-50
senatism
29
-40 ascendent autarchism
-30 Augustus
-20 Pax Romana literary elegism
Tibullus, Propertius
-10
Ovidius Naso
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
110
120
130
140
150
160
170
180
190
200
210
220
230
240
250
260
270
280
290
300
310
320
330
340
350
360
Varro’s encyclopaedism
Virgil’s humanism
Christian protestation
Pliny’s
comparativism
Seneca‘ stoicism
Nero
mystics
counter-reformation
offensive
Christians
senatism
persecuted
Traianus centralism
Fronto‘s
Second Sophistics
Plutarchos
comparativism
ROMAN
AUTARCHEUM
Hadrianus
descendent
autarchism
Aurelian’s inquisition
persecuting Christians
Christian
Tertullian’s
theology
Montanism
Plotinus
mysticism
Gallienus oligarchy & Thirty Tyrants
colonate feudalism
defensive regionalism
Nonnius
Nemesianus
bagauds’
Diocletianus
protestation
ascending autarchism
Christians
GALLIC AUTARCHISM
persecuted
Donatists’
Constantin’s Christian reformation
protestation
Constantin’s culminating absolutism
pagans
persecuted
emperor Constans persecutes Arianism
30
370
380
390
400
410
420
430
440
450
460
470
480
490
500
510
520
530
540
550
560
570
580
590
600
610
620
630
640
650
660
670
680
690
700
710
720
730
740
750
760
770
Ambrosian mysticism
Ambrosian Theocracy
Holy Fathers: Hieronymus, St. Augustine, Prudentius
Neo-Platonism: Hypatia, Synesios
defensive regionalism
Hunnish conquest, Atilla defeated 450
ascending autarchism
Theodorich
GOTHIC AUTARCHEUM
king of Ostrogoths
Germanic kingdoms of Visigoths,
Ostrogoths and Anglo-Saxons
strong state bureaucracy & centralism
emperor Iustinianus
BYZANTINE AUTARCHEUM
senate opposition weakened
Gregorian theocracy
Gregorian
counter-reformation
Cassiodorus
Fulgentius
Augustine sent to baptise
Anglo-Saxon kings
offensive missionarism as a
weaker form of crusaderism
Sergius monotheletism
Arabs conquer Damaskos 635, Jerusalem 637,
Persia 640 and North Africa 640-710
Leonine theocracy, pope Leon II’s Liber pontificalis
Willibrord missionarism in Frisia
defensive regionalism
Karl Martell & Pipin’s
military expeditions
politic reintegration
Petrus Pisanus
31
780
Schola palatina
790
800
CARLOVINGIAN
Alcuin, Diaconus
810
AUTARCHEUM
Paulinus, Eginhart
820
830
840
Auvergne scholastics
850
Auxerre scholastics
860
870
880
Auvergne
Normans conquer Normandy
890
counter-reformation
NORMAN OLIGARCHEUM
900
Odon de Cluny‘s
910
religious ascetism
920
930
940
plague 941-2
defensive regionalism
950
960 Otto I proclaimed Roman caesar
Ottonian Renascence
970
ascendent autarchism
Eckehart, Hroswitha
980
Gerbert
990
OTTONIAN AUTARCHEUM
1000
1010
1020
1030
Fulbert
1040
Patararian
Notker Labeo protestation
1050
1060
Roscellinus
1070
emperor Henry IV
nominalism
1080
descendent autarchism
1090
1st crusade to Jerusalem 1096
1100
offensive crudaderism
1110
Anselmian
1120
counter-reformation
1130
Bernard de Clairvaux
1140
mysticism
1150
1160
Waldenses
1170
Albigenses
1180
32
1190
NORMAN OLIGARCHEUM
1200
1210
Simon of Montfort’s crusade against Albigenses
1220
Magna Charta Libertatum 1215
1230
offensive senatism Dominican inquisition
1240
scholastics
1250
1260
Simon of Montfort’s
St. Thomas scholastics
1270
rebellions
1280
Duns Scotus
1290
scholastics
1300
1310
1320
Avignon papacy
Occamist
1330
Hundred
experimental science
1340
Years’ War Law‘s mysticism
1350
meditation
1360 AVIGNON
Wycliffite
1370 AUTARCHEUM
Reformation
1380
1390
Gerson‘s scholastics
1400
1410
1420
Hundred
1430
Years’ War
1440
1450
1460
Grand
1470
Rhetoricians
1480
1490
Innocenc VIII‘s
1500
inquisition
Humanism
1510
1520 Anglican
1530 Lutheran
WEST-EUROPEAN
AUTARCHEUM
1540 protestation
Trident inquisition
1550
1560 Hugenot
1570 protestation
1580
Molinist inquisition
1590
33
1610
A. Waldstein’s expansive crusaderism
1620
SPANISH OLIGARCHEUM
1630
Thirty
1640
Years’s offensive senatism
1650
War
1660
1670
Restoration absolutism
1680
1690
Fenelon kvietism
1700
Berkeley solipsism
1710
Montesquieu sociologism
1720
1730
churchyard meditation
1740
ascendent
metaphysics
1750
autarchism
Encyclopaedist
1760 CENTRAL-EUROPEAN
ENLIGHTMENT
Science
1770 AUTARCHEUM
French
Volney ideologues
1780
revolution
1790
Payne‘s concept
Schelling mystics
1800
of human emancipation
1810
Comtean positivism
1820
1830
Junghegelianer
Schopenhauer metaphysics
1840
1850
Spencerian evolutionism
1860
descendent autarchism
1870
Durkheim/Masaryk realism
1880
Nietzsche
1890
Einstein relativism
metaphysics
1900
Sorokin sociologism
1910
1920 expansive
1930 crusaderism
Heidegger metaphysics
1940
Adorno empirism
1950
1960
Foucault rupturism
1970
Derrida metaphysics
1980
1990 offensive
philosophy of
2000 senatism
corporative pluralism
human rights
Table 4. Cultural cycles of human evolution
34
The Past and the Present
Table 4 helps to define our historical situation as the second act of the
historical drama occurring in all dark ages of cultural crises. The Modern Age
1873/1896-1946 and the Post-Modern Age 1997-2040 represent two cycles of
a cultural oligarcheum remarkable for private corporative economy that is
dominated by powerful oligopolies and rich corporations. The post-war era
interrupted this period by tendencies to state-controlled strategies, economic
planning and centralised national states but it was only a transient and
temporary phase determined by the needs of post-war reconstruction. Though
the western civilisation has replaced constitutional monarchies by
republicanism and state religions by secular political ideology, its cultural
thought bears still clear marks of a religious conservative revival comparable
to the Baroque Counter-Reformation. It stands a couple of decades or centuries
ahead of underdeveloped countries but it clearly manifests tendencies to their
Islamic theocracies, sacred jihads and Moslem fundamentalism. Its prophets
are Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida who gave Europe a religion without
gods and metaphysics free of theology. Conservative irrationalism infected
also sciences, philosophy and art. The political strategies of democratic parties
have therefore been confined to programs similar to ideas of Jansenism. Its
gist consists in continuing the rational principles of the Hugenot, Jansenist and
Cartesian science in the period when new Molinists, Jesuits and Oratorians
revived a sort of doctrinal scholastics and kindle fundamentalist intolerance.
The present-day historical situation may be classified as a phase of
defensive senatism, a syndrome of administrative centralisation and high
parliamentarianism with highly-developed parliamentary procedures. Many
observers identify this syndrome with ’democracy’ but forget that it lacks any
remains of low-level democracy, institutes of popular tribunes and public
gatherings. Our philosophy of human rights bears much resemblance to ideas
of Magna charta libertatum (1215) that granted great privileges of freedom to
feudal and religious corporations. It was passed by the rebellious AngloNorman barons as their constitution ensuring them independence upon the
king John Lackland and his court. Feudal privileges gave wide liberties to
lords, knights and orders but forgot to relieve serfs of their toil. Weakened
royal authority could not prevent barons from abusing them as the rights to
conquer, plunder and enslave the free peasant communities. Plundering had to
be disguised by the religious motifs of ardent Catholic orthodoxy.
Fundamentalist preachers united in the Dominican order and summoned trials
of secret inquisition to persecute heretic sects. They incited crusaders to
punitive expeditions and gave blessing to their suppressing the Staudinger
peasants’ rebellion in 1233. In 1209 Arnold de Citeaux led a crusade against
35
the Albigensian heretics that resulted in massacring and plundering prosperous
and thriving Provence. One of the first crusades (1096) was led by Pierre de
Amiens and culminated by Anti-Semitic pogroms in the Rhineland. The fourth
crusade in 1204 ended by ravaging temples in Byzantium.
The nature of defensive senatism may be elucidated by the movement of
regionalism and pluralistic pragmatism (James 1909) at the threshold of the
20th century. The French fin-de-siècle resembled our times in a hot fever of
financial speculation and an avalanche of financial falls that made banking
houses go bankrupt in dozens. At that time the German Heimatkunst and the
French movement Action Française celebrated administrative decentralisation
and defended provincial life only in order to pass to offensive nationalist
propaganda in the 30s. A similar type of enthusiasm about différance and
pluralité associates J.-F. Lyotard’s post-modernism and W. James’ pluralistic
pragmatism. Modern regionalism in Italy and Yugoslavia wants federal states
to crumble into pieces, detach small regions from backward provinces and join
them directly with America’s sphere. However, pluralism and totalitarianism
are only two successive phases of corporative economy on its development
from small corporations to big oligopolies. The transition from defensive
pluralistic disintegration to the integrative incubation phase of offensive state
monopolies takes several decades. Their need to expand abroad can be
satisfied only by a wedding with a strong military empire inviting tenders and
orders to armament industries.
The modern freedom of enterprise brought liberty and luxury only to a
narrow caste of noveaux riches but it condemned to new poverty people from
the Third World. Citizens were granted an ingenious bundle of human rights
(secrecy of bank deposits, the right not to be identified by identity cards,
personal data protected) but these ingenuities only cater to desires of economic
criminality. When we take an oath to democracy, what we actually mean is
plutocracy where the mass-media magnate Silvio Berlusconi can buy TV
channels, votes, juries and governments and where lobbyism allows
corporations to bribe senators, countries, Security Council, UNO’s decisions as
well as foreign armies. The liberty of bribery, corruption and speculation
hardly ever sets free common citizens, it only codifies the rule of ‘black law’
and criminal mafias in societies with ‘black economy’. Every social movement
in history had its own political slogans, freedoms and human rights but until
we are able to decipher their denotative relation to a definite system of law,
morals, manners, economic values and the ruling distribution of wealth, we are
hardly more than victims of ideological illusions of our own epoch.
Political rights change as dynamic variables dependent on the economic
power. Like the poor plebs in Ancient Rome, the modern working-classes can
enjoy panis et ludi alongside with other privileges of social welfare but their
36
economic position has become negligible and futile. Their role was occupied
by the Gastarbeiter underdogs from underdeveloped countries, so they can
choose between the army of homeless loafers or go abroad and glean oil fields
in the Middle East in hopes to become members of new aristocracy in
prospective colonies. Every dark age brings into existence a new empire
concentrated around a new cosmopolis and this has now moved its centre to
New York. The role of its allies has been ascribed to the western countries that
serve their lords as ardently as Italicum, Hispania and Gallia to their Roman
subjugators. The new worldwide empire grants them senatorships in the
Roman senatus as well as a proportionate portion of prey seized in overseas
expeditions. East-European countries resemble Germanic infantry in Roman
legions: they would like a nibble of prey but their ranks file them in the lower
category of soldiers of fortune
Categories of Political Regimes
Political sciences cannot speak in metaphoric similes and biblical parables
but require firm foundations based on a firm taxonomic network of technical
terms sheltering valid theoretical categories. Cultural periodicity provides our
considerations with large samples of comparable data that may be set up into
periodic tables arraying classes of similar phenomena. The important point is
not to concentrate on isolated events but study recurrent processes associated
with cycles of demographic and economic growth. No process takes an
identical course because every historical situation has clad it with different
material substance. There are no equal political bodies but all societies move
forth in similar rises and falls, in similar directional tendencies representable
as algebraic vectors. Such tendencies may accelerate, speed up or slow down,
tide and ebb but their course is always a resultant of multiple internal and
external pressures vibrating in rhythmic oscillation in various geographic
zones. Cultural history looks like a complex process filled with haphazard
deeds of accidental personalities, but when seen from the bird’s eye view on
historical maps, its course exhibits regular patterns. Culture makes progress as
if governed by an inner historical clock hidden in the peristaltic contractions
of the bowels of worldwide booms and crises. People can slow down their
pace or accelerate them by rational reforms, but however violent interventions
they might exert, they can never disturb and change their inner rhythm for a
longer time.
Political history revolves in periodic cycles from centralistic absolutism to
pluralistic decentralisation according to different types of public ownership.
Totalities are associated with the original state of undivided common or public
ownership while pluralities presuppose private property owned by magnates
37
and big corporations. Totalities bring periods of lucky utopias when society
enjoys rapid peaceful development and high prosperity, whereas pluralities are
typical of rich stagnating societies full of luxury, decadence and wars. Table 5
depicts elementary types of social structures as constructions in an abstract 2dimensional ‘social space’ defined by parameters of height and breadth. The
horizontal axis x expresses the index of polyverticality conceived as the
number of peaks per breadth exhibited by the members‘ base. The vertical axis
y indicates the degree of economic differentiation between elites and common
masses and the height of the ruling social hierarchy. According to the number
of towers and excrescences, societies may be classified as totalities, dualities,
tripartities and pluralities. A totality tends to have one central dominant peak
sloping down into wide lower floors. Dualities have two vertices with steep
towers and tripartities have three distinct towers of lesser height. A plurality
is a convenient name for a roof structure with many high peripheral towers but
a low depressed centre. The equality (egalité) may be defined as a low
structure with a wide base, low peaks and slowly sloping roofs. It is an ideal
social model of left-wing ideologies looking like a cone compressed from a
low central peak down to the low broad base.
hierarchicity
axis y
duality
totality
plurality
totality
axis x
plurality
equality
equality
Table 5. Types of social structures in a ‘social space’
Revising elementary categories of political sciences primarily means their
revisiting in such a way that every term applied fits all of its periodic
occurrences in cultural and political history. Many commonplace terms
(democracy, oligarchy, totality, bureaucracy) are so plagued by incorrect usage
that we have to prefer new coinage to their tedious redefinitions. In order to
avoid redundant words, one terms is used for (1) a class, (2) its dominant
political reign, (3) the short-term period of its reign and (4) a longer term of its
historical dominance.
38
ELEMENTARY TYPES OF REGIMES
Democy: (1) The social classes of crafsmen, artisan townsfolk, countryside
peasantry, modern working-class and imported slaves. (2) The Protestant reign
of common people in populist regimes, a popular government of peasants’
communities, civic society or public majority applying the institution of ‘direct
democracy’. Direct democracies imply a rule of public councils and popular
tribunes elected by public gatherings (Greek ekklesia, Roman comitia,
medieval urban communes).
Aularchy: (1) The social class of state bureaucracy (clerks, police, scribes in
the Egyptian Old Kingdom, French légistes and gens de robe, Chinese fa-ti)
subordinated to a strong centralistic ruler. (2) A centralised totalitarian rule of
state bureaucracy with the decisive role of one strong absolutist ruler.
Oligarchy: (1) The social class of the private well-to-do magnates, patricians,
bankers and feudal princes. (2) A decentralised rule of independent feudal
princes, land-owning magnates and supra-national corporations centred in
scattered decentralised regions. It is a system of decentralised administration
that guarantees great liberties to rich magnates at cost of a new serfdom
inflicted upon the common people. It represents an economical model where a
small elite minority of owners possesses the majority of land and controls the
decisive amount of land, financial capital or productive means.
Autarchy: (1) A civic, popular and national self-government that combines in
different ratios into one ruling coalition the centralised state aularchy and
popular democy. These two arms of autocracy join their efforts in order to
weaken the strength of the privileged upper classes (magnates, corporations
and private owners). Its basic precondition is a strong sector of the state (royal)
ownership completed by high rates of the public and the civic sector.
Autarcheum: (1) A three-cycle period of ‘golden age’ consisting of periods of
an ascendent, culminating and descendent autarchy. Its phenomenon may be
illustrated on Augustan Rome, Charlemagne’s empire, Renaissance and
Enlightment. The immense bloom of rapid economical development is
accompanied by flourishing arts and sciences. The popular national
reformation allows protestant states to emancipate from under the rule of
strong empires and liberate from their financial and military hegemony. (2) A
ring of peripheral national protestant states that have united in their anticolonialist resistance against the dominant world empires (Protestant states in
North Europe united against the popes in Amiens and Rome, the
underdeveloped third world after the post-war decolonisation).
Ascendent autarchy starts with a syndrome of national reformation
characterised by a strong predominance of the centralised state bureaucracy
(renaissance, enlightment) and aims at a strong secular state.
39
Descendent autarchy is remarkable for a decay of state centralism, growing
role of the consumers’ society, the dominant role of public democy and the
strong influence of trade unions (Athens under Pericles, Rome under the
Antonins, the 19th century positivism).
Oligarcheum: (1) a three-cycle period of a ’dark age’ dominated by the rule of
great empires (Sparta, Roman Empire, Habsburgs’ Spain, British Empire). (2)
The heartland of large colonial empires comprising the central cosmopolis and
the surrounding megalopolis of satellite states.
HISTORICAL TYPES OF AUTARCHY.
Tyrannís: The ancient Greek form of autarchy based upon the reign of a strong
sovereign ruler supported by popular gatherings and direct democracy.
Ghibellin monarchy: A medieval type of autarchy applying an exclusive
sovereign position of the monarch with an exclusive role of courtiers in the
court administration and the authorities of the royal town.
Absolutism: A New Age autarchy in large agrarian kingdoms with a strong
ruler supported by strong state bureaucracy and protestant national church.
HISTORICAL TYPES OF OLIGARCHY.
Crusaderism: A type of global expansionism under the pretext of a ‘saint
war’, conquests of monks’ and knights’ orders and soldiers of fortune haunted
by religious fanaticism against infidels and heathens.
Senatism: (1) A strong rule of ‘high parliamentarianism’ with a strong senate
opposition that kindles resistance against the central royal power. The
aristocratic senate of lords functions as an instrument defending the interests of
the richest land-owning magnates (aristocratic rule of areopagus in Classic
Athens, Roman senate under Cicero, the Magna Charta Libertatum granting
feudal rights, the British House of Lords under Queen Victoria, the postmodern age and its idea of human rights). (2) A type of aristocratic
constitutions granting liberties to rich oligarchy (Lykúrgos’ reform of
aristocratic constitution in Sparta, Magna charta libertatum passed under the
Anglo-Norman king John the Lackland in 1215).
Regionalism: A model of a scattered decentralised theocratic empire with
many independent counties and strong local rulers.
Dominion: An early extensive type of oligarcheum where the military power
acquired a huge formal control of neighbouring countries but it managed to
enforce its hegemony only by collecting a symbolic tribute.
Theocracy: A rule of religious corporations and divine clergy that have
absorbed the land possession of the local yeomanry and peasantry to such an
extent that they subdued peasants’ communities to serfdom.
40
NEO-LIBERAL MONETARISM: Political Economy
Parallels in Economic History
Politics is only one of tools enabling people to regulate the process of
demographic and economic growth. Society is an untameable animal exerting
its natural vital and spontaneous energy and politicians may act as its
charioteers only in so far as they sufficiently understand its nature. The
dynamics of economic growth incessantly transforms the masses of its
participants and requires exchanging economic elites according to its varying
values and needs. Varying values change the social and cultural atmosphere
like fashions in popular music and every fashion heaves up with its own young
generation of fans. Although people are hardly ever aware of their propagation
and influence, such moods influence also the choice of ruling elites in arts,
politics, science and all spheres of cultural life.
People exchange ruling cabinets and political parties because they
disappointed their expectation and do not notice they all surf on waves of
social fashions and economic trends. They do not realise that their fall was
caused by their inability to catch up with changing economic moods and the
latest cultural vogues. They behave in politics as subconsciously as illiterate
savages act in their everyday life. They give an emotional and irrational
response to economic crises by carrying out revolutions, rebellions and
overthrows without understanding deeper economic causes of their discontent.
They do not realise that their political activities assist economic growth and
help to free the flux of the historical river grinding out new riverbeds.
The modern philosophy of history has made a great progress in the minute
description of social and economic cycles. These are of greater interest for
everyday politics and cultural studies than long-term ‘modes of production‘
and ‘economic formations’. Much work in this field has been done by the
Russian Menshevik school (N. D. Kondratyev, S. Kuznets) founded by
Kerensky’s political advisor Pitirim Sorokin. R. K. Merton (1967) was
probably his most prominent disciple after leaving Russia and reading lectures
at American universities. Their team studied the periodicity of economic crises
as a clue to ‘the dynamic cycles of cultural history’ (Sorokin 1939) and
inspired researchers who found their reflection also in ‘cycles of aesthetic
taste’ (F. P. Chambers 1939). In Germany this direction of macroeconomic
research pursued a new field of studies called Konjunkturforschung (Spiethoff
1923, 1955; Schlumpeter 1912, 1939). After the war it turned attention to the
social causes and the history of working-class masses (Jürgen Kuczynsky).
In the post-war American macroeconomic studies the most admirable
results were achieved also by the ’growth school’ (W. Rostow 1962, R. E.
41
Lucas, B. Reich, J. Rifkin) that concentrated on shifting economic elites in
periodic cycles of economic booms. A huge upsurge of exact methods brought
about a revolution in modern statistic sociometry (Adolf Cost, J. L. Moreno).
Sociometry focused on contemporary social groups but econometry (Ragnar
Frisch) and demometry could apply statistic methods also to historical growth.
Waves of rise (prosperity) and decline (decay) in economic production
repeat in cycles of definite but variable length. Economic booms are known to
succeed in ascendant cycles followed by descendent crises. Kitchin’s cycle
lasts 4 months, Juglar’s 7-10 years, Kuznets’s 20 years and Kondratyev’s cycle
lasts half a century. C. Juglar’s ten-year cycle consists of several Kitchin’s
cycles corresponding to the successive phases of revitalisation, expansion,
boom, stagnation, depression and crisis. The rise of economic production takes
about five years, three years exhibit transient oscillation and two years display
a marked decay. Kuznets’s 20-year period is a chain of two Juglar’s cycles that
are split apart by a weak depression but closed into one block by two deeper
crises (S. Kuznets 1966, 1971).
Nikolai D. Kondratyev analysed the periodicity of long-term cycles with a
special emphasis on periods lasting five decades. His book Bolshiye cikly
konjunktury (1928) observed the first quinquagenarian cycle between
revolutions in 1789 and 1848 with an inflective point (vertex) in 1814. The
second cycle lasted from the boom 1844-1851 to the industrial era 1890-1896
with a point of inflexion in 1873. E. Souček developed his partial observations
on the cycle 1897-1945 and prolonged them to the post-war era 1947-1996 that
culminated in 1974 before the crisis in 1975-1976 announcing stagflation.
Such cycles can be traced easily in literary history and Kunstgeschichte as
development from utopian idyllic classicism to a sort of decadent romanticism.
Economic Cycles
Every boom shifts the focus of dynamic growth from one economic sphere
to another and throws people into the whirls of different economic strategies.
The first three booms in a bright age bring a rapid industrial growth that
accelerates agriculture, building industries and heavy engineering. After
transition to light industries and reaching the point of inflexion the curve
begins to descend. It begins to concentrate only on consumers’ goods and
services because best incomes flow from tourism, entertainment and finances.
The boom of consumers’ goods is ominous of an approaching economic
breakdown because it ends by a deep crisis and a syndrome of stagflation, a
long-term stagnation accompanied by high inflation. The market is saturated,
prices are rising but high unemployment lowers the economic demand. The
dirigiste planning has to be abandoned, state companies are privatised by huge
42
financial corporations and national economy heads for a new 50-year age of
corporative ownership. This cycle repeats a similar succession of booms with a
darker colouring and modifications due to higher macroeconomic tendencies.
The main types of 10-year cycles may be described as a sequel of several
productive strategies ensuring the cyclic rotation of the economic automaton.
As accumulation we may denote an agrarian boom that accumulates financial
capital in the hands of strong state owners and makes their investment flow
into costly public projects. Edification is a suitable term for a phase of
reconstructing the industrial basis, heavy machinery, engineering and factories.
It is regularly accompanied by ’a building fever’ bringing a boom of
construction activities. The third cycle consists in industrialisation, an
industrial boom turning from heavy machinery to light industries and electric
appliances. The consumption is a period of transition to producing consumers’
goods that results in ‘a consumption fever’ and a boom of cheap mass
production for working-classes. The last stage is stagflation, the saturated
economy is stagnating but ‘a speculative fever’ in finance and banking brings
enormous wealth to new financial elites. Traditional working classes suffer by
high unemployment and loose their status owing to the inflow of cheap
Gastarbeiter immigrants. The following survey of industrial cycles may be
verified on the historical diagram outlined in Table 6:
Accumulation (eunomy): low prices and wages, cheap working force, a wide
use of the unemployed and the homeless in hired armies carrying out state
labours on public buildings. A fast growth of agricultural production oriented
to ensure a state of self-sufficiency in food. Strengthening administrative
bureaucracy and centralistic mechanisms of state control in order to restrict
private owners and speculative business activities.
Edification (reconstruction phase, esthonomy): concentration on mining ores,
coal and raw materials, a fast growth of building industries, a reconstruction of
machine equipment in large factories, renovating machines in large companies,
utopian public projects, peasants’ cooperative farms founded.
Industrialisation (technonomy): a great boom of industrial production,
extensive development of industrial planning, stabilising the system of social
security and insurance for working-class masses and wide consumers’ masses.
Consumption (demonomy): a great boom in the production of consumers’
goods, industries focus on public masses, raise their wages and lower their
prices to increase sale. Their standard of living rises and their rights grow
thanks to trade unions and left-wing parties enforcing democratic rights.
Stagflation (plutonomy): a long-term stagnation of industrial production
accompanied by a rapid inflation, high prices of realties and consumers’ goods,
high unemployment and tough competition. Plutocratic elites concentrate on
advertisement, finances, banking and stockbrokers’ activities.
43
1826 ======== crisis in 1826-1829 ===
1827 the first wave of
PLUTOCRACY
1828 romanticism in 1826-9
STAGFLATION
1829
PLUTONOMY
1830 July revolution in 1830
a boom of
1831
financial speculation
1832
a long-term depression
1833
rapid inflation
1834
1835
1836 the second wave of romanticism
1837
1838 ======= crisis in 1837-1839 ======
1839 ====== demarchy ==============
1840
rural populism
1841
1842
ł EUNOMY
1843
ł
ACCUMULATION
1844
prosperity between 1844-1951
1845
agrarian boom
1846
EUCRACY: Communist utopianism
1847
========= agrarian crisis ======
1848 ===== REVOLUTION in 1848 ===== of 1847-1848 ======
1849
1850
ESTHOCRACY
1851
ESTHONOMY
1852
building boom
1853
EDIFICATION
1854
the Crimean War
1855
from 1854 to 1856
1856
Parnassism
1857 =========== crisis in 1857 =======
1858 attack on Napoleon in 1858
sentimental realism
1859 a war in Indo-China
1860 in 1858-62
liberalisation from 1860
1861 Mexican expedition 1861-7
INDUSTRIALISATION
1862
TECHNONOMY
1863
rapid industrial boom
1864
TECHNOCRACY
1865
technocratic administration
1866 =============== financial crisis in 1866 ========
44
1867 positivism & evolutionism
DEMARCHY: political liberalisation
1868 literary naturalism
CONSUMPTION
1869
DEMONOMY
1870
consumption boom
1871 == revolution in 1871 ==
Paris Commune
1872
1873 =============== crisis in 1873 ========
1874 MacMahon’s monarchism
1875 =============== depression in 1873-9 ======
1876
a long-term depression
1877 IDOLARCHY:
STAGFLATION
1878 monarchist traditionalism
European agrarian crisis
1879
from the 70’s till the 90’s
1880
a short-term rise
1881 the second wave of naturalism
a rise in 1878-1882
1882 impressionism
1883 =============== crisis in 1882-6 ======
1884 ==================
a deep crisis in America
1885 literary decadence
a boom of financial speculation
1886 boulangerism in 1886-1889
a long-term depression
1887
STAGFLATION
1888 literary symbolism
PLUTONOMY
1889
corruption, inflation and usury
1890 ======== militarchy =======
European crisis
1891
1892
monopolies blooming
1893
a bill protecting public health passed in 1893
1894
agrarian boom
1895
ACCUMULATION
1896
EUNOMY in corporative ownership
1897
social legislation
1898
Dreyfus’s affair
1899
10-hour working day for women and children
1900
1901
1902 ========== crisis in 1900-1903 =======
1903
anti-clerical laws passed by radicals between1902-4
1904
strikes for a 10-hour working day in 1905
1905
ESTHONOMY in corporative ownership
1906
EDIFICATION
unanimism
1907
a great rise in mining coal, ores and raw materials
45
1908
1909
1910
1911
1912
1913
1914
1915
1916
1917
1918
1919
1920
1921
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
1927
1928
1929
1930
1931
1932
1933
1934
1935
1936
1937
1938
1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1944
financial capital
exported abroad
TECHNOCRACY
TECHNONOMY
boom in armament industries
INDUSTRIALISATION
First World War in 1914-1918
cubism
new civilism
modernism
========== revolutionary wave in 1917 ==========
dadaism
short boom
high unemployment in 1920
inflation
high investments
inflation & devaluation
DEMONOMY
sociologism
CONSUMPTION
boom of consumers’ good
liberal consumerism
DEMARCHY: Social-Democratism
========== Great Depression ======
======= depression from overproduction ======= populism
the ascent of fascism
Idolarchy: TRADITIONALISM
long depression
conservative traditionalism
state corporativism
historical novel
PLUTONOMY
boom of armament industries
STAGFLATION
pre-totality stagflation is typical of lower prices
and greater state control
hermetism
agrarian boom
AGRARIANISM
war campaigns raging
pétainism
mass destruction
Militarchy: rule of generals and military leaders
most stagflation crises are ended by ‘sacred wars’
and colonial expansion
De Gaulle’s government of national resistance
46
1945
programs of nationalising industries
1946
reforms of social insurance
1947
======= aularchy =======
1948 1948
Monnet’s 4-year plan in 1946-1950
1949
ACCUMULATION
1950
EUNOMY
1951
high investments into reconstructing industries
1952
EUCRACY: post-war communism
1953
1954
ESTHOCRACY: social civilism
nouveau roman
1955
ESTHONOMY
phenomenalism
1956
EDIFICATION – Rueff’s plan
1957
sanative reconstruction of flats and public housing
1958
financial catastrophe in 1958
1959
Algerian crisis
theatre of the absurd
1960
poésie quotidinienne
1961
civilism
1962
4th national plan 1962-1967
1963 ==================== Europe building crisis in 1963 ===
1964
programs of social insurance
1965 formalism
INDUSTRIALISATION
1966 structuralism
industrial crisis in 1966
1967 generative grammar
French riots
1968
students’ strikes in 1968 ============
1969
economic planning abandoned
1970 Maoism
1971 Tel Quel
CONSUMPTION
1972 sociologism
DEMONOMY
1973
consumers’ society
1974
boom of consumers’ goods
1975
Brandt’s Sozialmarktwirtschaft
1976 consumption crisis in 1976-7 ============================
1977 rising prices
1978 higher unemployment
1979 punk
Thatcherism
1980 skinheads
PLUTONOMY
historising
1981
STAGFLATION
traditionalism
1982
long-term depression
ecologism
1983
privatisations of state companies
postmodernism
1982
PLUTOCRACY: rule of rich countries
1983 Le Pen’s Front National
47
1984 New Age
rapid inflation
1985 fatalism
Reagan’s armament
1986 apocalyptic postmodernism
military boom
1987 catastrophism
militarchy
1988 deconstructed metaphysics
1989 free market devaluates weaker currencies
1990 Eastern revolutions
STAGFLATION
1991 irrationalism
speculative boom
1992 hermetism
foreign capital
1993 occultism
in great want
1994 anarchism
high criminality
1995 MYSTARCHY:
and corruption
1996 new sectarianism
1997 ==== plutarchy ==== a crisis of capital investments in 1997
1998
EUCRACY: T. Blair’s New Labour
1999
. EUNOMY in corporative ownership
2000 .
. ACCUMULATION?
2001
Blair’s Third Way
new classicism
2002
or New Labour
new syndicalism
2003
new anticlericalism
2004 ====== agrarian crisis? ======
2005
2006
.
political models of Clemenceau’s Radical Party in France
2007
.
liberalism in analogy to Lloyd George’s Liberal Party
2008
. . EDIFICATION
2009
ESTHONOMY
2010
. . big monopolies and oligopolies fusing
2011
globalist expansion
2012
fast-growing armament
2013
ESTHOCRACY: new fashionable society
2014 ====== crisis in building activities? ====
Table 6. Industrial cycles of economic growth in France
The Perspectives of Neo-Liberal Monetarism
The post-war economic theory has undergone a series of dramatic
alterations revising Keynesian theoretical doctrines. John Maynard Keynes
devised them to provide Roosevelt’s New Deal with an efficient tool of state
control and interventions regulating private businesses. Modern economists
abandoned the Keynesian ideal of ‘wage and price rigidity‘ guarded by the
48
state (Hall, Taylor 1986: 324) and adhered to the ideal of ‘free market’
worshipped by the Chicago School. In the mid-70s the Chicago Boys were
commissioned to recover the ailing economy in Chile and erase remains of
Allende’s Socialist Protectionism based on state control and planning. Since
they emphasised monetary tools as a means to keep a well-balanced state
budget, their views became known as New Monetarism. President Ronald
Reagan took up their ideas and integrated them into the economic program of
his ‘Reaganomics’. New Monetarism won overwhelming victories also in
other countries but few budgets managed to keep balanced assets without
debits and deficits.
A similar course of reforms took place in Britain after the defeat of H.
Wilson’s Labour Party in 1979. Margaret Thatcher declared war on trade
unions and started privatising the national state-owned economy created by the
post-war socialist cabinets. Her privatisations seemed to confirm the dark
visions of F. A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom about the twilight of totalitarian
utopianism. The ‘invisible hand’ of free market began to erode social
egalitarianism and backed up the claims of private ownership inviolable by the
state. When J. Major’s cabinet lost elections, T. Blair’s New Labour found
Thatcherite reforms irreversible. In a few years they spread to the EastEuropean Post-Communist countries and China managed to avoid them only
by letting them pop in through a backyard door in a Marxist disguise.
Most economists adopt a normative approach to economic thought and
interpret every economic reform as an ultimate uprooting of an erroneous
model by a correct one. They consider socialist protectionism and capitalist
liberalism as abstract opposites without noticing their mutual transitions and
periodic returns. They fail to see their dynamic alternations in evolutionary
development and in a wide scale of economic strategies rotating in circular
cycles. Such evolutionary economic conception was formulated by Kennedy’s
advisor Walt Rostow in his ‘non-Communist manifest’ The Stages of Growth
(1962). Rostow maintained that it is not possible to reduce economic strategies
to one stale doctrine and cling to one everlasting standard without adapting to
new dynamic tendencies. Cultural progress proceeds through a series of lawful
’stages of growth’ repeating recurrent cycles. Every long-term cycle starts with
protectionist nationalisation and ends with liberal privatisation. In Table 6 it
consists from periods of booms separated by reforms dictated by crises.
When we project protectionism and liberalism on a wider macroeconomic
screen, we may classify them as types of cooperative and corporative
economy. Communist regimes carried out reforms similar to C. Attlee’s
nationalisations and expropriated religious orders in the same way as Henry
VIII in the years of the Anglican reformation. Such nationalisations are
indispensable after years of criminal plundering when governments have to
49
redistribute stolen property and return it to its original owners. Agrarian
reforms bring a rapid egalitarian redistribution of land but subsequent socialist
governments start a long-term development resulting in new privatisations.
Communist utopias start with cooperative economy directed by bureaucratic
centralism but end with liberal reforms introducing decentralised pluralism.
Conservative governments start with privatisations that introduce a
decentralised corporative economy but end with monopolised corporations
intertwining with a totalitarian state. Bright ages develop cooperative economy
from the stage of centralism to pluralism, dark ages develop corporative
economy from the stage of pluralism to new centralism. Both move in a circle.
Cooperativism is a system of common, collective, public or national
ownership ensuring large groups of people equal rights in availing themselves
of material sources. Corporativism is an alternative system of private
ownership where material sources are owned by individual magnates or large
corporations of their dependent clients and shareholders whose rights of
disposing of collective riches are determined by the amount of their share and
financial participation. Cooperative ownership is characteristic of a prehistoric
agriculturalist common, colonies of new settlements in the wilderness and
modern utopian communes (American Amana societies, Israeli kibbutzim etc.).
Their modern applications consist in perpetual returns of agrarian reforms
redistributing the common wealth after periods of conquests and plundering.
Cooperative economies presuppose that an 80-percent share of land and
material sources are owned by an 80-percent majority of the commons. On the
other hand, corporative economies presuppose that the same amount of
property is owned as private possession by a 5-percent minority of owners of
heterogeneous origin. Corporative economic models prevail in dark ages when
large empires subjugate smaller countries. Cooperative models prevail in
bright ages when small countries become free as independent national states.
The struggle between cooperative and corporative systems is usually
conducted in the disguise of religious orthodoxy because empires tame small
countries by stigmatising them as heretics. In England corporativism was
always enforced by the claims of church theocracy against the secular state. It
was especially Coleridge, Cobbett, Disraeli and Belloc who refused the Tudor
kings’ confiscations of monasteries and blamed reformation for expropriating
their land (R. Kirk 2000: 171). On the continent the upper-class gentry saw its
rightful amendment in the Baroque counter-reformation that returned land
back to feudal magnates and monastic orders. In Bohemia the Catholics
confiscated the land property of Protestant gentry and dedicated it to the Jesuit
theocracy creeping in as the octopus of supranational monastic corporations.
A similar reaction followed after the French Revolution in 1789 when the
Saint Alliance voiced the claims of legitimism justifying the legal lawfulness
50
of aristocratic hereditary ownership. Its heralds Adam Müller and Franz
Baader advanced economic theories that attempted to restore a ‘klerikaldynastischer Ständesstaat’ based on the hierarchy of medieval estates. Before
the First World War the corporative philosophy of ownership was propagated
by Catholic Distributism (Hillaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton) that demanded
distributing private property to the highest possible number of individual
owners. Hilaire Belloc’s treatise The Servile State (1912) launched outpourings
of bitter criticism that continued in complaints of ‘totalistic Utopianism’ up to
our days (G. Sampson 1945: 1035). Belloc, Hayek and Orwell became modern
prophets of individualism advocating weakening centralised governments and
strengthening private corporations. The periods of corporative and cooperative
economy alternate in regular cycles but their nature needs a different
elucidation in medieval and modern societies (Tables 7, 8).
CORPORATIVE THEOCRACY
SECULAR AUTARCHY
A1. theocracy: church corporations
seize control of state authorities
A2. orthodoxy: official religion is
declared as a state ideology
A3. crusades: official religion used
as a pretext for legalising expansion
A4. clerical administration: clergy
enjoys legislative independence and
controls local authorities
A5. clerical schools: clergy controls
universities and private schools,
orders organise clerical schools
A6. papal investiture: church
dignitaries are elected by clergy,
electio – popes elected by cardinals
and papal curia
A3. monasticism: monastic orders
control church foundations, church
corporations given donations of land
B1. secular absolutism: sovereigns
hold an absolute control of the church
B2. religious tolerance: secular states
admit protestant, heretic & atheist faith
B3. religious sovereignty: national
religious traditions are tolerated
B4. secular administration: church
is subjected to secular authorities,
clergy integrated into state hierarchy
B5. secular schools: secular academies
govern a unified system of education,
church schools secularised
B6. secular investiture:
bishops are nominated by monarchs,
designatio - popes designated
by emperors
B3. secular nationalisation:
monastic orders abolished, their
property is expropriated and confiscated
Corporative theocracy vs. secular autarchy in medieval kingdoms
51
CORPORATIVE OLIGARCHY
COOPERATIVE AUTARCHY
A1. corporative oligarchy: a rule of B1. cooperative autarchy: a rule of
private magnates and corporations
state-controlled egalitarian cooperatives
A2. corporativism: hereditary copyhold B2. etatism: state monopoly, public
owned by orders, guilds, corporations ownership, agrarian reforms
A3. liberalism: private corporations B3. dirigism: the egalitarian state plans
are let to conduct free activities
& coordinates collective cooperatives
A4. free-tradism: free market allows B4. protectionism: trade is controlled
private owners free transactions
by strict state regulations
A5. laissez-faire: state authorities do B5. interventionism: state bureaucracy
not regulate independent businesses is free to intervene in private businesses
A6. pluralism: society crumbles into B6. totalitarianism: national economy
multitudes of independent businesses is organised by the state as one whole
A7. senatism: central governments
B7. direct democracy: public gathering
controlled by parliamentary lobbyism elects tribunes delegated to leadership
A8. regionalism: regional authorities B8. centralism: state centralism
independent on central governments restricts regional authorities
Table 7. Corporative oligarchy vs. cooperative autarchy in modern states
Conclusions
In economic theory there are no saints and devils and no sacred economic
systems condemning other systems as sinners to eternal perdition. There exist
only flexible systems open to new tendencies and static systems whose
regulations hinder development and conserve the old status. Modern political
thought still continues to discuss economic issues in deceptive terms of false
religious, moral and ideological pretexts. It wages fallacious battles of
socialism vs. capitalism, totalitarianism vs. democracy, protectionism vs. NeoLiberalism or Keynesianism vs. monetarism without realising and revealing
their deeper economic content. Such terms are only vague abstractions helping
to bury old departing economic strategies and acting as a mid-wife of new
strategies. Modern economics will not become a full-fledged science unless it
manages to strip such political ideas naked and explain them as false labels
changing economic strategies according to various economic cycles:
Communism = utopian ‘eunomy’ in booms of post-war reconstruction;
technocracy = boom of high technology, socialism = popular consumerism,
decentralised pluralism = post-stagflation plutocracy, fundamentalism =
corporative theocracy etc.
52
THESES TO PRIVATE CORPORATIVE ECONOMIES
• Every society enthrones some values and suppresses other values, every
regime installs a reign of new elites and dethrones old elites. Their free
competition in politics, philosophy, religion and arts has no other inner
cause but tending the economic engine, but a periodic rotation of
economic elites and strategies.
• As there are dynamic changes of ‘grey’, ‘dark’, ‘black’ and ‘brown
economy’ replacing the ages of ‘yellow’, ‘orange’ and ‘bright prosperity’,
there also exist various shades of ‘grey’, ‘dark’, ‘black’ and ‘brown
politics’ (or philosophy, science and culture) that seize the rule according
to the moving hands of the economic clock. Their slow clockwise progress
crowns as kings the champions of reconstruction, industrialisation,
services, tourism, finances, entertainment, prostitution, racketeering, theft
and war functioning as equal means of reaching prosperous economy.
• Every political ideology must rightfully defend the mean economic
instruments of its own way of making living but science should know
better, it can never remain blind to political fallacies and the present-day’s
ideological lies. The extant ascent of private corporative ownership is an
inevitable regular process in all stagnating saturated economies but it
cannot be misinterpreted as an ever-lasting eternal standard destined to
overwhelm all alternative economic systems.
• The post-modern economic powers cannot return to the rapid industrial
boom of post-war socialism but the optics of the present-day prolonged
decadence should not induce economists to criminalise its theoretical
status and foundations. The autarchic social systems of the Renaissance
and Aufklärung where scientific medicine suppressed charlatanry and
secular learning regulated religious bigotry cannot be passed off as
absolutist tyranny and totalitarian dictatorship. The real tyranny exists in
decadent theocracies (Crusaders’ Age, Counter-Reformation, Saint
Alliance) where religious bigotry can freely persecute secular learning,
where criminality can freely parasite on fair productive labour and a
narrow plutocracy can snatch the whole nation’s collective property.
• Theoretical economics cannot be reduced to the abstract moral criteria of
social equality or liberty because these mean different things when applied
to the three basic components of every society: bureaucratic intelligentsia
(autarchy), working-class masses (democy) and rich owners (oligarchy).
In corporative oligarchies the freedom of crime and religious fanaticism
brings bondage to manual work, learning and science. All dark ages
liberate magnates and enslave the commons by harder serfdom.
• The noble moral ideas of individual freedom should not be abused for
defending high economic criminality and denying collective and public
53
•
•
•
•
rights. The secrecy of banking accounts, protecting personal data, refusing
identity cards, legal lobbyism, deceptive sponsorship, obstructive
jurisdiction and the inviolability of an individual will look like ‘eternal
human rights’ but may serve also as the head of a coin whose tail is a
moral code of a criminal gang. Modern human rights may be abused like
Magna charta libertatum (1215) that gave greater freedom to the baron’s
castles but also harder serfdom to the commons’ huts.
The post-modern private corporative economy has dedicated unlimited
liberty and independence to financial and commercial magnates whose
illegal financial practices let them absorb productive legal enterprise. It
has liberated criminal mafias whose bailiffs have taken over the role of
state-controlled tax offices and collect taxes by racketeering. It has created
medial magnates employing journalists who engage in propaganda and
investigation more efficiently than the state-governed police and secret
intelligence services. This liberty of crime has dedicated freedom to the
oligarchs but bound the commons with a new bondage. Such changes are
not entirely eradicable in our Post-Modern Global Age but it is up to
productive labour to devise political programs minimising their epidemics.
Our Post-Modern Global Age has enthroned the historical situation of
Athenian and Roman Decadence: poor immigrants flow from
underdeveloped provinces into the rich cosmopolis while our moneyed
native heroes begin to conquer estates in ailing and starving colonial
provinces. Our unemployed cosmopolitan working-class plebs, fed by
panis et ludi, is watching TVs in comfortable armchairs while the
employed Gastarbeiter slaves from barbarian provinces are toiling hard in
our manufactures to supply us with luxury.
In the Global Age free pecuniary acquisition has superseded cares for
social emancipation, the laws of higher profit have legalised higher
financial criminality and the collapse of jurisdiction guaranteed criminal
bosses legal innocence with the least possible penalties. It is an age of
enormous poverty in impoverished colonies but also huge luxury in
cosmopolitan centres. The financial dictatorship of free currency rates
condemned the poor barbaricum to the least gains for the hardest toil and
the profligate cosmopolitan magnates to the highest gains for least efforts.
Democratic parties cannot simply brighten the sombre twilight of social
decadence and return to the nostalgic socialist utopias of bright ages. They
cannot, however, avoid playing the role of Anglican, Lutheran, Huguenot
and Jansenist protestants under the reign of fundamentalist inquisitors.
They cannot fall a simple-minded victim to the lures of colonial luxuries
and applaud to economic criminality, obscure superstition, religious
fanaticism, military armament and imperial expansion. Their historical
54
duty in the brighter decades between two peaks of corporative oligarchy is
to face fanatic irrationalism with rational science, financial speculation
with productive labour, economic criminality with civil law, worthless
crap with valuable art and charlatanry with humanitarian medicine.
55
NEW OLIGARCHY: Political Anatomy
Units of Social Culture
Modern social, political and cultural sciences lack a consistent and unified
systematic classification of their theoretical categories though all social
thinkers admit their deeper interrelations. Social history is a process of
immense complexity that cannot be given a simple theoretical interpretation
but can be measured in a statistic way and segmented into units of valid
dynamic categories. Social sciences sin by focusing on visible and superficial
phenomena from a static viewpoint instead of treating them as dynamic
tendencies in the same way as modern theoretical mechanics studies abstract
forces exerted upon solid bodies without brooding on their specific substance.
If we enquire into China, Spaniards, Middle English, the Tudors, the
Conservative Party or social mobility as isolated inconsistent facts of
amalgamated composition, we can hardly arrive at any higher systematic
knowledge. But if we plot their facts into long-term historical statistics and
grasp their essence in their dynamic growth, we may distil from specific
accidental phenomena essential traits of higher historical recurrence and
understand general categories as dynamic units moulded in evolutionary
processes of periodic and lawful nature.
Table 6 describes the economic history of France with a view to political,
cultural and literary life and to dynamic trends in their fields. A brief
comparison with Table 1 oriented to the political development in Britain shows
that in the post-war era France and Britain oscillated in the rhythm of similar
changes although in the 19th century France was one decade ahead of other
countries. Such discrepancies prove that economic rhythms may be accelerated
or delayed but the general course of their oscillation observes deep periodic
lawfulness. Moreover, their general tendencies may serve as a safe ground for
a general taxonomy of cultural trends in all fields of human life.
The classification of economic booms in Table 6 and the preceding survey of
terms apply a set of simple catchwords with the intention to coordinate the
current usage for economic, political and cultural trends. Its systematic is
envisaged in Table 9 depicting an array of terms proposed for unifying
dynamic trends into all fields of human activities. Trends in economic growth
contain the Greek root -nomy, trends in political development have the lexical
root -cracy, science bears the root -sophy and religion -doxy. More important
are coordinated terms for series of cultural trends that classify economic
strategies according as they emphasise producing ‘good’ (eu-), beautiful
(estho-), functional (techno-), buyable (demo-) and luxurious goods (pluto-).
Such terms look a little bit odd and weird in political economy but make clear
56
sense as soon as we derive their origin from literary styles. All historical cycles
and periods in literature start with dreams about ‘good man’ (humanism) and
‘good reign’ (utopia) but their visions about ‘good place’ (eutopy) rapidly
change into visions of ’beautiful place’ (esthotopy) and ‘abstract formal space’
(technotopy) and finally they lapse into in macabre nightmares grieving at ‘bad
life’ in a ‘bad world’ (cacotopia) at bad times.
accumulation edification
reign
eucracy esthocracy
economy eunomy esthonomy
science eusophy esthosophy
religion eudoxy esthodogy
space
eutopy
esthotopy
time
euchrony esthochrony
type
eutypy
esthotypy
measure eumetry esthometry
emotion eupathy esthopathy
music
euphony esthophony
industrialisation consumption stagflation depression
technocracy
technonomy
technosophy
technodoxy
technotopy
technochrony
technotypy
technometry
technopathy
technophony
democracy idolocracy theocracy
demonomy idolonomy theonomy
demosophy idolosophy theosophy
demodoxy idolodoxy theodoxy
demotopy idolotopy theotopy
demochrony idolochrony theochrony
demotypy idolotypy theotypy
demometry idolometry theometry
demopathy idolopathy theopathy
demophony idolophony theophony
Table 8. A proposal of an integrated taxonomy of trends in social sciences
Political Anatomy
The meaning of such terms becomes obvious when we apply them to the
rapid industrial growth of the post-war era. What was the Communist utopia
(eutopy) in the cultural thought 1947-1953/6, meant state-controlled planning
(eunomy) in economy, centralised bureaucracy (eucracy) in politics and
classicism in fine arts. What was literary civilism and sentimental aestheticism
(esthopathy) in literature between 19567-1962, meant petty-bourgeois
approaches (esthonomy) in economy and ‘little Englandism’ (esthocracy) in
political opinions. After crises in 1947-8 and 1953-6 there were depressions in
1962-3, 1968-9 and 1975-7 that overthrew all established patterns of life. The
60s brought a rule of engineering elites (technocracy), managerial economic
strategies (technonomy), philosophical structuralism, scientific formalism
(technosophy) and formalistic art (technotopy). The 70s started with a
consumption fever (demonomy), accompanied by scientific sociologism
(demosophy), French Maoist Leftism and H. Wilson’s trade-unionism
(democracy, demarchy). The period after the crisis 1975-7 froze the economic
growth by a syndrome of long-term stagnation that proceeded in three phases:
traditionalism 1975-1981, catastrophism 1982-1989 and hermetism 1990-1997.
These three cycles displayed inclinations to ritual traditionalism (idolosophy),
catastrophic visions (cacosophy) and religious fundamentalism (theosophy).
Every economic crisis functions as M. Foucault’s rupture épistémique and
T. S. Kuhn’s ‘scientific revolution’ burying the old épistéme and enthroning a
57
new paradigm in its place (Foucault 1971, Kuhn 1970, Lakatos 1970). The
breakdown of the old paradigm paves the way for the breakthrough of a new
paradigm. In literature and arts a new generation of fashionable young people
comes and challenges the old-fashioned and out-of-date taste of the ruling old
generation. In parliaments a younger generation of politicians overthrows the
cabinet of the older generation because its fates were associated closely with
the old economic strategies whose recipes have apparently failed. Vilfredo
Pareto (1935) described this process as a rotation of elites. Cultural trends
establish the rule of a new taste, a new generation and a new social elite but
hardly any of participants of these intellectual skirmishes is able to realise their
contiguity with changing economic strategies. Every crisis is an emergent state
of hunger, thirst and want that alarms the political savage into action and
makes him perpetuate the functioning of the nutritional chain in social nature.
It is the inner balance and hierarchy of economic values that propagates
social moods, arouses people into action and makes them move the economic
engine one step forth. Economic values control our social behaviour in the
same way as hormones control the physiological priorities of a savage. Most
people can perceive these invisible values of aesthetic taste only in the indirect
reflection of some ‘visible events’. They admit that politics may influence arts
but they do not realise that politicians, lawyers and priests are the last to
explicitly say what every common citizen and artist implicitly feels. They
think that the reign of the conservatism New Right came with M. Thatcher’s
ascension in 1979 or Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981 but in fact their
governments began to jut out only as a top of an iceberg of conservative
moods emerging from 1975 and accomplished what other fields of culture
claimed openly much earlier. The very heralds of new conservatism were
groups of punk music in the mid-70s whose weakness for anarchy, violence,
blood and brutality sent the hippies’ movement of the 60s forever to oblivion.
The static view of ruling elites concentrates on old rich well-to-do
generations and neglects vanguards of young people in cultural media who
fight much more flexibly for the new standards of life style, fashion and
literary taste. The static rearguards of older generations adhere to old ideals
and slow down the speed of economic reforms but it is the young dynamic
vanguards that go to the wars and wage real battles. With the rapid pace of
economic booms, social progress is passed over as a relay from one ascending
elite (bureaucracy, technocracy, plutocracy, theocracy) to another that is
adapted better to new economic needs. The same perpetual change of
economic strategies assorts the popular masses that shatter the reign of old
elites and give the reins to new elites. Every economic decade generates
another dynamic type of working-class (volunteering builders, industrial
proletariat, petty-bourgeoisie, consumers’ masses, the unemployed
58
Lumpenproletariat etc.). Tables 9a-b brings a proposal of their systematic
general classification based on their analogous development in the light
centralistic cycle 1891-1945 and the dark corporative cycle 1945-1997.
A Dynamic Typology of Elites and Masses
DYNAMIC TYPOLOGY OF ELITES
Eucracy: (1) a bureaucratic elite and (2) its rule in centralistic and totalitarian
regimes confessing utopian ideals of a ‘good ruler’, ‘good reign‘ and ‘good
state‘. A strict rule of strict laws, strict morals and strict bureaucracy.
Esthocracy: (1) an Epicurean fashionable elite in centralistic regimes and (2)
its rule indulging in court revels, beauty, aesthetics, courtesy, sentiments
and feelings. A transition to the ideals of ‘beautiful woman‘, ‘beautiful
landscape‘, ‘courteous behaviour’ and ‘sentimental adventure‘.
Aularchy: the rule of bureaucratic elites in bright ages consisting of the
successive stages of eucracy and esthocracy.
Technocracy: (1) the social class of the technocratic elite, engineers,
economists and (2) their rule in countries at times of industrial booms.
Democracy: ‘direct democracy’ as rule of popular tribunes that are elected
at public gatherings and represent people in parliaments.
Democy: the rule of trade unions and popular working-class parties during
the booms of consumers’ societies before the outbreak of stagflation.
Demarchy: different forms of popular movements (communarchy, hyparchy,
democy) that win dominance in times of revolutions and street riots.
Autocracy: a hegemonistic block of totalitarian eucracy (utopian movements)
with popular demarchy (popular rebellions) prevailing in bright ages.
Plutocracy: (1) the financial elite and (2) its rule in periods of deep
stagflation (long-term stagnation with fast inflation and rising prices).
Liberalisation at the market produces a class of new parvenus and riches
noveaux who buy old castles and want to imitate the old aristocracy.
Theocracy: (1) divine clergy and (2) its rule in dark ages when the state
resigns from providing secular education and unemployed intelligence
has to find shelter in monks’ monasteries and act under religious cover.
Idolarchy: (1) a type of theocracy based on traditional churches and orthodox
monastic orders, (2) an elite of clergymen confessing the cult of saints,
martyrs, idols, icons, relics and heraldic coats of arms.
Militarchy: (1) a military elite and (2) its rule in the final phase of long-term
crises when economic conflicts (overpopulation, unemployment) can be
solved only by a new colonisation and a ‘sacred war‘ against barbarians.
DYNAMIC TYPOLOGY OF MASSES
Proletariat: the productive working–class employed in factories during
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the long-term industrial boom (saeculum clarum) in prosperous
totalities and autarchies.
Pauperiat: the poor masses in oligarchies at times of long-term stagnation
(saeculum obscurum) and corporative ownership.
Urbarchat: Lumpenproletariat, the riff-raff and rabble in dirty urban
quarters, bums and hoboes recruited from the poor, the unemployed,
the crippled and the homeless in times of dark ages.
Suburbarchat: the poor living in suburban tenement houses and provisory
slums in workers’ colonies, bums and hoboes wandering from villages to
get a job in large towns and cities.
Communarchat: young unemployed people getting jobs in public works,
volunteering brigades of builders living in temporary communes (volunteers
building up dams in Communist regimes, the poor employed with building
‘hungry walls‘ by Charles the Fourth in Prague in the 14th century).
Hyparchat: petty-bourgeoisie, craftsmen, artisans, street vendors, prosperous
lower classes, factory workers with odd jobs and illegal earnings focused on
bettering their family budget, Petty Englandism in the mid-50s.
Technarchat: classic industrial working-class proletariat in manufactures and
factories in times of industrial prosperity and rapid industrial booms.
Consumeriat: wide masses of consumers enjoying good wages, low prices
and advantageous loans and credits during booms of consumers’ goods.
Demarchat: a type of working-class consumeriat organised in strong
trade unions and working-class parties.
Anarchat: (1) a class of unemployed young generation living in squats and
dilapidating houses, (2) movements of anarchism in periods of transition
from centralistic autarcheum to corporative oligarcheum.
Thearchat: a social group of unemployed young generation falling victim to
esoteric sectarianism and finding shelter in superstitious sects.
Exarchat: a type of pauperiat in dark ages that joins expanding colonial
companies in order to make fortune overseas.
Endarchat: a type of pauperiat in dark ages that has come from barbarian
provinces to work as slaves or servants in large cosmopolitan cities. It
beats cosmopolitan pauperiat by offering hard work for lower wages
(metoikoi in Athens at times of cynic philosophers Antisthenes and
Diogenes, modern Gastarbeiter immigrants from the Third World).
Cleptarchat: an urban type of criminal gangs and pauperiat living on criminal
activities (theft, burglaries, shoplifting).
Pornarchat: an urban type of pauperiat living on prostitution, gambling,
casinos, circuses, fun fair shows and other popular revels.
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61
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Falangsteriat: a type of declassé pauperiat that joins the services of rich
oligarchs and landowners to act as their bodyguards and bailiffs.
Militarchat: a young generation of landless people who join colonial armies
as soldiers of fortune to conquer new land (Xenophanes’ hired soldiers of
fortune, medieval crusaders, Waldstein’s landsknechts, Pizarro’s
conquistadores, armies of the East Indian Company in the 17th century).
Agrarchat: poor townsmen and peasants’ masses in villages who find
consolation in the agrarian self-sufficient economy at times of wars, plague
and starvation).
Table 9. Trends in modern centralist and dark corporative cycles
These social elites and masses should be considered as dynamic classes in
contradistinction to static classes discussed in traditional sociological
literature. They do not consist of people with permanent jobs such as peasants
or teachers but from transient vanguards fluctuating flexibly from one
economic sector into another according to the calls of the economic machine.
So ‘agrarchat’ is no use when referring to peasantry but makes deeper sense as
a denotation of starving suburban proletariat moving to utopian agrarian
colonies in the country at the end of destructive wars. Every stage of the
economic automaton creates a new group of economic heroes who were the
first and best to grasp the ropes of new economic mechanisms, to pull them
and make fortunes on them. The deterministic laws of history rely on the
principle of free will and greed in economic behaviour. The national economy
generates current values rewarding generously definite economic strategies
and people carry them slavishly out just because the winners take everything
and losers take nothing. As a result of powerful economic movements, their
heroes are celebrated as outstanding personalities while individual protesters
are forgotten as personal failures. Superficial observers can watch only
individuals, chaotic groups and statistic classes but they remain blind to
essential aspects of social growth, to movements, transformations, processes
and general trends.
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GLOBALISATION: Political Geography
Political Geography as a Field of Political Sciences
Political sciences cannot reach any accomplished systematic knowledge in
so far as they confine their scope of study to modern republican regimes and
resign from integrating their account into a unified theory including ancient
and medieval monarchies. Any enquiry into isolated present-day regimes
hovers suspended in the utter void and nothingness unless there exists a
consistent elucidation of political evolution and a systematic taxonomy of its
evolutionary categories. Such taxonomy may be obtained only by developing
macropolitology, i.e. a field of internal and external political sciences that
studies political regimes on a long scale of historical, geographical and
sociological phenomena. Its goal to deal with the complex process of political
development may be pursued efficiently if its scope of study is delimited as a
coordinate system with axes of time, space and social stratification (Table 10).
sociopolitology
social layers
society-axis
typological
method
time-axis
space-axis
chronopolitology
geopolitology
evolutionary method
comparative method
Table 10. The theoretical space of macropolitology and its methods
Table 10 represents the ‘theoretical space’ of macropolitology as a
Cartesian product of three subdisciplines whose phenomena are distributed
along three axes. One underlying subdiscipline consists in ‘pure chronology’
or ‘chronopolitology’, i.e. historical politology concerned with historical
political development. The second axis concerns ‘geopolitology’ or political
geography that is usually called geographical politology and enquires into the
zones of geographic distribution of political systems. These two branches must
be completed by ‘sociopolitology’ or social politology analysing the hierarchy
of social classes and their mutual relations in a state. Table 10 outlines these
fields in unity as a Cartesian geometry of political studies in a space defined by
three axes: geopolitology, chronopolitology and sociopolitology.
Such terms may smell of undue futile verbalism, yet whichever terms we
choose, we cannot avoid formulating these three dimensions on the level of
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practical politics, its theoretical study as well as its heuristic methodology.
Economists think it indispensable to distinguish macroeconomy vs.
microeconomy and this opposition is projected into political sciences as pairs
of ‘macrohistory’ vs, ‘microhistory’, ‘macropolitics’ vs. ‘micropolitics’ and
‘macropolitology’ vs. ‘micropolitology’. Another needful cluster of terms are
‘geopolitology’ and ‘geopolitics’ that should be cleared of its secondary
connotations associated with the German foreign politics during the war. The
axiomatic approach to these fields requires defining their theoretical categories
in a standard way compatible with natural sciences.
Global Geopolitics
The nature of political organisation in a given country depends more upon
its historical and geographical environment than on a free choice of its citizens.
The western civilisation cannot transplant its political system automatically to
Afghanistan, Iraq or New Guinea, it can only manage to change the mutual
balance of inner native political forces and graft in similar structures but these
will always display the delayed level of the local political culture.
Interventions into their internal political life cannot radically change their
historical and economical status because every geographic zone has its own
historical clock and observes its own delayed economic pace.
The geographical distribution of political systems all over the world
resembles an evolutionary pyramid with the most advanced countries on its top
and the least developed backward systems at its foot. However, no evidence
confirms the simple rule that the earlier a country started its civilisation the
higher stage of political organisation it has now reached. Human civilisation
grew like a coral island in tropic seas, the earliest centres in the Near East and
Egypt turned crusty and stale and had to give way to the dramatic growth on its
peripheral fringes. Owing to this, the role of the global hegemon in large
empires was periodically shifted from the inner core to the outer shells: from
Sparta to Macedonia, Rome, Germany, Spain, Britain and the U.S. This
principle of dominance shifted to outer shells may be formulated as the law of
inner incrustation and outer activation. It determines the growth of
civilisation in cultural progress and its geographical propagation.
Another conspicuous historical law implies that the pyramid of human
civilisation cannot elevate its advanced top without a respective progress in
broadening its lower geographic basis. Once Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia,
Greece and Rome had reached the level of secular republican regimes, they
turned into powerful military empires and decayed regressively into theocratic
monarchies because the underdeveloped periphery needed a lower type of
economic organisation. Apparently, economic progress leads to political
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elevation but after reaching its peak it consumes its energy in military
expansion and territorial extension that presuppose repeating the same
evolutionary series of regimes on a broader basis. This peristaltic process
develops the model of demographic growth in animal and human aboriginal
populations. After settling down in a new area all populations experience an
era of rapid intensive progress and flourishing renascence that lasts until the
exhaustion of all available sources. Then comes a period of a deep cultural
crisis leading to extensive progress and an extensive search for new sources.
The golden age of renascence presupposes a specific type of autonomous
organisation based on independent national states. The post-war era of rapid
industrial growth put an end to expansive wars and brought years of peaceful
stability when peoples of Africa and Asia could renew their national existence.
Large colonial empires dissolved and shrank, their overseas dominions
rebelled and won freedom. The golden age of post-war decolonisation
guaranteed small countries national autonomy in external relations, inner
autocracy in their internal politics and secular reforms of church education.
Similar reforms could be observed also in the Renaissance and the Age of
Enlightment. The absolutistic monarchs restored national autonomy by
withdrawing and seceding from large empires.
In the Ancient Age such popular reformations proceeded as the secessions
of the Messenian and Roman plebs to a fortified hill (Ithome, Mons sacer).
Here they established their own democratic self-government and proclaimed
administrative independence from the ruling oligarchy and its military empire.
Most social revolutions of ancient history were not inspired only by social
protest but also the pathos of ethnic and national liberation. From 510 BC to 82
BC Rome was exposed to clashes of incessant political struggles raging
between its nobility and the plebs. Then social rebellions disappeared because
Rome became a powerful military empire and its proletariat found relief in its
armies conquering new provinces. In Sparta the era of inner social struggles
and democratic reforms started only as late as in 245 under the reign of Agis
when Sparta lost its empire and was oppressed by the Achaean Alliance. The
internal autarchy regularly results from the state of external autarchy, ethnic
autonomy and national independence. When it matures and turns into an
internal oligarchy, it usually results in an expansive external oligarchy.
In the Middle Ages such types of external autarchy occurred when small
national kingdoms became independent on the emperor and the pope. The
reformation movement refused papal supremacy and created independent
national states governed by national monarchs. In England Wycliff’s
reformation started in 1353 when the king Eduard III forbade the English
church to pay 1000 marks to the pope. In order to separate from Rome and
avoid paying taxes to the pope, Henry VIII became the official head of the
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reformed national Anglican Church and decreed his subjects to worship him as
an English pope. The religious autonomy of British Anglicanism bore a close
resemblance to French Gallicanism. In Central Europe it was proclaimed by
the Czech Brethren and Austrian Febronianism during the era of Aufklärung.
In the dark ages of cultural decadence the state authority is weakened by
decentralisation and national states are vexed by disintegration into
independent regional counties. The process of regional disintegration is
outbalanced by complementary tendencies to imperial integration, by fusing
weak national kingdoms into large cosmopolitan empires united by strong
colonial armies and emperors with weak internal executive power. Emperors
are pompous symbols of the external unity of the colonial empire as a whole
but the real economic power rests in the hands of rich provincial magnates
representing their regions in the senate. Emperors represent mega-states, i.e.
large empires associated on principles of one civilisation and one faith, while
local magnates stand for mini-states, i.e. small regional counties with a high
degree of administrative independence. Paradoxically, globalisation into large
mega-states is impossible without disintegration into small mini-states.
world
MEGASTATE
STATE
MINISTATE
continent
empire
military powers
kosmopolis
global hegemons
theocracies
elites
subcontinent
national state
nation
federation
region
county - district
local tribes
autonomy
dominion
church
elites - mafias
defensive blocks
secularism
bureaucracy
Table 11. The decay of nation-states into mega-states and mini-states
Table 11 demonstrates four magnitudes of political units scaled from
worlds’ organisations to mega-states (empires), national states (kingdoms) and
mini-states (regional counties). Since mega-states and mini-states are typical of
oligarchies and presuppose corporative economy, their diagrams are rimmed
by double lines to indicate their common nature. These types of units are
contrasted graphically to national states and international organisations that
prevail in autarchic epochs. The post-war autarcheum before 1996 was based
on national states, federations and autonomous republics coexisting peacefully
under the roof of UNO and worlds’ international organisations. The post-
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modern oligarcheum after 1997 opened a new epoch of global empires and
regional mini-states. Globalisation has broken federations into national states,
autonomous republics into separatist satellites, national states into regional
counties and international organisations into dominant military blocs.
The tendencies of post-modern globalisation look easier to understand if
considered on the background of similar global processes in the past. Ancient
Greece and Rome experienced several eras of cultural decadence when small
town states merged into one large kosmopolis overcrowded with multiethnic
immigrants and imported slaves. The kosmopolis functioned as the heart and
the capital of the empire (mega-state) consisting of one market exporting
soldiers and importing slaves. The inner core of the market without frontiers
was encircled by regional towns (mini-states) that joined their activities as the
megalopolis of close allies and satellites. The outer shell of candidates of
imperial integration was formed by the ‘warring zone’ in Thrace and Germany.
The local kings who lived along the limes Romanus fought for the empire as its
soldiers of fortune, conquered barbarian tribes living outside in the barbaricum
and earned money by capturing slaves.
Athens failed to create a large military empire but became a centre of a large
cosmopolis running large-scale trade with slaves. Socrates’ disciple Xenophon
had a career characteristic of most Athenian magnates after the oligarchic
overthrow in 404/3 BC. He fought with his private army of soldiers of fortune
in services of Persian, Thracian and Spartan kings, captured slaves and settled
down as a representative of new rich land-owning aristocracy exploiting
slaves’ work. Cheap slaves worked in large ergasteries and produced highquality goods for cheaper prices. Their owners soon made a great fortune,
because small native craftsmen were not able to compete with their cheap
goods on the market.
The post-modern globalisation has its missionaries in expansive
corporations that play the same role as the Greek religious brotherhood
amphiktyonia, the Roman ordines, the Germanic comitatus and medieval
monastic orders. In the age of crusades medieval Christendom looked like one
diversified empire whose knights and monastic orders did not obey their kings
but waited for the pope to beckon them and send them to conquer new feudal
estates by crusades against infidels. The medieval monastic brotherhoods and
knights’ orders engaged in the same missionary, military and commercial
activities as colonial companies in modern colonial empires. When the English
founded their East Indian Company in 1600, crusades gave up their religious
disguise and turned into secular commercial expeditions. Missionaries
undressed monks’ garments and became merchants, knights took off their
armour and became soldiers in colonial armies. The supra-national monopolies
of the Colonial Era have been resurrected in the modern commercial
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corporations of the Global Era. Both could revive only in a supra-national
environment without national frontiers, regulations and customs officers.
External Integration
Since foreign affairs and internal politics are joint vessels, every political
regime may exist only in a definite type of external environment complying
with its nature. Private corporations may flourish only if fishing as predators in
the pond of large supra-national empires. Missionaries can explore a new
wilderness only if their life is protected by colonial armies. Utopian colonies
may flourish only on isolated islands or in isolated national states. Statecontrolled economy can exist only in independent national states whose peace
is protected by international treaties and an external autarchy. Oligopolies can
expand only if national states break down and supra-national integration
allows them to dominate the world’s market.
During autarchic epochs large empires invigorate their centralist state
control but allow provinces to function as a free federation of national states
where every nation enjoys national autonomy with an autonomous school
system and cultural institutions. The federative integration in the Soviet
Union and China descended from former compact feudal empires whose shape
was adjusted to modern republicanism to satisfy the cultural needs of
independent autonomous nations. The same process took place in the
disintegration of the British Empire that decomposed into a free
commonwealth of independent dominions. At present they keep in economic
touch and avow the queen as their symbolic head. Such types of political
integration arisen from decolonisation differ much from confederacies that
originated in voluntary unions of free independent states. These included the
Confederation of thirteen American states united in 1781-9 and the Canadian
territorial unity founded by Quebec, Ontario and Nova Scotia in 1867. The
term seems applicable also to the Yugoslavian federation that was composed
from several brotherly Slavic nations in the Balkans.
The processes of external integration and disintegration proceed on several
levels and encroach upon several types of states:
world - international world organisations on equal principles,
empire - hegemonistic powers, military empires, expansive realms,
federation - a confederacy of independent autonomies of heterogeneous
ethnic origin that have descended from a former empire,
confederacy - a free egalitarian federation of states (confederates)
associated by common ethnic origin,
commonwealth - a political unity of dominions,
state - national kingdoms and republics with centralised governments,
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autonomy - a state in a federation with great cultural independence,
regions - autonomous counties, tribal districts.
These political unities emerge in different phases of globalisation and external
integration. The chain mega-state – mini-state or empire – satellite –
protectorate – colony defines a typical territorial hierarchy in expansive
oligarchies and presupposes supra-national integration. Federative relations
make appearance in autonomous autarchies based on national integration.
The pairs commonwealth – dominion, federation – autonomous republic and
confederacy – confederates may differ in historical descent but they all agree
in organising political unities on principles of national self-government.
A. AUTARCHEUM:
a. national integration: states live in peace as national state-controlled
republics with centralised state authorities and autonomous organisation,
b. international integration (UNO, UNESCO), a peaceful system of
international organisations uniting all nations on principles of equality,
c. federal integration: ethnic minorities live in provinces enjoying cultural
independence and administrative autonomy.
B. OLIGARCHEUM:
a. regional integration: counties and districts become independent
administrative units ruled by rich magnates and warring princes,
b. corporative integration: national property is crumbled into private estates
possessed by rich magnates, private corporations and religious funds,
c. supra-national integration: private corporations function on supranational principles in order to penetrate into weaker barbarians countries,
d. global integration: strong states became powerful empires and global
hegemons with strong armies supporting the penetration of private
corporations into barbarian countries.
Autarchies are organised on ethnic, national, autonomous and federative
principles and tend to form defensive blocs whose highest forms are treaties of
international integration. The first covenant setting up the League of Nation
was passed in 1919 as a clause to the treaty of Versailles and empowered this
organisation to look after its realisation. The League of Nation arose from the
activities of the Triple Entente (Britain, France, Russia) and defensive blocs
opposed to the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy). After the
Second World War it bore the name of the United Nations Organisation and
looked after the peace made at the Potsdam conference. Before the
international organisations UNO, UNESCO and Security Council celebrated
their heydays in the era of post-war peaceful reconstruction, they had to
overcome a period of a deep crisis. In the 30s the League of Nations was
paralysed by offensive powers with aggressive ambitions. Germany, Japan and
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Hungary resigned from their membership and made their own aggressive bloc
in order establish a new global order.
The conflict between international and supra-national integration may be
illustrated by numerous historical parallels. In the 15th century there appeared a
proposal of an international treaty of Europeans rulers that should have
guarded continental peace like the modern UNO and the League of Nations. In
1464 the French monarch Louis XI conducted negotiations concerning the
Czech king Jiří z Poděbrad’s plan to establish a Pan-European union of all
Christian nations. Their endeavour to proclaim independence from papal
supremacy was, however, condemned to failure. The pope could not give them
blessing and in 1466 he sent a punitive expedition against Czech rebels.
Empires are incompatible with international blocs and treaties.
The dynamics of national and supra-national (imperial) integration develops
in an interval of many transient stages. Static categories of political unities
reveal their true nature only if studied in dynamic processes of global
economic transformations. Every political movement may be defined as a
dynamic tendency that transforms the input of old external integration into the
output of new integration:
I. AUTARCHEUM:
isolationism: national states seek isolation from the surrounding countries,
centralism: national states integrate loose regions into a centralised system,
federalism: independent provinces join larger federations,
internationalism: national states make international treaties against empires,
bilateralism: large empires are opposed by blocs of Protestant states,
autonomism: ethnic minorities require establishing autonomous republics.
II. OLIGARCHEUM:
separatism: autonomous units endeavour to separate as independent states,
regionalism: centralised states decompose into regional counties,
corporativism: national enterprises turn into private corporations and funds,
globalism: private business require global freedom for global expansion,
unilateralism: autarchic states in opposition have to succumb to empires.
A short survey demonstrates the principal difference between bilateral and
unilateral polarisation: Bilateral polarisation is one with the dominant empire
having a steady counterpart in the anti-imperial camp of global opposition. Its
functioning can be illustrated by the heydays of Wycliff’s, Cranmer’s or
Luther’s reformation when Protestant countries seceded from the theocratic
unity of the Roman Catholic Empire and formed an opposite pole of political
balance, a political opposition of independent secular national states. Autarchic
regimes develop the idea of national autonomy common to federations,
confederacies, autonomous republics and national states. Since their
independence may be preserved only by international law and international
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treaties, internationalism goes hand in hand with federalism, autonomism and
bilateralism. Since national states can hardly ever afford subversive activities
against the theocratic empire, they usually practice a politics of national
isolationism. Its effects are multiplied by the pope’s interdicts and the
emperor’s embargos. Isolationism is fatal for small countries, Elizabethan
England and Anglican Protestantism overcame its dangers by turning eyes to
overseas countries and starting their own expansion.
Imperial and supra-national integration create unilateral polarisation that
prevails in dark periods of counter-reformation and papal theocracy. The
disobedient camp of Protestant countries is finally defeated by the theocratic
empire applying strategies of outer and inner erosion. Its strongest tentacles are
supra-national armies of religious, commercial and military corporations that
penetrate national states, infiltrate all weak parts of their body and imbibe their
nourishing blood. National states crumble into mini-states with regional
decentralised organisation and their national property becomes an easy prey to
foreign expanding oligopolies. The winner takes everything and his power
consists in financial dictatorship controlling the exchange rates of foreign
currencies. Underdeveloped countries are impoverished because their
currency, working force and products are worthless and they cannot afford
competing with financial giants. They shrink and decay while large empires
grow and inflate. They lapse into dependent protectorates while large empires
begin to act as global hegemons and accumulate enormous wealth. The
process of impoverishment is accelerated by the inner national oligarchy,
their local and regional economic elites that join supra-national corporations in
sacking and profit from their feasts. An efficient support is provided also by
the hegemon’s closest allies and satellites who are not let down either and get a
lion’s share in portioning the prey.
The dynamic process of unilateralisation is carried out by a gradual erosion
of Protestant national states and their infiltration by Jesuit missionaries acting
as papal legates. Elizabethan England proved to be merciless in executing the
English Jesuit Edmund Campion in 1581 and other Roman Catholic
missionaries concentrating in the seminary at Douai. It persevered in its
reformation by overcoming the outer Roman Catholic infiltration and
concentrating on its own commercial expansion. At last it defeated Catholic
theocratic fundamentalism by its own inner counter-reformation, by
suppressing Puritans at home, expelling them to America and sending out
commercial companies to India. It beat the Roman-Catholic Empire of Spanish
Habsburgs by stopping the inflow of Spanish religious orders and giving a vent
to the outflow of English commercial corporations to India. This Elizabethan
road to freedom granted England economic supremacy and passed the global
hegemony from the Catholic South to the British Empire.
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The Elizabethan example had an early rehearsal in Athens threatened by
Spartan military troops and Kritias’ oligarchy. Aristocratic Sparta acted as a
global hegemon but it could not subjugate democratic Athens until it managed
to cultivate and corrupt its inner oligarchy grown from democrats’ idle sons
and their Gilded Youth. While democrats esteemed slaves and barbarians as
their equals, the new rich oligarchy made them a cheap source of new
gorgeous wealth. Globalisation turned Athens into a supra-national cosmopolis
full of native beggars, foreign slaves and underpaid immigrants (metoikoi).
The victory of oligarchs gave the rich new economic, financial and military
freedom but condemned the commons to new slavery and bondage.
Sparta eroded Athens by inciting clashes between the anti-imperial camp of
democrats and the pro-imperial camp of oligarchs. This is a standard strategy
used in all transitions to unilateral polarisation and applied also in the 30s
when European nations were menaced by the German military threat. In order
to undermine their federative governments, Germany kindled separatism,
corrupted ethnic minorities in European countries and offered them national
independence. So the nationalist J. Tiso in Slovakia was lured to disavow the
central government in Prague and separate from Czechoslovakia. Croatian
nationalists (J. Šubašić, A. Pavelić) were offered to separate from Yugoslavia
and create a separatist state dependent as a satellite on Germany. Kosovo was
torn from Serbia and joined to Albania controlled by Mussolini. Inciting local
separatism in neighbouring adjacent areas undermined the bilateral balance in
Central and South Europe and ensured Germany unilateral military
predominance in the European zone.
Autonomy and Heteronomy
Internal micropolitics depends on favourable external geopolitics and
external foreign affairs. The opposition of autarchy and oligarchy in internal
politics may be translated as the opposition of autonomy and heteronomy in
external politics. Autonomy is a kind of self-government where 70 per cent of
land, natural sources and industries belongs to the people and 30 per cent
belongs to state bureaucracy growing from its autonomous national roots. It is
a political system where the national majority possesses the majority of the
national property and its economic activities are organised by an educated
minority of the same ethnic origin. Heteronomy is a political system where
one nation is subject to the will and rule of another nation. In heteronomous
regimes the autochthonous population continues the same toil on natural
sources as in autonomous regimes but their possession and control were seized
by a small minority of invaders.
After a detailed scrutiny we may conclude that all historical oligarchies were
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heteronomies and all historical autarchies were autonomies. In his
Tischgespräche the German politician A. Hitler (1952: 115; Nolde 1998: 525)
could not help admiring the example set by Sparta where a small majority of
6000 Dorian lords reigned over the huge majority of 345 000 Messenian serfs
(heilotes). The Spartan constitution was praised by Thucydides as an
accomplished parliamentary system with a limited rule of two kings eforoi but
its accomplished political rights were granted only to members of the ruling
military aristocracy.
Most heteronomies in history arose after raids and conquests conducted by
hordes of pastoralist nomads (Huns, Avars, Tartars, Turks). These hordes
systematically subjugated peasant civilisations and seized their land as a
warrior caste of feudal aristocracy. On most continents peasants turned into
serfs and pastoralist nomads into the ruling caste of warriors. In Africa the
peasants were of autochthonous Bantu or Negroid origin while pastoralists
were nomadic immigrants of heterogeneous Arabian descent. The third caste
was represented by pygmy populations that settled in urban suburbs as
craftsmen or were often exploited as slaves (Mair 1969; Seligman 1959). Such
social hierarchy of ethnic castes could be observed also on other continents. In
Europe it ceased to be perceptible, because it was veiled by long cultural
assimilation. In West Europe most of feudal aristocracy descended from
Norman warriors, peasants were Indo-European autochthones, craftsmen were
mostly of Celtic and Slavic origin and merchants descended from ancient
sailors and seafarers. European medieval kingdoms were heteronomies but the
upper classes assimilated their tongues to their serfs.
Whatever be the ethnic origin of feudal conquerors, after three centuries
their aristocracy adopts the popular language of serfs and undergoes cultural
assimilation. Such fates befell also the Norman reign in Britain founded by
William the Conqueror in 1066. William replaced the surviving Anglo-Saxon
autonomy by a Norman heteronomy of French stamp. 4000 Saxon landlords
were expropriated by 200 Norman barons seated in unassailable castles.
Peasants became their serfs, only 14 per cent of freemen were let to hold their
20 per cent of land (Morgan 1988: 181). The Norman raids ravaged all
Western Europe as far as the Mediterranean and ensured their kings a
unilateral hegemony with no bilateral counter-balance to challenge their
military power.
When the English and French nation began to emancipate from under the
Norman rule, they felt obliged to separate from the Roman-Catholic popes
who after Gregory VII traditionally acted as Norman allies. The Anglican,
Gallican, Calvinist and Lutheran reformation in the first half of the 16th century
succeeded by restoring bilateral polarisation is foreign affairs. The Protestant
North split off from the Catholic South and separated as a zone of national
74
secular states on its outer periphery. It won national, cultural and religious
autonomy and administrative independence on the pope, Emperor Charles I
and the Spanish Habsburgs. The North could build its autarchy in bilateral
environment after weakening the unilateral predominance of the South.
Conclusions
Very naïve are those observers who interpret the Post-Modern Age of
globalisation as a worldwide propagation of information technologies and fail
to see its deeper economic causes. In foreign affairs there are no dos and
don’ts, no Satans and Angels and no countries that are a live embodiment of
Good and Evil. Tigers will be tigers, hares will be hares and tigers will
globalise hares, whatever standing and viewpoint we take in the hierarchy of
political animals (zoon politicon). Globalisation will benefit advanced powers
but it will prove fatal to underdeveloped countries. Tigers are free to eat hares
only in the disguise of angels exorcising devils, providing they pass laws that
hares' nails are a disastrous threat to all the animal kingdom. Such fables are
indispensable for tiger's everyday subsistence but political sciences cannot be
reduced to tigers' or hares' ideological confabulations. They have to describe
globalisation as a regular periodic process clear of any subjective bias.
Understanding our Global Age presupposes to view it in parallels with all
dark ages of globalisation and in contrast to all bright ages of autonomisation
in the past. Roughly speaking, the first halves of the last four centuries
exhibited tendencies to extensive globalisation while the second halves were
devoted to intensive autonomisation. The approximate growth patterns in the
years between 1997 and 2035 are set up in Table 1 by comparison to the first
half of the 20th century. Present-day conservative parties may be expected to
pursue the political strategies in the interval from Balfour’s unionism and J.
Chamberlain’s imperialism to W. Churchill’s neo-paternalism. In spite of a
financial and industrial origin of new riches, new conservative parties defend
their interests with legitimist, monarchist and expansionist doctrines prevailing
in earlier dark ages. Democratic parties should oppose these political
guidelines by guarding their liberal entrenchments and adhering to the anti-war
politics adopted by their opponents Jean Jaurès and Lloyd George before the
First World War. They should balance extensive globalisation by intensive
progress and broadening the base of social welfare.
THESES TO THE POST-WAR AUTONOMISATION
• Although the 20th century foreign affairs exhibit a general tendency to
extensive globalisation, the post-war era 1945-1989 must be classified as a
period of transient intensive autonomisation. This autonomisation caused
that the unilateral world order with the dominant hegemony of powers was
75
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
disintegrated by bilateral tendencies and shattered to multilateral
autonomies preserving global balance between continental religions
(Christianity, Orthodox Church, Islam, Hinduism). It liberated European
countries from German armies, turned colonies into independent countries
and ensured nations a bloom of their political autonomy.
The post-war era replaced unilateralism with a one-sided hegemony of
powers by bilateralism waging a ‘cold war’ between two blocs. This
‘cold war’, however, guaranteed international peace and contributed to
decolonisation in Asia and Africa. In 1948 the world divided into several
continental blocs (NATO, Warsaw Treaty, the Organisation of American
Countries, the Treaty of Brussels as a forerunner of the European Union).
One cosmopolis disintegrated into military blocs according to religions,
ethnic families and cultural areas.
The bilateral world with the multilateral balance of several world camps
fostered internationalism and entrusted a privileged role to the United
Nations Organisation in settling continental conflicts. International
organisations became a guarantor of peace and national autonomy.
Soviet communism set a classic example of a continental secession of
protestant countries with Marxism as an ideology of protestant
reformation. Regardless of its original intentions, Marxism served as a
convenient tool for installing a centralised bureaucratic autarchy with
state-controlled protectionism and secular cultural institutions. Communist
constitutions revived Puritan morals and engaged citizens in productive
labours. They isolated national countries from cosmopolitan centres and
united them in loose federations of autonomous national states.
Marxism inspired also Afro-Communism (Sékou Touré, Patrice
Lumumba, Nkrumah) as a movement supporting decolonisation in underdeveloped countries. Marxist visions concerning the victory of modern
industrial proletariat functioned as a convenient ideology although they
did not address any working-class and had little to say to poor peasants.
Movements for national independence gave rise to centralised autarchies
in the Third World. Their leaders Násir, Néhrú and Sukarno were
supported by Russia but the Soviet influence could hardly change their
own specific march to popular autocracy and national democracy.
The post-war emancipative autonomism obviously flourished in all
countries and geographic zones irrespective of their economic retardation.
This lawful development was assisted by theoretical Marxism that seemed
to play a universal role as a convenient ideological weapon although its
social doctrines had little in common with ideas of national autonomism.
Rapid industrialisation, economic prosperity, high employment, social and
national emancipation in the post-war era were not special merits of Soviet
76
Communism but standard attributes of all autarchies. Communist ideology
served only as a facultative means for installing an economic syndrome.
THESES TO THE POST-MODERN GLOBALISATION
• The post-modern globalisation after 1989 is the third phase of a global
crisis started by the decadent fin-de-siècle moods at the end of the 19th
century. Its prospective development can be judged from parallels to the
Dark Age of medieval crusades that, despite a short intermezzo of
Troubadour Renascence, continued from 12th to 13th century. The deeper
cause of its cultural stagnation lies in overpopulated mankind and its
having exhausted all available sources and satisfied all consumers’ needs.
This critical state dooms our civilisation to a syndrome of festering
cultural decadence in which all that pays is pseudo-work, pseudo-law,
pseudo-culture and pseudo-science.
• Globalisation generally means integrative and disintegrative processes
opposed to autonomisation. Our Western civilisation dissolved national
states, cancelled national frontiers and weakened national governments.
The centralised governments lost their executive power so that politicians
now act only as beautiful manikins with smiling faces lobbying for
invisible financial, commercial and religious corporations that pull their
strings hidden in the background. Administrative units were diminished to
small districts and counties connected almost directly to the supranational
commissions of the European Union. The collapse of authorities enables
supranational funds to supervise anonymous financial flows of capital
without any intervention of the state.
• Globalisation has pulled down all commercial barriers and brought people
economic liberation. It has fused national states into a universal
cosmopolis beaming with perverse pleasures and occult superstitions like
decadent Athens and Rome. It has given freedom to the provincial
proletariat to migrate money-wise to the large western city centres, work
as inferior slaves and underdogs and replace the idling inefficient
cosmopolitan proletariat. It has set free the magnates of cosmopolitan
oligarchy who have created a system of financial dictatorship that makes
fortunes on free currency rates but impoverishes underdeveloped countries
with weaker currencies.
• Globalisation has opened corporations a road for marching abroad and
absorbing small weak businesses in faraway colonial provinces. Once rich
corporations started conquering the world commercially, they have to
conquer the world also by armed military forces and missionaries
instilling aborigines a new religion of freedom.
• Globalisation is a challenge to all isolated autarchies that either have to
give up their independence and become its victim or they can face its
77
•
menace by inner globalisation. This implies an Elizabethan road of
overcoming reformation by its own self-negating counter-reformation and
its expansive commercial strategies.
The prophets of every global age are its financial, commercial, religious
and military missionaries that wander in numbers from the cosmopolis to
teach barbarians our democratic Christian wisdom. New armies of
crusaders, adventurers, landsknechts and soldiers of fortune consist of
pious knights, pious religious brotherhoods, smart pious tradesmen,
charitable foundations and merciful hospitalites providing medical care.
Their allies are local chieftains that sell their land for a few worthless
trinkets and a bottle of fiery water. All chieftains who are reluctant to open
their borders for such a trade will be proclaimed tyrants and terrorists.
THE ROLE OF DEMOTIC PARTIES
• The role of demotic parties in dark ages of globalisation is not to soothe
us with unrealistic utopian dreams but warn against the serious threats of
the extant cultural crisis. Their historical mission is to navigate the crew of
commons through its dark subterranean waters in patient resistance to the
adventurous Pizarros and Waldsteins on the captain’s bridge. But is the
Elizabethan ’third way’ to luxury possible without our Francis Drakes?
• Their primary goal is to develop direct, participative and representative
democracy without mistaking it for political corruption and oligarchic
plutocracy where medial tycoons can buy and bribe voters.
• The feasible programs of democratic parties in the three half-bright
decades 2000-2030 are predefined by the strategies of Georgian
Liberalism between 1902 and 1929. This label is not derived from
Georgian poets and King George V but the liberal politician D. Lloyd
George (1863-1945). Its goals are to defend secular cultural institutions
against religious fundamentalism, scientific institutions against postmodernist metaphysics, productive labour against financial fraud, civil law
against criminal gangs and international peace against military adventures.
• Demotic parties admit to be unable to shatter down the hegemony of
conservative parties whose predominance in corporative economies rests
on their economic sovereignty and survives even in the forthcoming halfbright decades. They should, however, oppose efficiently their
conservative policies leading from regional separatism to militant
nationalism, global interventions and new expansionism. They should
seclude their political line clearly from the right-wing program of political
counter-reformation because its perspectives may correspond to Ch.
Maurras’s right at the threshold of the 20th century. His political career
followed the lawful development of corporations from regional separatism
to militant nationalism, global interventions and military expansionism.
78
79
NEW FEUDALISM: Political History
The Marxist Interpretation of History
The preceding chapters considered historical and geographical aspects of
political life as a recursive process with relatively stable periodicity
determined by economic oscillation. They attempted to shed light on human
microhistory as a process of circulating elites and economic regimes whose
duration does not exceed a decade. Their considerations would remain
incomplete without a general outline of macrohistory as a process segmented
into long-term periods, epochs and eras. H. Cysarz proposed to develop a field
of historical research concerning their study under as historionomy or
periodology. Its first synthetic projects were outlined by the schools of
historism, positivism and evolutionism in the 19th century.
The modern political theory has its unrecognised and unacknowledged
father in the French School of liberal historiography, influenced by
contemporary positivism. Its founders F. Guizot, A. Thierry, F. Mignet, A.
Thiers and A. Morellet wrote a great number of historical treatises dealing with
the dramatic events of the French revolution in 1789 and its place in modern
history. They concentrated on the young bourgeoisie and the commons as the
Third Estate whose political claims had set moving revolutionary changes. In
his Essai sur l'histoire de France (1821) F. Guizot interpreted the Besiege of
Bastille and years after as a bourgeois révolution aimed at overthrowing the
feudal order. His school was the first to notice its hidden ethnic dimension
because the commons descended from the Celtic Gauls whereas the French
gentry originated in the Germanic Franks. In this sense their social
emancipation meant also their national liberation from German oppressors.
Guizot’s School had a close fellow-traveller in the contemporary trend of
positivist sociology (Saint-Simon, A. Comte) that indulged in applying
Hegelian schematic triads to the evolution of human culture. It was also
influenced deeply by the German Philosophie des Rechts (J. J. Wagner) and
Hegel’s historical school in Germany (Stutzmann, Ast) that concerned with
stages in the history of law, politics and arts. In the 50s their efforts found a
new ally in the ideas of organic evolutionism in Britain (H. Spenser, Ch.
Darwin, H. L. Morgan, J. Lubbock). Evolutionists assumed that historical
epochs were divided by economic milestones and every age had its specific
economic characteristic. J. Lubbock classified human prehistory according to
the technological perfection of tools and implements (Palaeolithic, Mesolithic,
Neolithic). H. L. Morgan classified the growth of early human societies in
several stages up to early kingdoms.
The most important issues of Hegelian and positivist historiography
80
concerned slavery and serfdom as traits distinguishing Altertum from
Mittelalter. This frame of thought determined also the views of contemporary
social reformers J. Proudhon, F. Lassalle, K. Marx and F. Engels who regarded
capitalism as new slavery and dreamt about its defeat by proletarian utopias.
Proudhon proclaimed that every property was a theft and demanded a return to
petty-bourgeois crafts. Marx and Engels turned their hopes to small
revolutionary groups of workers and promoted them to the rank of flag-bearers
of coming proletarian revolutions. In their eyes modern capitalists exploit
workers in the same way as ancient slave-holders exploited slaves and
medieval lords exploited serfs. Each pair of these exploiting and exploited
classes represents one rung on the ladder of economic evolution and defines
one specific historical ‘mode of production’ (Produktionsweise).
K. Marx and F. Engels played the left-wing role of Jacobins and Babeufists
in the German revolution of 1848 and took the same efforts to switch its antifeudal protest into a sort of popular anti-bourgeois rebellion. Being upset by
the political treason of rich bourgeois classes in Germany, they saw the only
revolutionary force worth supporting in the modern proletariat. Their
Communist Manifesto (1848) was an open call to new proletarian revolutions
that became a foundation-stone of modern socialism. Their projects of
proletarian dictatorship resembled visions of Protestant reformers and utopian
thinkers in the past. They extolled autarchy as a union of a popular upheaval of
participative democracy and a strong centralised state bureaucracy with
repressive instruments. Their dreams came true in the post-war East-European
communist regimes that would, however, take a similar turn even without any
theoretical recipes.
Such political aspirations would make Marx feature as a classic utopian
thinker if he did not support his utopian visions by deeper economic studies.
He refused vague dreams about utopias of social justice unless they resulted as
an inevitable consequence from deterministic laws of economic history. He
searched for driving forces conditioning all social revolutions and found their
engine in social classes participating in the ruling division of labour. The
major conclusion of his economic studies was that economic growth
determines political growth and every economic basis determines a
corresponding ‘superstructure’ (Überbau) in political organisation. His look at
economic determinism formulated a new type of philosophical materialism
influenced by contemporary evolutionism. He called it materialistische
Geschichtsauffassung because it transplanted into social sciences evolutionist
ideas about the priory of matter in natural sciences.
Marx’s conception of history insisted on the decisive role of historical
evolution and development, on the priority of material economic forces and
dialectic contradictions as a main source of historical changes. Their inner
81
antagonisms activate social classes and make them carry out revolutionary
transformations and push forth the historical progress. What was the priority of
the material body to the spirit in natural sciences meant a primordial status of
economic forces in social and cultural life. In order to analyse laws of politics,
he started disembowelling the economic bowels of the modern industrial
society and explaining how its glands ensure the cyclic reproduction of its
economical automaton. He surpassed Darwin in understanding the general
causes of economic and social evolution but failed to catch up with him in an
evolutionary systematisation of social history. His focus on synchronic
microeconomy prevented him from devising a Darwinian classification of
economic, political and judicial species and from completing his outlines into a
systematic account of human history.
So Marx rightfully became a Wycliff or a Luther of modern social history
but failed to become its Darwin. His periodisation of historical development
hardly amounts to anything more than a preliminary outline. His unsystematic
considerations on orientalische, asiatische und feudale Produktionsweise (R.
Falber 1971) are too general to give a detailed description of the real pathways
of economic history. The main obstacle preventing from getting a deeper
insight into economic history were the dogmatic prejudices of contemporary
historiography about Sklaverei as a universal mode of production in the
Ancient World. They implied that Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and
Rome did not represent different centres in the extensive growth of human
civilisation but lawful successive stages in one line of intensive development.
This prejudice hindered him from noticing multiple dynamic transformations
in ancient slavery and made him neglect factors of extensive progress.
Marx’s concern with inner intensive economic progress without taking into
account extensive growth was a major disease of all evolutionists of his times.
Simple evolutionary schemes made him await a wave of powerful proletarian
revolutions only in the most advanced European industrial countries that were
beginning to control large colonial dominions. Since England exhibited the
highest level of heavy industries, trade unions and working people, he situated
his revolutionary dreams into the streets of London. This expectation did not
come true, because the 20th century Communism did not emerge in Western
Europe but in the cultural periphery of Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa.
Neglecting regressive development in large expanding empires and
progressive tendencies in the rebellious cultural periphery stopped him from
appreciating progressive aspects in the Slavic Revival in Eastern Europe. In his
opinions undue Slavic claims could endanger the coming of proletarian
revolution in Germany. His general scientific method lay on sound foundations
but his concrete analyses could not exceed the limited scope of contemporary
historical knowledge.
82
Economic Formations
Political theory cannot afford cultivating a special field of Marxist science
since it is as absurd as to speak of Marxist politology as it is to develop a
special field of Darwinian zoology or Mendielevian chemistry. The scientific
truth is impersonal to such an extent that it goes beyond particular historical
persons and its silhouette shapes thanks to huge numbers of researchers.
Glorifying Marx as a saint and martyr of a religious sect and his ‘sacred
words’ as its bible led in Soviet Russia to the ultimate uprooting of Marxism as
a scientific method. Modern social sciences do not need any martyrs and
prophets but a strong antidote to all religious doctrines resting in rational
knowledge. Their most urgent goal is to get rid of historical schematism and to
give a plastic minute description of the dynamics of real social development.
Modern political theory must pass from prophetic visions to empiric statistic
maps giving a true description of social processes in political history. Such
maps (Table 1, 4) confirm that economic crises cause overthrows of
governments as well as revolutions dividing longer epochs. The longest
consistent units of economic history were sought in economic formations
conceived as. long-term stages of economic production lasting several
centuries. Their traditional classification was not based on detailed analyses of
history but a superficial succession of human civilisations. The classic
approach regarded our past as a linear chain of civilisations ordered in a curve
of ascending growth without noticing that all autonomous civilisations
repeated a similar series of intensive stages in larger and larger extensive
scales. The despotic regimes of the Old Kingdom in Egypt and slavery in
Ancient Rome did not imply that Siberia and the Fuego Islands in South
America had lawfully passed them as inevitable stages of their economic
progress. Every isolated region had its own inner homogeneous evolution and
civilisations on other continents remained irrelevant for its growth. This view
implies that Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome must have
passed, with a few modifications, through the same succession of economic
and political formations as medieval kingdoms in Europe. The ancient
civilisations did not have to turn to intensive industrialisation until they could
exploit available extensive sources and spread to neighbouring barbarian areas.
The issue of economic formations was discussed in detail by several
generations of Soviet Marxist historiography. Russian historians reached a
final agreement in adopting V. V. Struve’s (1950: 15) periodisation counting
with five distinct stages: prehistoric communities, slavery, feudalism,
capitalism and communism. This dogmatic conception suppressed all previous
alternative impulses that revealed ancient parallels to European serfdom. These
83
included ‘ancient feudalism‘ (A. G. Prigoshin 1930: 159ff.), J. M.
Kobishchanov‘s ‘eternal feudalism‘ in the Ancient East as well as E.
Welskopf‘s ’patriarchal slavery’ in ancient oriental despocies. The results of
this discussion were summarised by Eric Hobsbaum and M. Shapiro in the
magazine Marxism Today (August 1962, 282-4). Instead of studying dynamic
economic transformations in ancient oriental civilisations, Soviet
historiography accepted the stale doctrine of one unchangeable stage called by
A. I. Tyumenyev allgemeine Sklaverei. The Soviet doctrine neglected K.
Marx’s ‘Asiatic mode of production’, F. Engels’s ‘military democracy’ as well
as Aristotle’s notes about ancient agrarian serfdom (heilotes in Sparta, penestai
in Thessaly, klárótes and afamiotes on Crete and hektamoroi in Athens, cf.
Aristotle, Athen. Pol., 92, 2). It did not worry about huge discrepancies in
chronology: ancient slavery could last five millennia, feudalism lasted five
centuries while modern capitalism needed only a few decades to be beaten by
the ultimate end-point stage of communism.
The dogmatic treatment of ancient slavery made Soviet historiography
refuse all rational arguments comparing medieval kingdoms to the Homeric
world. As Homeric epic resembled medieval Heldenlieder and chansons de
geste, so Spartan heilotes and Athenian hektamoroi resembled medieval serfs
and tyrants in Florence resembled the reign of Peisistratos in Athens. Ancient
civilisations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India and Greece evolved from
early monarchies to feudal disintegration and aristocratic parliamentarianism
(Greek aristocracy, Egyptian nomarchy as constitutional regimes) and through
the system of electoral and fiscal census they arrived at a mercenary economy
of Renaissance type. Serfdom and slavery were not absolute opposites but
parallel approaches to defeated populations revived simultaneously in all
oligarchies at times of conquests. Their mutual distribution resembled bondage
in Africa where conquerors exploited peasants seated on their fields as serfs
and forced pygmy craftsmen seated in towns to work in their palaces as slaves.
Greek and Roman slavery did not differ from modern British and American
slavery in their historical character, both were commercial makeshifts for the
earlier feudal serfdom. Greek and American slavery had to use physical
coercion where continental Europe could apply voluntary servitude. The lack
of land in Europe made paupers became cheap voluntary servants while its
abundance caused importing involuntary slaves from abroad.
Stages in Economic History
The hypothesis of paragenesis maintains that all autonomous civilisations
went through a parallel succession of stages in extending and ascending
circles. It counts with general laws of human demographic growth defined by
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similar rhythms of cultural oscillation in prehistoric, ancient, medieval and
modern civilisations. The laws of paragenesis consist in the regular periodicity
of demographic growth from flourishing utopias in new colonies to epochs of
festering decadence in old settlements. Every epoch of decadence leads to a
deeper inner differentiation and increasing social inequality inside the old
population. Its ultimate crisis is due to exhausting all sources and the state of
dense overpopulation whose severe contradictions may be solved only by
expatriation and new colonisations. Circular processes of periodic migrations
extend human settlements and make them burst out into offshoots of new
colonies. Their peaceful utopias cancel economic inequality and return again to
the stage of original communist equality. The spiral recurrence of periodic
returns in history may be segmented reliably by end-points of demographic
crises. These moments finishing expansive wars and starting new peaceful
utopias serve as natural milestones dividing cultural cycles from one another.
Such cycles repeated in barbarian as well as prehistoric aboriginal societies
but their recurrence became more obvious in times of early kingdoms. The
original stage of tribalism prevailed when independent tribes worked for
themselves and could do with a primitive exchange of labours. This earliest
stage was abandoned when populations became denser and independent tribes
began to live in loose tribal confederacies under the leadership of one tribe
with the strongest military home guard. The transition from scattered tribal
confederacies to petty barbarian kingdoms opened a stage of tributalism when
chieftains extorted tribute from neighbouring tribes. Their strong military caste
fought with other princes and seized duchies until their military dominance
controlled areas as large as medieval national kingdoms. At this stage an
irregular collection of tributes, taxes and money by warring princes changed
into feudalism with regular taxation and collecting the fief. Tributalism
transformed loose tribal confederacies into irregular petty barbarian kingdoms
while feudalism transformed the latter into stable counties. Tributalism obliged
chieftains to pay tributes while feudalism obliged commons to pay tithes to
their counts and required feoffees to pay fief (feoff) to their feoffers.
The economic system of feudalism developed in several subsequent stages:
(A0) tributalism (Latin tributum ‘tax‘) - chieftains make raids on
neighbouring tribes and collect an annual or biannual tribute,
(B1) beneficialism - kings endow their earls (beneficiaries) with
beneficiary fiefs (Latin beneficia) owned as a temporary pay for
administrative functions,
(B2) feudism - feoffees take their beneficiary fiefs into long-term
possession (feudum, copyhold) and may bequeath them to their sons
providing they properly fulfil their military defensive duties,
85
(B3) allodialism - feoffees take fiefs into permanent hereditary
possession, own them as their inalienable property (allodium,
freehold) and disintegrate the kingdoms into small counties.
(B4) censualism - feoffees, guilds and estates become more independent
and begin to pay taxes to the state according to census categories
defined by the amount of their property,
(C1) mercenarism - the Renaissance mode of production employing
servants, maids, farm-hands and soldiers just for board and lodging. It
abolished serfdom but subdued serfs to new forms of hiring servitude.
These successive stages define laws of inner local growth that clearly
applied to medieval Europe but probably operated also in the early history of
the Old Kingdom in Egypt, China and Ancient Greece Their clear tectonics in
ancient societies was obscured by more conspicuous milestones of outer
global growth that consists in spreading advances of one dominant cultural
centre into its outer neighbourhood.
Classic economic history could not decipher shorter stages of social growth
and preferred to treat ancient civilisations in large long-term blocks. Its rough
periodisation distinguished the Ancient Age (slavery), the Middle Age
(serfdom) and the New Age (capitalism) but could not explain why all
countries exhibited parallelism in the dynamics of short-time development. It
failed to see that most civilisations had their autonomous history passing
through stages A0-C1 according to their own economic forces without regard
to other civilisations. The assumed slavery ruling four thousand years BC in
Egypt could have little importance for medieval Europe or modern Alaska.
Economic progress moves forth in intensive as well as extensive direction.
When an ancient kingdom had accomplished an intensive local growth through
stages A0-C1, it had to get hold of surrounding kingdoms and accomplish a
new cycle of extensive evolution during which new regions repeated stages
A0-C1 and old provinces realised them on a larger scale. Such global
involution of peripheral kingdoms into large empires proceeded in accord with
local involution integrating barbarian tribes into the class-divided hierarchy of
labours in the empire. The original cultural centres in Mesopotamia and Egypt
took the initial lead but their pioneering leadership gradually grew stale in
order to give relay to other hegemons, to Assyria, Persia and Rome.
Political Stages
When we apply these medieval economic stages to ancient social history,
we cope with lack of sufficient evidence but can complete it with data from
political development. Economic categories cannot be detached from political,
demographic and religious changes that complete economic regimes into one
86
organic whole. A brief look at the long-term waves of cultural oscillation
(Table 4) shows that tributalism and feudalism can be segmented into a dozen
of shorter cycles (A0-C1). These cycles may be given also a political
description in terms of totality, plurality and duality, introduced in Table 5.
They circumscribe a spiral development from an autarchic totality to a
disintegrated oligarchic plurality and through the stage of duality they head for
a new totality. Transitions from totality to plurality and duality may take
variant forms arraigned on geometric curves in the scaled interval I-VI
envisaged on Table 12.
formation
totality
’in-government’
plurality
’out-government’
’after-state’
duality
tributalism
monogeny
endogeny
polygeny
exogeny
epigeny
digeny
feudalism
industrialism
monarchy
endarchy
polyarchy
exarchy
eparchy
diarchy
monocracy
endocracy
polycracy
exocracy
epicracy
dicracy
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
Table 12. A systematic taxonomy of political macro-regimes
Table 12 outlines a minute 6-grade subdivision of three formations,
tributalism, feudalism and industrialism, each lasting five or six centuries and
divided into five or six economic cycles. These cycles repeat the development
B1-5 from beneficialism to allodialism and censualism at regular intervals. The
sinusoid curve of cultural oscillation may be traced also in terms of political
regimes because economic centralisation presupposes political totality and
economic disintegration requires political plurality. The political engine
revolves from the state of initial totality to an intermediary stage of
decentralised plurality, and through a period of duality (civil wars) it goes back
to a strong united centralised state. Table 12 makes use of local and global
periodicity and divides long economic formations into several series of
political subformations, labelled according to the degree of centralisation.
These labels may be illustrated on medieval Europe whose history included
formations of tributalism and feudalism. Both were composed from five or six
subformations in the interval from totality to duality. Table 13 attempts to
apply this periodisation to the history of England. The first epoch in each
column exhibits tendencies to a strong centralised autocracy and political
absolutism. The second epoch in each column is associated with curialism
shifting the political power from central bureaucracy to the queen’s court and
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court elites. This is an age of troubadours, courtoisie, tournaments and merry
revels. The third and the fourth stage, often compressed into one epoch, bring
administrative decentralisation. The monarch’s court is overshadowed by the
wealth of regional counts and his kingdom disintegrates into small provinces.
TRIBUTALISM
FEUDALISM
400
1500
900
450
INDUSTRIALISM
MONOGENY
Briton
kingdoms
Saxon invasion
500
Alfred the Great
MONARCHY
1550
BENEFICIALISM
classicism
1050
MONOCRACY
humanism
MERCENARISM
classicism
1600
Arthur’s court
550
1100
ENDARCHY
CURIALISM
CURIALISM
600
1150
650
700
1650
ENDOGENY
court aristocracy
courtoisie
ENDOCRACY
metropolitan
merchants
1200
POLYGENY
POLYARCHY
POLYCRACY
MONASTICISM
1250
ALLODIALISM
LIBERALISM
1800
strong feudals
750
1300
1850
CENSUALISM
EXOGENY
800
1350
SENATISM
850
1400
DIGENY
900
1450
EXARCHY
EXOCRACY
1900
SENATISM
peasants‘ war
DIARCHY
The War of
the Roses 2000
SENATISM
DICRACY
Table 13. A comparison of three formations in England
Political pluralism fosters crusaderism and senatism, regional counts
begin to influence political decisions through the senate whose membership is
reserved to rich aristocratic families in provinces. Such polyarchy prevailed
under the reign of John Lackland when strong feudal magnates ruling in
88
regional counties acquired excessive privileges of administrative
independence. The barons’ wars broke the English kingdom into petty counties
(exarchy) of independent status. In some countries exarchy continued by
eparchy if independent counties were annexed to new realms. King Edward I
started a new integration of England culminating in the late 14th century by the
Chaucerian Renascence and the Wycliffite religious reformation. After
suppressing peasants’ rebellions the political system made for new duality
(diarchy) because the old conservative aristocracy in the provinces began a
civil war against new merchant patriciate in large urban centres. In England
such wars divided the royal houses of York and Lancaster (War of the Roses),
in France they raged between the royal families of Armagnac and Burgundy.
At last the conservative royal houses were defeated and had to give way to
new absolutist regimes supported by merchants, artisans and craftsmen.
Ancient Civilisations
This model of economic growth and political development was principally
valid also for ancient civilisations although the succession of inner stages was
often disturbed by external military influences. Table 14 demonstrates similar
periods in ancient Greek and Roman history in spite of a cultural delay of a
few centuries. Rapid local intensive growth could never proceed far without
global extensive progress. Once a pioneering civilisation won a top
commercial position, it took over military leadership in its neighbourhood and
began to repeat a similar succession of cycles as a powerful empire on a larger
geographic scale. The most important milestones were initial centralism,
feudal decentralisation, colonisation and social reforms introducing census as a
basis for military service and paying taxes. After passing aristocratic
constitutions (Lykurgos' Statute c. 800, Romulus' Statute c. 700) that granted
local rulers independence on kings, small city-states (poleis) started a new
integration. They introduced civic societies with administrative censualism and
replaced elected kings by self-appointed tyrants.
The ascent of censualism under Solon in Athens or Servius Tullius in Rome
signalled a decay of regional land-owning aristocracy and the rise of new
merchant classes whose property was based on trade, banking, usury and
crafts. The tyrants in ancient Athens and Rome did not differ from the despotic
rulers in Florence and Venice of the Renaissance age. They relied on the
commons, artisans and townspeople, carried out agrarian reforms and expelled
aristocrats. Their reign ensured small city-states a cultural bloom reminiscent
of Renaissance humanism but it took at least two centuries to extend its
beneficial effects to large agrarian states. Before this early ‘urban monocracy’
(urban renascence) could grow into ‘territorial monocracy’ in large agrarian
89
kingdoms (territorial renascence in absolutist monarchies), small city-states
had to group into two opposite military blocs competing in a system of
political diarchy. In Classic Greece the conservative aristocratic bloc was
represented by Sparta while new merchant classes in city-states united in the
Naval Alliance headed by Pericles’ Athens. The aristocratic social order in
Sparta was doomed to perish but at last it was not the merchant classes of
Athens who humiliated its pride but Macedonian kings who united all Greece.
Absolutist monocracy in large realms introduced into Greece by Alexander of
Macedonia and installed in Ancient Rome by Emperor Augustus looked like a
defeat of urban democracy, but in fact it meant its embedding into a large civic
state with rural provinces requiring administrative strategies of strong
centralised monarchies. Ancient contemporaries could appreciate its political
system as a conservative return to the times of kings, but historians should
compare it to modern absolutist states under Henry VIII or Louis XIV.
The trade with slaves in ancient city-states seemed to represent a specific
alternative to oriental despotism (China, Egypt) and medieval feudalism but
mere chronology in their occurrence should not be mistaken for evolutionary
laws. China and Egypt resembled medieval Europe in preferring serfdom to
slavery and agrarian realms to urban city-states. Their civilisation grew on the
base of huge homogeneous ethnic populations of the same religious
denomination and its economic order worked like medieval bondage. Huge
homogeneity in large agrarian monarchies did not make people seek protection
inside the walls of urban strongholds and prevented from enslaving kinsmen
confessing the same religious faith. So military coercion enslaving captives
had to be replaced by serfdom functioning under the deceptive disguise of a
voluntary religious service to the highest representatives of the church.
On the other hand, ancient Mesopotamia, Greece and Italy gave rise to
pioneering advanced societies living in a heterogeneous surrounding of
underdeveloped barbarian tribes. They developed urban civilisations enclosed
into safe fortified walls and used military power to enslave barbarian tribes
worshipping alien gods. Theirs was an urban model of city-states with a higher
rate of slavery prevailing in isolated pioneering outposts of civilised culture. A
similar model had to be adopted in American plantations where imported
captives had to be forced to work by military coercion. While nobles in
continental Europe had their plantations tilled by the cheap voluntary services
of tenants and grooms who were recruited from paupers forced to earn their
living as servants owing to lack of means, land and money, the abundance of
free land in America made its owners apply military coercion to compel slaves
to do involuntary work. Slavery and serfdom were not successive stages of
human history but complementary and concurrent economic institutions
operating in different rates according to local geographic conditions.
90
1250 ATHENS
1200
1150
MONARCHY 1230Theseus synoikismos
in Athens and Attica
BENEFICIALISM
1100
1050
800
950
900
950
850
1050
1000
Dorian invasion
The Dark Age
Dorian monarchy
wars and decline
The Ionian Coloniation
1000
900
ROME
850
ENDARCHY
CURIALISM
court aristocracy
Homeric spic
poetic contests
POLYARCHY
Lykurgos' Statute 800
strong magnates
800
750
700
750 753- kings elected for 10 years 650
ALLODIALISM
750 Great Colonisation
700
693 kings elected for 1 year
Tullus Hostilius killed
EXARCHY
independent rulers
600
650 -550 Dracon‘s laws
decline & famine
MONARCHY
Latium
Alba Longa
ENDARCHY
CURIALISM?
court aristocracy
Latine colonisation
Rome founded in 755
POLYARCHY
Romulus' Statute
independence on Latium
strong magnates
ALLODIALISM
comitia curiata elected kings
EXARCHY
decline & famine
91
600
550
500
550
DIARCHY
Solon‘s reforms in 594
property census
CENSUALISM
freehold land taxation
URBAN MONOCRACY 500
Peisistratos‘ tyrannis
MERCENARISM
450
CLASSICISM
DEMOCRACY
400
OLIGARCHY 411, 404/3 350
oligarchic decadence
global diarchy
250
350
300
Alexander the Great
Hellenistic empire
MONOCRACY
400
MERCENARISM in Sicily
Dionysios of Sicily
CLASSICISM
AUTOCRACY
oligarchic decadence
global diarchy
Punic wars
200
250
150
200
100
150
DIARCHY
550 Servius Tullius‘ reform
property census
CENSUALISM
freehold land taxation
the republic founded in 510
kings expelled
URBAN MONOCRACY
Hellenistic decadence
50
Greek states became part
of the Roman Empire
0
100
50
DEMOCRACY
Roman democracy
optimates vs. populares
civil wars
MONOCRACY
Augustan empire
92
Table 14. The parallel political development in Ancient Greece and Rome
monarchy
diarchy
polyarchy
anarchy
TRIBUTALISM
3200
3100
3000
2900
2800
2700
2600
2500
TRIBUTALISM - chieftains collect
tribute from their neighbours
DIGENY - permanent wars between
chieftains of Upper and Lower Egypt
..................................................
Early Kingdom - Menes was made pharaoh of Upper
and Lower Egypt, Upper and Lower Egypt unified
BENEFICIALISM - the pharaoh gives beneficia
as loans to his generals
MONARCHY - the pharaoh considered the sole
ruler and possessor of all land
the first pyramids under the 3rd dynasty
NEPOTISM - the rule of the royal clan and
the family council, uncles rule provinces
HIEROCRACY - the rule of high priests
given land so that they might officiate
the funeral cult of pharaos
.............................................
ENDARCHY - the rule of court aristocracy
CURIALISM - the flourish of metropolitan
nobility, pharaos’ pyramids diminishing
courtiers’ tombs growing in size
and luxury
2400
2300
NOMARCHY/POLYARCHY
provincial nomarchs richer than pharaos
ALLODIALISM - provincial rulers
nomarchs possess land as
permanent hereditary owners
2200
2100
EPARCHY - many independent
rulers in independent states
decline & famine
93
2000
1900
Middle Kingdom, pharaohs fight
with independent nomarchs
CENSUALISM - classes and estates
pay census, land-owners pay taxes
and labourers pay rents
every tenth client recruited to army
1800
1700
15th Great Hyksos dynasty
DIARCHY - the country subdued
to the Hyksos rulers
16th Little Hyksos dynasty
between 1630-1562
1600
1500
1400
1300
DIARCHY 18th dynasty Ahmose
the Hyksos expelled, the warring
states reconquer the country
the period of integration
..............................................................
MONOCRACY
1364 Amenhotep IV starts
Aton's reforms CLASSICISM
Ramses expansion
1200
1100
1000
900
from Ramses IV 1138
20th dynasty
palace coups
decline & anarchy
rebellions
ENDOCRACY
decadence
Libyan soldiers
of fortune
800
Table 15. The political formations in Ancient Egypt
94
monarchy
2200
2100
2000
1900
diarchy
polyarchy
anarchy
TRIBUTALISM
DIGENY
Yao dynasty
TRIBUTALISM - chieftains collect tribute
kings elected
military democracy
dynasty Shun
..............................................................
FEUDALISM
Hsia dynasty, its founder Great Yu
established hereditary succession of kings to rule
MONARCHY - hereditary kingship
BENEFICIALISM - the king wang is the sole
possessor of land and lends its lots to vassals
1800
1700
1600
1500
1400
1300
1200
1100
NEPOTISM - the rule of the royal clan and
the family council, uncles rule provinces
Shang & Yin dynasty 1700
po ‘uncle‘ & ‘duke in a province‘
large tombs with human sacrifices
.................................................
ENDARCHY
the rule of court aristocracy
CURIALISM
the flourish of metropolitan nobility
POLYARCHY - provincial rulers are stronger
than kings, the capital moved to Yin
ALLODIALISM - provincial rulers possess
land as permanent hereditary fiefs
Western Chou dynasty 1122-771
1116 rebellion of Yin
a provincial royal house wins
over the metropolitan kings
95
900
EXARCHY
crisis 878-828
rebellion in 842
many independent rulers
era of weak kings
781-771 crisis
...................................................
800
700
CENSUALISM - estates pay census
in 594 land taxation in Lu
a hereditary possession of land
labourers pay a monetary rent
600
500
Warring states 403-221
counties begin to integrate
DIARCHY - battles between
five royal clans
400
300
...........................................
MONOCRACY - a centralised secular state
the rule of legist bureaucracy and mercenary soldiers
the ascension of the Chkin dynasty to rule in 221
MERCENARISM - the economic mode of production based
on the hired mercenary work of voluntary servants
200
100 legists
0
100
ENDOCRACY
NEPOTISM - numerous palace coups
riots and rebellions
decline decadence and refeudalisation
Table 16. The growth of civilisation in Ancient China
Table 15 demonstrates similar stages and patterns of growth in Ancient
Egypt whereas Table 16 outlines parallels in the political development of
96
Ancient China. Their political history bears general resemblance to European
medieval feudalism, though all changes occurred in larger proportions and at a
slower pace. Egyptian feudalism was based on the hierarchy of temple priests
who administered mortuary cults to pharaohs and their vassal nomarchs.
Pharaohs gave priesthood donations of land together with peasants attached to
its cultivation as serfs. Priests dwelt in temples and gave offerings to the spirits
of dead pharaohs whose body lay embalmed in the local pyramid. These
offerings consisted of bread made from corn and flour provided by peasant
serfs compelled to pay tithes and carry out corvée labours in the fields owned
by priesthood. The system could not work without slaves building pyramids.
In spite of specific traits of Egyptian cults the political history of Ancient
Egypt exhibited sinusoid curves with cultural oscillation similar to medieval
societies. The Old Kingdom started with a period of strict centralism because
pharaoh distributed fiefs of land to their nomarchs who held them as temporary
beneficia in reward for their military help and service. The Middle Kingdom
brought feudal disintegration because nomarchs became independent on
pharaohs and their tombs exceeded royal pyramids in wealth and luxury. In the
New Kingdom under the reign of Amenhotep Egypt became a sort of
absolutist monarchy with the church reformed by Aton’s cult and the
conservative priesthood replaced by a secular bureaucracy of scribes employed
as clerks in state services.
The gradual transition from strict centralism in early monarchies to feudal
disintegration in decentralised warring states could be observed also in the
ancient history of China demonstrated on Table 16. Chinese feudalism rested
on ancestral cults and dignitaries administering the rites of filial piety. A
natural circulation of nutrition from peasants tilling the land to gentry enjoying
its yields in reward for military service was mystified as a circulation of
offerings to the spirits of dead fathers. The serfs were considered obedient sons
giving offerings of tithes to the lord who acted as their imaginary father and
justified their bondage by rendering similar services to the spirits of dead
grandfathers. Despite large numbers of slaves working as servants in the
palaces, the village common was not set free and clear of feudal duties.
When we compare different cultural areas, we may observe that countries in
Western Europe, Central Europe and Scandinavia oscillated in a similar
rhythm of changes but some zones were delayed and moved on different levels
of long-term cycles. Progress proceeded from within to without, growing like a
coral island and allowing for several variant roads of growth. If a civilisation
succeeded in prosperity as an advanced outpost and headland of economic
progress in an alien heterogeneous surrounding it had to choose the urban
model of evolution with a high rate of slavery. If it, however, grew in a huge
homogeneous surrounding, it could not exploit kinsmen as involuntary slaves
97
and had to impose upon them involuntary bondage motivated by religious
pretexts of voluntary offerings and voluntary services. This was an agrarian
road of historical progress found inevitable in large agrarian empires with
strong centralised absolutist regimes.
Conclusions
The issues of economic formations are of crucial importance for political
ideology because most modern parties justify their political claims by laws of
economic progress. After the French Revolution they all ceased to defend their
interests by the deceptive pretexts of religious theology and began to seek
argumentation in economic needs and strategies. Conservative parties abandon
faith to promise financial prosperity while socialist parties appeal to working
masses in the name of relentless defenders of their economic demands. Both
camps accept the view that progress in prosperity justifies leadership. Its
implications are fairly close to the major proposition of Marx’s theory of
revolutions: new social forces (working-class) grow in number so long as to
overthrow the extant ruling regime by a new economic formation and replace
the hegemony of old well-to-do classes by the leadership of new progressive
classes. This is a secular account of political struggle that modern thinkers
accept with a reservation that such circulation does not concern classes but
elites. The whole theory of social change needs revising by a few corrections:
THESES TO ECONOMIC FORMATIONS
• Modern political ideology is confused by misleading terms for economic
formations. Capitalism, socialism and communism are short-time dynamic
phases of every formation but they considered as long-term economic
formations coming as lawful successors after medieval feudalism.
• Economic formations last at least half a millennium and consist of five to
six subformations of two-century duration comprising smaller cycles.
They are of little avail in everyday political causes unless they are
analysed into shorter economic cycles allowing for one-decade booms
(Juglar’s cycles) and five-decade periods (Kondratieff’s cycles).
• Revolutionary overturns are inevitable because no society can make a step
forward from one economic cycle to another without putting a new elite of
charioteers and a new yoke of masses to the carriage. Politics is a form of
collective maintenance tending the national economic engine. Political
revolutions awaken people to collective economic solutions and rotate
social leadership. They help economic crises dethrone old elites and
enthrone new elites at short intervals lasting even less than one decade.
• Revolutionary changes should be conceived in terms of Vilfredo Pareto’s
(1935) circulation of elites: masses, workers and students in the streets
98
•
•
•
•
revolt but the control of political institutions is passed from old elites to
new elites. The social role of masses is as indispensable as that of elites.
The pace of political progress marches in zigzag peristaltic oscillation,
political development goes right or left in Kitchin’s four-year cycles. Leftwing movements take the lead in the years of crises, radical reforms and
ascending phases, the ring-wing conservative elites take the lead at the top
arcs of stagnating establishment.
Long-term economic formations with statistic indices of industrial growth
can hardly ever arouse political passions and kindle the flame of political
strife. The sole concern of struggle between political parties is perpetual
levelling between elites and masses and a gradual circulation of elites
and masses in short-time series of economic booms (Tables 9a and 9b).
Elites elevate the height and masses broaden the breadth of economic
bowels but their inner pressures obey the rules of peristaltic periodicity
transforming their dynamic roles.
Left-wing movements enable masses to carry out the horizontal
dilatation (redistribution, equalisation) of the social wealth in the
economic intestines and extend the breadth of its lower basis.
Conservative elites attempt at the vertical elevation of the economic body
consisting in its steeper economic differentiation and an asymmetric
distribution of material riches.
All political parties attempt to pursue one stable program without realising
changing economic needs that govern and transform real social
movements, without realising their chaotic role in rapid economic
changes. All left-wing parties gradually move from communism to
tradeunionism, ecologism and anarchism while all conservative parties
accompany their march by reforming conservatism into paternalism,
liberalism and monarchism. Their premeditated doctrines mean nothing,
their spontaneous participation in social turmoil means everything.
THESES TO SOCIALISM
• Modern socialism has overcome the limitations of medieval ideology
disguising political changes in terms of protestant reformations and
orthodox counter-reformations and it has given them the name of real
economic forces. However, for purposes of historical self-reflection and
statistic comparison it has to realise its historical place and periodic
occurrence in series of religious reformations and counter-reformations.
• Socialism revives the ideas of protestant and heretic reformations that
historically coincide with the bright ages of centralised autarchic societies.
It consists in the program of Puritan ethic defending the standards of
constructive labour and sound collective family life against individual
acquisition and economic criminality.
99
•
•
•
Its ideas awaken again and again with all popular movements and
rebellions in history, with all upheavals of direct, participative and
representative democracy in Pericles’ sense of the word.
What classic Marxism imagined as a lawful evolution from feudalism to
capitalism, socialism and communism actually repeats in half-century
cycles in a reversed order. People tired of wars found sweet communist
utopias but these gradually degenerate into petty-bourgeois liberalism and
socialist tradeunionism. When all resources are exhausted, communist
elites return to money-grubbing capitalism and after making fortunes they
preach new monarchism in hopes to become new high aristocracy.
Historical phases of industrialism do not consist in a linear growth of new
manufacturing classes but obey higher laws of cultural evolution defined
by periodic curves of social demography. Working classes take the lead in
eras of post-war reconstruction but in dark ages they disappear to be
replaced by immigrant Gastarbeiter workers or by slaves imported from
underdeveloped countries. The idea of linear progress owing to the
increase of working-class proletariat and its constant pauperisation in the
factories is refuted by periodic curves of repeated booms and crises.
THESES TO COMMUNISM
• Communism as a political regime realistically applies only to the initial
decade in the periods of reconstruction after disastrous ‘sacred wars’. The
construction of Communist society does not really proceed as a planned
building of its material base in several stages from ‘popular democracy’
through ‘advanced’ and ‘highly-developed socialism’ up to the utopia of
blissful communism but by its gradual deconstruction (Abbau), by
deconstructing socialism. The richer and the better-to-do a society is, the
stronger position its elites conquer and the nearer is approaching the day
of its final pulling down by the capitalist system of private ownership.
• All communist utopias in human history have a real historical content in
the strict Puritan regimes of bureaucratic elites dominating in post-war
eras when productive intelligentsia makes a strong political bloc with
discontent popular masses and they together introduce strict autocratic
regimes. It is a new term for ancient tyrannis, medieval secular
ghibellinism and modern absolutist monarchies that cultivated the same
regimes of strong state bureaucracy. Its goal is to meet the requirements of
post-war reconstruction and to overcome poverty by a planned statecontrolled economic management. Every communism develops into more
liberal forms of government according as new elites acquire new riches.
• The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat is a vague word for a few
years of a short-time rule of street masses in all eras of civil disobedience
but its chaotic turmoil soon disappears to give way to the rule of
100
•
•
•
•
paternalist absolutism dictated by bureaucratic elites. It is a misused
word for a strict centralist rule of administrative educated intelligentsia
(civil servants, teachers, physicians) in productive bright economies.
The decisive political role in post-war socialist autarchies was not played
by the ‘international proletariat’ but secular intelligentsia building
centralised social systems in national states. Its elite acted like
Renaissance humanists in close alliance with working masses: it enforced
high protestant reformation in close alliance with low popular reformation
in the streets. In many countries of Asia and Africa it reigned despite the
weakness of industrial proletariat and machine production in factories.
This alliance was based on a positional balance of two independent social
forces and their strategic cooperation against national oligarchy as their
common enemy. This alliance of secular intelligentsia, administrative state
bureaucracy and popular democy applied the ideas of communism for
needs of post-war reconstruction, for introducing rational social reforms, a
planned state-controlled economy and centralised administration.
The current political sciences dub protestant autocracies as
totalitarianism and oligarchic plutocracies as genuine parliamentary
democracies. But the truth is that all protestant autarchies are unstable
dualities where the orthodox catholic half is temporarily outnumbered by
the heterodox (heretic, protestant, atheistic) half and a weaker half of provincial states secludes by dual, bilateral secession from the imperial half.
Conservatives should not loathe communism because communism is only
a larval stage of a conservative insect and they loathe only their better self.
It is a constructive phase of their destructive politics formulating a
program of bureaucratic elites before they develop into technocratic and
corporative elites. The best conservatives were communitarian utopists
(Plato, Th. More, F. Bacon).
THESES TO CAPITALISM
• Capitalism is a misnomer used vaguely for our extant ruling formation of
industrialism and misinterpreting its historical content by undue
emphasis on financial capital. Most people speak of capitalism in
reference to an economic system of private ownership, free trade and
uncontrolled financial speculation and they forget that this is only one of
several periodic phases of modern industrial societies. In this sense
capitalism represents only stagnating and decaying phases of modern
industrialism while communism, socialism, technocratism and liberalism
represent its dynamic constructive phases.
• Industrialism can be defined as free individual hired labour in a society
of free individual citizens where industrial production consisting in an
intensive processing of sources exceeds the rate of agricultural production.
101
•
•
•
•
Their mutual proportion in isolated countries is the only reliable absolute
criterion of economic progress and industrial growth.
The very crux of all vague speculations about capitalism is not massproduction, toil and drudgery in large factories but acquisitive practices of
private corporative ownership in decaying phases of stagnating
economy that repeatedly make its critics erect the banners of healthy
productive collective communism. Most critical complaints of ruthless
capitalism hardly amount to more than sentimental outpourings unless we
specify the meaning of capitalism as one of periodic returns of economic
corporativism, as an economic system of possessing all material and
spiritual sources by private independent corporations. Corporativism can
be defined as a corporative system of private ownership by groups of
shareholders who take part in collective decisions according to their
financial participation and the amount of capital invested.
Economic strategies of corporativism can be reduced neither to the
tendencies of the Italian state capitalism in the thirties nor to Roosevelt’s
New Deal because it comprises a broad scale of changing economic
strategies from decentralised pluralism to state-controlled centralism and
from independent oligopolies to powerful state monopolies. The 20th
century capitalism was blamed for giving birth to monopolies absorbing
mercilessly smaller businesses but monopolisation is typical only of final
phases of state capitalism. The real nature of corporations lies in
oligopolies functioning as financial, commercial, religious and military
corporations arraying troop of their dependent clients into combatant files.
Oligopolic corporations seem to represent an innocent mode of collective
participative ownership on a free competitive market giving equal chances
to every individual participant. The very truth is that the ropes of decisionmaking are in the hands of powerful magnates (oligarchs) who can
control trade, media and governments. It is an economic mode of
possession shaped as a steep pyramid with the top of magnates and the
broad lower base of their uncountable smaller dependent clients. Modern
European societies now fall under control of medial magnates (T. Turner,
S. Berlusconi, B. Berezovsky) and money-grubbing plutocracy but the
realistic usage should consider R. Aron’s reservation that ‘all democracies
lapse into oligarchy’ and return to Aristotle’s conception of oligarchy.
Capitalism is misused imprecisely as a term for the modern industrial
society and its private corporative ownership without realising its links to
the corporative forms of property in the Ancient and the Medieval World.
Private corporations may take shape of religious foundations, orders and
brotherhoods, medieval guilds, ancient amphictyonies, colonial companies
and their private hired armies, modern monopolies and financial groups.
102
BERLUSCONISATION: Political Typology
Political Parties
People tend to identify political parties with some abstract ideas and moral
principles without realising their historical role in social transformations.
Liberal parties are said to preach liberalisation and conservatives are believed
to proclaim conservation, but such programs will remain vague unless they are
considered in respect to definite economic tendencies reappearing in recurrent
situations. Stale doctrines mean nothing, the live core of parties are
spontaneous movements that appear and disappear as ripples of waves of
invisible inrushing streams of economic cycles. Political organisations
(Conservative Party, Labour Party) are visible aggregates of people who
enforce their social visions by means of their leaders and secretariats but their
deeper essence consists in invisible tendencies of economic transformations.
They resemble inertial physical bodies whose substance, structure and texture
are immaterial, and all that matters are the vectors of underlying physical
forces exerted upon their motion. Political sciences should resign from dealing
with parties as static bodies and constitute them as a sort of vector algebra of
social forces. They should treat political movements as dynamic units whose
energy is dissipated by motion in an abstract social space.
Understanding modern politics is hindered by a great deal of trivial visible
trifles that distract the eye of the political savage and prevent him from
perceiving its deeper invisible essence. The essence of modern conservatism
lies in the stagflation syndrome that went off in 1975 and made most European
political parties go right and more conservative. Its common denominator in all
countries is an invisible economic undercurrent that escapes the naïve
observer’s notice because his eye concentrates only on superficial and
accidental events. Conservatism is usually identified (a) with individual
persons who act as founders, leaders, heralds, saints or martyrs, (b) political
apparatuses and secretariats, (c) with traditional flags, icons, symbols, coatsof-arms and colours, (d) ideology as a set of abstract principles or (e) social
attitudes, passions and desires. But none of these attributes expresses faithfully
the whole economic syndrome underlying all similar conservative revivals in
the past. The very gist of Thatcherism as a term for the new conservative right
does not lie in Margaret Thatcher’s ideas proclaimed after she was installed as
the prime minister of Britain in 1979 but in a hierarchy of economic (political,
cultural, artistic) values generated by the stagnation between 1975-1981.
In the post-war years the British Conservative Party has defended a number
of various incoherent programs of paternalist or even Socialist stamp but it
celebrated its true resurrection only when mounted to the royal saddle by the
103
ascent of a new conservative era in 1975-6. It is next to impossible to compare
conservatism in Britain, Soviet Russia and China because their political parties
rest on heterogeneous incompatible cultural traditions but all appearances of
conservatism in various countries get a common denominator when reduced to
the same direction of economic transformations in similar historical situations.
Conservatism is a trend of a steep economic differentiation at the threshold of
all dark decadent eras and its regular effect is deforming the shape of the social
hierarchy vertically by elevating new rich elites.
The general morphology of social systems, represented as pluralities,
totalities, dualities and equalities in an abstract social space (Table 5), has its
diminished sample and shop window in the typology of political parties. Table
17 displays different types of political parties considered as formal geometric
figures in an abstract social space. Since conservative parties support a steep
economic differentiation and a steep elitist social hierarchy of classes, they are
likely to exhibit patterns of a steep elitist hierarchy also in their inner political
subordination. On the other hand, democratic egalitarian parties, struggling for
social equality, must accordingly have an egalitarian organisation resting on
masses. Hence parties may be divided into the following structural types:
1. elitist parties: parti de cadre ‘a party of cadres‘ (Duverger 1951, 1981),
parti de notables (Charlot 1970: 63ff.), Weber‘s Honorationpartei,
2. leaders’ parties: Führerspartei, ‘a party of one man and one leader‘,
3. mass parties: Weber‘s Massenpartei (Fiala, Strmiska 1998: 77ff.), parti
de masses ‘a party of masses‘ (Duverger 1951, 1981), parti d‘électeurs
‘a party of voters and electors‘ (Charlot 1970: 63ff.),
4. apparatus parties: Weber‘s Büropartei and also his Patronagepartei,
5. popular parties: catch-all party, omnibus party ‘a party of all people‘,
attrape-tout, Volkspartei ‘popular party‘,
6. spontaneous parties: syndicalist parties of l’action directe ‘direct action‘
led by charismatic leaders, public speakers and intellectual vanguards.
elite
leader
(3)
(1)
(2)
mass basis
apparatus
vanguard
(4)
people
(5)
Table 17. A schematic morphology of parties
(6)
104
Political Trends
Such typology of parties is constituted as an abstract geometry of social
forces in belief that any party, inclusive of the Communist party in Soviet
Russia, may become conservative if it adopts an elitist structure in an era of
elitist social differentiation. A political trend is a force endowed with an
amount of energy exerted in a definite direction, regardless of its starting-point
and the political body upon which it is acting. A political trend is a visible
manifestation of an invisible economic trend, it is its live interpreter and
solicitor appearing at court only in company with its client. Political sciences
may be conceived as a formal trendology regarding all political movements
as forces attempting to reform the extant society in a desirable way. Every
trend functions as a complex of several ‘deformation tensors’ distorting the
social body by vector forces exerted upon its surface.
An illustrative sample of simple formal definitions is given in Table 18.
Such definitions do not look exhaustive and explicit enough but they manage
to express political trends formally as geometric shifts. They situate them
between the poles of totality and plurality on one hand and the extremes of
equality and elitist hierarchy on the other hand. So the political left is said to
defend the principles of emancipating masses while the political right is
supposed to back up the ideal of elitist superiority and the individual
differentiation of elites at the cost of popular masses. Communism opposes
conservatism by restricting elites by administrative totality while liberalism
sets the elitist oligarchy free by enhancing administrative plurality.
communism:
socialism:
liberalism:
conservatism:
fundamentalism:
restricting elites
emancipating masses
individualisation of elites
superiority of elites
intolerance of elites
totality
equality
individuality
plurality
duality
Table 18. A spatial quantification of political trends
Such formalisation does not only help introduce a formal calculus in
political studies but also provides them with reliable foundations because the
accidental phenomena of static entities are omitted and reduced to essential
tendencies of recurrent economic cycles. It enables us to detach every political
program from intricate ideological reasoning and define it as a formal shift in a
geometrical space. Some shifts consist in deforming the social body by
emancipation and equalisation, some use pluralisation and individualisation,
differentiation and discrimination or restriction and repression. Such formalism
105
redefines the basic concepts of social and political sciences in terms of
axiology understood as a general theory of social and cultural values. It
explains every ideology as a palpable expression of an impalpable hierarchy of
economic values generated dynamically by booms and crises. As various
sectors of industry change prices, costs and wages, their axiological evaluation
encroaches also upon moral valuables, it sets up a price list of books,
paintings, sciences, family, church and law. Understanding how such axiology
actually works and how its mechanics determines political movements is
almost impossible but it suffices to trace such changes by growth graphs of the
yearly figures of different cultural products. Such statistic maps will show that
all fields of culture oscillate in one rhythm and undergo similar formal
transformations. Their projections on different fields of culture may be ordered
by inequalities between their characteristic keywords in Table 19:
communism
’ultra-left’
state
authorities
punishment
collectives
education
<>
<>
<>
<>
<>
<>
<>
socialism
’left’
people
labour
rights
society
science
<>
<>
<>
<>
<>
<>
<>
conservatism
‘right’
church
authority
privileges
family
scholastics
<>
<>
<>
<>
<>
<>
<>
fundamentalism
‘ultra-right’
pseudo-elite
speculation
terror
mafias
pseudo-science
Table 19. Basic inequalities of trends in the political space
Systematic Classification
The most essential import of such a formal approach is that political
doctrines are detached from accidental traits determined by the heritage of
local cultural traditions. When we omit considering their contingent substance,
we find that political thought in Christian, Protestant, Moslim, Hinduist and
Communist countries displays similar patterns regardless of specific cultural
traits. Instead of enquiring into various national philosophies of political life
we get one integrated systematic methodology of all fields of human culture
manifested in similar ways in most countries in the world. Its gist consists in
social dynamics that does not concentrate on ideas, theories and philosophical
doctrines but primarily deals with social attitudes. It regards every ideology as
a rush of political passions expressing contradictions between the departing
and the forthcoming system of economic values. When we abstract from
tedious traditional terms, we may integrate all social and political sciences into
one systematic taxonomy conceived as an integral cultural axiology of all
fields of culture.
106
CYCLE A
y
bonapartism
fundamentalism
x
communism
conservatism
social democratism
civilism
liberalism
CYCLE B
y
imperialism
corporatism
messianism
paternalism
x
modernism
mannerism
cosmopolitism
Table 20. A classification of political trends in bright and dark cycles
107
Table 20 attempts to sketch a general classification of political trends as a
circular spectrum of all colours. It does not represent them as static extremes
but orders them as they follow one another in short-time cycles. Their rotation
is represented as a circular algorithm moving the hands of the economic clock
clockwise in the direction of economic cycles. Their pace makes political
parties undergo parallel changes in adjacent geographic zones and
neighbouring national countries but their treasons of ideas conceal deeper
laws. These laws consist in a synchronised rhythm of rotating the inner
hierarchy of values ruling inside every society and in similar patterns of their
expression in ideology, philosophy, law and arts.
Both spectra display analogous patterns because they pursue the pace of
analogous economic cycles but their inner quality exhibits different shades of
colouring. The lower spectrum of political colours in dark cycles is a
projection of the upper spectrum of colours in bright cycles but it differs by
darker colouring. The arraignment of political trends is determined by their
similarity and position of the axes in the abstract social space (Table 5) where
the x-axis orders trends in the range from plurality to totality and the y-axis
orders them in the interval from low equality to steep verticality. Yet it
coordinates them also according to their subsequent transitions in cultural
cycles that rotate analogous political movements. Their meaning and nature
may be elucidated by comparison to the parallel diagrams of political
development in Table 1.
Political changes have no inner purpose in their free interplay but serve
instrumentally as a battlefield for settling quarrels between the departing and
the coming economic vanguards. The economic engine would not be able to
move from one state into another without changing productive strategies by
taking flexible measures. It could not make a step forward without
calumniating the old political vanguard and glorifying political champions of
economic elites. The inner economic meaning of political changes may be
deciphered by means of comparing political and economic trends in Table 6.
Their survey makes it clear that cultural growth in real history exhibits much
lawfulness as well as much irregular variation due to different levels of the
relative altitude of cycles. A political movement can be classified reliably as
conservatism but various historical occurrences of conservatism differ a lot by
being positioned on different levels of cultural altitude according to long-time
tendencies of cultural prosperity and decadence (Tables 2 and 4). A paternalist
movement will look very conservative in darker cycles but it may draw nearer
to communism in lighter cycles. Cultural waves tide and ebb like the waves of
seas and oceans. They are driven by deep submarine undercurrents but obey no
laws of precise timing and divine predestination.
108
POSTMODERNIST FUNDAMENTALISM: Political Ideology
Political Psychopathology
All political parties, however bad, rotten and corrupt, have their bad guys
and good guys, their devils and saints, bad names and good laudatory names,
but all this sticky ideological stuff amounts to no more than confused feelings
of a patient waiting for a qualified psychiatrist’s examination. The very
concern of political sciences is not with biased ideologies but with outlining
the systematic diagnostics and general symptomatology of all political, cultural
and philosophical diseases in all countries and nations. An uncouth patient’s
mania may grow up into the psychiatrist’s science only after years of diligent
self-study when the latter can see the given case and political situation from an
overview of many similar medical cases in history. Political attitudes express
social passions bursting out in fiery harangues in favour of this or that political
party but their scientific treatment should stand high above their feeling.
Political sciences should not impress us with subjective passions but ought to
provide objective knowledge diagnosing and classifying all political diseases.
They should set up a historical and geographical atlas of all ideological trends
so that might find out our location on its maps and orient our steps safely
through the next decades.
Scientific politics cannot be reduced to a stale one-sided doctrine or a shorttime politics of remedial measures but consists in understanding social
processes in their historical course as well as everyday consequences. As Karl
Jaspers foresaw in his Psychopathologie der Weltanschauungen (1921),
political movements resemble mental disorders that insinuate various distorted
visions of our social reality. They propagate like epidemics of contagious
diseases that infect their victims in a lawful sequence of several incubation
phases. Whoever wants to take part in politics, can engage in its strife as its
patient or a graduated physician. The savage mind of a common observer
easily falls victim to an infection of intrusive propaganda spread by politicians
and ideologues that act as its bacillus-carriers. The greater number of people a
politician infects, the more successful his political career and campaigns are.
Because the glands letting out political hormones are still hidden in obscurity,
the present-day voter, politician and ideologue continue to remain innocent
patients rather than expert psychiatrists curing our diseases. They practise their
political statecraft as dumb instruments rather than beings endowed with
ingenious wit and reason. They act as ordinary mechanical conductors of
social moods that send street crowds into frenzy and translate their raving into
the sublimed sophisticated discourse of political salons.
109
A qualified political psychiatrist approaches his political patient in a way
different from ideologues. He understands that anarchism, communism,
liberalism and conservatism are just malades d‘un jour and the point of his
vocation is not to talk his patient out of such fantastic visions but to go into
their deeper causes. He can foresee possible prognoses with realistic prospects
of recovery and treats him by removing tumours in his brain. He makes him
aware of alternative choices and gives him a fair treatment doing his health
good. He does not promise false miracles but offers reliable knowledge.
The main obstacle of ideology as ‘a scientific study of political ideas’ is its
identification with ‘ideology as a system of subjective ideas’. As a result,
scientific political theories are refused as ideological lies and religious
fantasies are praised as the authentic truth. In politics politicians still rule over
politologists and madmen rule over their psychiatrists. False ideologues win by
brewing lies and passing them off as eternal rational truths. Scientists lose by
proving them guilty of a collision of economic interests and curing them from
invisible diseases The speech of economic necessity delivered in statistic
figures leaves common people cool and bored unless it addresses their brains
by a dramatic puppet play of fairy-like monsters and moves their aesthetic
feelings. Modern politics still consists in secular rites and myths, politicians act
as priests administering their mass with oblation at public gatherings. The
ancient commandments, theogonies, prophets, holy fathers, saints and martyrs
changed into the modern cult of national heroes, classic writers and
philosophical geniuses but their social function has undergone no essential
change. Even if political sciences reach deeper understanding, their voice will
not be heard in the roar of cunning charlatans selling deceptive ideologies.
One solution is to call the scientific study of political ideas ideography and
avoid identifying doctors with patients by setting up its foundations as a
systematic diagnostics of ideological diseases. Politicians, philosophers and
artists, who act as priests selling cultural illusions, must be divorced from
scientists who act as religionists. Ideography must provide a systematic
classification of ideologies and confine ideologues to theoretical cells in
lunatic asylums. Its victory over ideological tigers will consist in describing
and isolating them sooner than they manage to devour the innocent explorer.
Systematic ideography
Every political theory attempts to explain questions (a) who we are, (b)
which people are our like and which are our antagonists, (c) when we exist, or
what political time it is, and (d) where we are situated, where we march and
what place of destination we are likely to reach. Such questions elucidate our
political situation in the political history but cannot be solved satisfactorily
110
without elucidating history as a whole, without explaining our past as a
continuous thread of all political possible situations. Constructive politics will
not obscure these issues by popular myths and fairy-tales but it will elucidate
them by a systematic classification explaining all political moods and feelings.
When we consider the present-day political vocabulary with terms such as
‘globalisation’, ’democracy’, ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘human rights’, we tend to
adopt them in a biased, deformed sense. We deform their meaning because we
look at social phenomena from the viewpoint of our historical situation and our
hierarchy of values without understanding our position in history. Every
society applies ideology to defend the rule of its own cultural values but
cultural values keep changing and their valid meaning can be deciphered only
by finding a set of similar historical situations with similar systems of values.
Ideologues will propagate false terms and theoretical labels until political
sciences give all social phenomena a systematic treatment similar to the
Linnean classification of species. When we classify all social events and
political regimes with a tenable system of general categories, we will shed
light also on ideologies as their misinterpretations and distortions. All political
opinions will be classified by a systematic taxonomy of all ideologies so that
any political government may be described exhaustively by its classification
as a member of a definite category and type of political thought. Such
taxonomy will integrate our theoretical knowledge into a systematic periodic
table elucidating the general principles of all historical ideologies.
Before social sciences can generalise such systematic taxonomy and periodic
tables of political trends, we have to devise a theoretical apparatus for their
exact description. Their historical development may be traced by reliable
methods only if we manage to measure its growth in their elementary units of
measurable character. What is demography and demometry in social studies,
may be termed ideography and ideometry in cultural studies. The former
should describe the historical and geographical distribution of cultural
ideologies while the letter should scrutinise their distribution with tools of
reliable quantification. It should apply methods of statistic measurement to the
yearly figures of cultural phenomena and count their statistic frequency in
clusters representing cultural trends.
A proposal of an ideographic analysis is illustrated by a set of coding
symbols in Table 21. The symbols stand for various types of literary genres
classified according to trends. Every literary genre is recorded by a different
type of characters (boldface, italics, understriking) and labelled by a vowel
letter denoting a class of cultural trends. The capital vowels A-E-I-O-U-Y are
used for high-brow (right-wing) literature, the lower-case vowels a-e-i-o-u-y
denote popular (left-wing) literature. Table 22 applies these symbols to the
yearly production of books in various ‘literary genres’. It demonstrates a
111
schematic map of the cultural development in Britain between 1882 and 1997
and records its growth in ‘clouds of trends’ whose most elementary units are
various genres of books. Publications in politics and science are coordinated
with clusters of literary trends in poetry, drama and novel writing because
literature and arts have a most accomplished systematic of aesthetic styles.
left-wing
right-wing
POETRY
SATIRE
EPIC
NOVEL
SHORT STORY
DRAMA
TRAGEDY
COMEDY
OPERA
MASQUE
ESSAY
SCIENCE
JOURNALS
EVENTS
PAINTING
SSCCUULLTTUURREE
x
X
V
F
u
U
v
f
lower-case letters
upper-case letters
bold
double-cross
R r
ordinary basic
D d
T t
italics
italics
Q q single-cross
M m single-cross italics
E e understriking
E e understriking
J j bold understriking
X x italics & understriking
AA aa rreelliieeff
II ii bboolldd rreelliieeff
AESTHETICS
A a CLASSICISM
idyllism
humanism
E a SENSUALISM
intimism
I i FORMALISM
geometrism
O o REALISM
figuralism
humorism
U u TRADITIONALISM
idolatrism
Y y MONUMENTALISM
heroism
aeiouy
AEIOUY
VO = O
FO = O
OU =
R0 = O
PO =
DO = O
TO = O
CO =
QO = O
MO = O
EU = U
Eo = o
JO = O
XO = O
AO = OO
IO = II
POLITICS
SCIENCE
utopianism
communism
paternalism
civilism
liberalism
antiutopism
technocratism
populism
democratism
labourism
conservatism
monarchism
fundamentalism
militantism
normativism
prescriptivism
encyclopaedism
geographism
diffusionism
logicism
panlogism
sociologism
evolutionism
comparativism
psychologism
hermetism
antiquarianism
biographism
Table 21. The coding tables of symbols applied by statistic ideometry
112
1882
1883
1884
1885
1886
1887
1888
1889
1890
1891
1892
1893
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1899
1900
1901
1902
1903
1904
1905
1906
1907
1908
1909
1910
1911
1912
1913
1914
1915
1916
1917
1918
1919
1920
1921
1922
I
IIII
ooo
FABIAN
SOCIALISM
oo OOOO ÖÖÖÖ
oo
OOOOOO
o oo
O
Sociologism
YEATSIAN DECADENCE
U
UUU
UUU UU
OOO
oooo
ooo oooo
oooo
o
WELLSIAN UTOPISM
UUUUU
UUU UUUU
uu
U
UUUU UU
uuu UUUUUUU
uu UUU
UUU
uu
U
u
UUUUUUUU
aa
A
AAAA
aa AAAAAA YA
aaä
AAAAÄÄ
ä
AÄÄÄ ÄÄ
a äääää A Ä
ää ÄÄ ÄÄÄ ÄÄ
ÄÄÄÄÄ
ä
ÄÄ Ä
ä
ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
ä
ÄÄÄÄÄÄ
Diffusionist
Geographism
Psychologism
Physiologism
GEORGIAN VITALISM
eee
eeeee EĘ ĘĘĘ
eee
EE ĘĘ
eee
EE ĘĘĘ
e
EE
Ę
eeee
EEEĘĘĘ
é
ĘĘĘ
ĘĘĘĘĘĘĘ Ę
ęę
ĘĘĘĘĘĘĘĘ
ęę
ĘĘĘ ĘĘĘ
ęęęę ęę
ĘĘ
ęę ęęę
ĘĘĘ
ęęĘĘĘĘĘĘĘĘĘĘĘ
ĘĘĘĘĘĘĘĘ
113
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
1927
1928
1929
1930
1931
1932
1933
1934
1935
1936
1937
1938
1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
ooo
ooo
OOOOOO
OO
OOOOOOO
o
OOOOOOOO
oooo
OOOOO
OO
oo
ooo
OOOO O
ooo
OO OO
oooo OOOOOO
Freudian Sociologism
METAPHYSICAL
TRADITIONALISM
JOYCEAN MODERNISM
WAR-TIME
APOCALYPTISM
POST-WAR
CLASSICISM
aaa
aa
aaa AAAAA
a
AAA
a
AAA
ää ÄÄÄÄÄÄ
ÄÄÄ
ÄÄÄ
ä
ÄÄ
ä
ÄÄÄ
ä
ÄÄÄ
YYY
y
YYY
yyy YYYYYY
yyy YYYYY
YYYYYYY
y
YY
YYYY
y
YYYYYY
YYYYY
YY YY
UUUUUUUU
uuu
U
uuu
UUUUUU
uuu
UUUUUUU
uu
UUUUUU
u
UU
uuuuuu
UUUU
uuuu
UUU
Psychologism
Encyclopaedism
CIVILISM: ANGRY YOUNG MEN
eee
eeeeee
eeee
eeeeee
eeeee ĘĘĘĘĘĘ
eé eeéé
ĘĘ
e
EĘĘĘĘĘ Empirical
eeeeee ĘĘĘĘĘĘ Sociologism
e
ĘĘĘĘĘ
ee
EE
114
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
MAOIST LEFTISM
o oooooo
oo
OO
oooo
OO
OO
oo
oooo OOOOO
ooo
OOO
ooooo
o ooo
IIII
IIII
i
i
III
iiii
II
ii
III
i IIIIIIIIII
I
BRADBURIAN
STRUCTURALISM
Generative
Formalism
Sociologism
THATCHERITE TRADITIONALISM
POSTMODERNIST
CATASTROPHISM
UU U
UUU
UUUUUU
uu
uuuuu UUU
UUU
uuu
UUUUU
y y YYYYY
yyyy
YY
yy
YYYY
YYYY
YY
y
YY
YY
Psychologism
YYYYY
Y
YYY
a
a
A
A
Cultural Materialism
Blair’s New Labour
Table 22. An ideometric map of English literary and linguistic trends
Table 22 brings a chronological map of the British cultural development
in the 20th century whose statistic figures were used for schematic parallel
115
diagrams of political trends in Table 1. It reckons with an assumption that
trends in politics, law, science and journalism may be united with trends in
poetry, literature, arts and philosophy because they express the cultural
paradigm of the same epoch. This term has become very popular in sociology
(Eisenstadt - Curelaru 1976; Ritzer 1980) as a synonym of M. Foucault`s
keyword épistéme (Foucault 1966, 1971). The assumption presupposes that
wars, law, philosophy, ethics, religion and arts are just a continuation of
politics with different tools and alternative means.
catastrophism
apocalypses
hermetism
occult sciences
astrology
SECTS
theology
traditionalism
militantism
monumentalism
warfare
ORDERS
ARMY
CHURCH
sociologism
popular culture
consumerism CIVIC SOCIETY
(socialism)
TRADE UNIONS
science
ideology
paternalism
utopias (communism)
education
STATE
civilism epicureism
sentimentalism ART
aesthetics
formalism
technocracy
TECHNOLOGY
LITERATURE
1928
1933
1939
1963
1968 1975 1981
1941
1945
1956
1990
1997
2004
Table 23. Triangular rotations of ideologies between 1928-2004
A generalised pattern of the political and cultural development in the 20th
century is suggested in Table 23. The graph shows cultural development as a
‘triangular rotation’ of elites, political ideologies and dominant cultural fields.
It describes its course as two rotations of longer cycles where cultural thought
finds alternative means of expression in theology, occult sciences, astrology,
utopias and art. If the historical clock strikes an age of decadent stagnation,
science decays into religion, religion harangues generals to wage ‘a sacred
war’ and on its ruins the winners devise political utopias or sentimental idylls.
116
The 20th century must be evaluated as a dark age but its cultural growth
oscillated between extremes of positive and negative ideologies. Periods of
positive ideologies pass from education and art to technology and science,
while eras of false ideologies pass from religion to metaphysics, occult
sciences and astrology. Inner relations between these cultural fields remain
obscure until we reveal that they are linked by the same economic logic of
subsequent economic cycles.
An Ideological Diagnostics of Political Diseases
Most people adhere to the cumulative conception of political thought
assuming that the history of European culture is one undivided spiritual
tradition in which new knowledge accumulates and grows to reach higher and
higher syntheses. They believe that the moderns abandoned monarchies
because they found that republics were better for practical life. They are
convinced that socialism suffered a defeat because it was less correct than
capitalism. Modern philosophers (T. S. Kuhn 1970, 1971; P. K. Feyerabend
1989; I. Lakatos
1971) refuted the cumulative views of history considering political progress as
a linear growth of knowledge. They have proved that human knowledge does
not march forth in linear curves but waves in the same rhythm of rises and
declines as other phenomena in nature. As there are periods of ‘shadow’,
‘grey’, ‘dark’, ‘black’ and ’brown economics’, there are also perpetual returns
of ‘shadow’, ‘grey’, ‘dark’, ‘black’ and ’brown ideology’, fully corresponding
to the wealth and health of the social body. Spiritual culture can prosper only
in countries with bright healthy economics when accelerated by rapid
industrial growth. In dark ages it periodically dies and gives way to a
superstitious pseudo-culture. As secular autarchy changes into oligarchic
theocracy, secular science and political thought change into religious
scholastics marching hand in hand with black occult sciences. Superstitions
and occult sciences represent a regular disease of cultural thought infecting the
social brain in all eras of cultural decadence.
A tentative outline of a tenable classification of ideological diseases was
foreshadowed in Table 9 suggesting ‘an integrated taxonomy of trends’ in all
fields of social culture. Cultural trends function only as means of economic
and political revolutions. As different cycles of economic growth shift the
focus to social engineering (eunomy), aesthetic design (esthonomy), industrial
technology (technonomy), consumers’ masses (demonomy) and finance
(plutonomy), so the progress of science shifts its focus on universal
encyclopaedic knowledge (eusophy), aesthetics (esthosophy), applied
technology (technosophy), sociology (demosophy) and financial magic
117
(idolosophy). Every ideology tends to disguise itself as science focused on
truth, knowledge and an objective study of reality but its nature has little to do
with the outer material world. Its major goal is to express political attitudes by
means of fantastic visions and various epistemic models of deforming reality.
The psychopathology of mental disorders in science must naturally start
from the state of their absence when the patient is in a perfect healthy state. As
is made clear by examples from Classic Greece, the Renaissance or
Enlightment, rational science tends to flourish in state-controlled societies with
a state-supported system of school education. In such bureaucratic societies the
state can afford to support ‘royal academies‘ and contribute subsidies to
education and academic research. The state-controlled school system of bright
ages promotes secular science where the church-controlled school systems of
dark ages subordinate impartial objective knowledge to religious faith. The
first stage of every bright age brings political regimes of centralist state
bureaucracy (eucracy) displaying academic systems of science called eusophy
(good wisdom, rational knowledge). Eusophy is a philosophical paradigm
exhibiting several standard symptoms:
•
•
•
•
Euphoria utopistica: social engineering and utopian dreaming about an
ideal planned, state-controlled society serving effectively the natural needs
of the collective public wealth and all common people.
Euphoria pantheistica: cosmic optimism combined with a fervent love for
the physical and material nature enlivened by human and divine energy.
Euphoria encyclopaedica: enthusiastic love of objective knowledge,
rationality, science, education, literature and arts as vital instruments of
humanitarian enlightment, spiritual illumination and human perfection.
Pamphilia humanistica: all-embracing love for the unbroken and unspoilt
human nature, belief in emancipation proclaiming equality between all
nations and human races, ideals of a healthy mind in a healthy body.
Eusophia is a stage of healthy cultural conditions known in the Renaissance
humanism or French encyclopaedism in the mid-18th century. Its science is
characterised by humanism, historical optimism (belief in historical progress),
encyclopaedism, physicalism (emphasis on cosmic physics), materialism (the
primacy of the material nature), uniformism (all areas of social life observe
prescriptions, regulation, standardisation and uniformity) and normativism (all
phenomena should have their standard moderate measure). Humanists tended
to write political utopias about ideal monarchs and happy islands and compiled
manuals instructing young princes how to rule, run their kingdoms and
practice animal husbandry. Encyclopaedists wrote compendious manuals,
handbooks and encyclopaedias giving instruction in universal knowledge.
All utopists dream about constructing future ideal societies (Aufbau) but
118
their dreams suffer from a gradual erosion of utopias, their dilapidation and
deconstruction (Abbau). In due course every ’positive utopia’ painting blissful
idylls expires and decays into a ‘negative utopia’ that depicts the world as a
nightmare. The first stage in this metamorphosis are ‘sentimental utopias’ that
lose the cosmic historical perspective and plunge into everyday personal life.
The humanists of the Augustan Age (Virgil, Horace, Varro) faced the
opposition of the Gilded Youth and young elegiac poets (Tibullus, Propertius,
Ovid) who wrote elegies about fictive beauties and poetic epistles about ars
amatoria. Such periods pay attention to aesthetics, court revels, naval
adventures and elegant rhetoric skilled in ars poetica. Their paradigm is
esthosophy with these symptoms:
•
•
•
Sensualitas amatoria: the disease of love manifested in desire for an
idealised sweetheart, the courteous cult of a beautiful noble lady in the
medieval Minnesang and Provencal courtoisie.
Sensualitas aesthetica: focus on aesthetic pleasures, ideals of beauty,
pleasure-seeking Epicureism and voluptuous sensualism.
Sensualitas intima: intimism as a philosophy of everyday private life.
The second step in overcoming utopism is made by ‘zero utopias’ that
indulge in scientific formalism. Technocratic antiutopias turn attention to
applied sciences because the rapid industrial growth requires transition from
universal science to applied technology. Their scientific philosophy may be
called technosophy because it meets the demands of technocracies and
technocratic engineering elites that come to the rule in the heydays of
industrial revolution. Technosophy loves logic, mathematics and geometry
because it has lost a sense of beauty, reality, cosmos and history. Young
technocrats signal their ascent by a deep methodological scepsis, by
depolitisation, weariness and fatigue from social utopias. Their „vision du
monde“ (L. Goldmann 1964) has abandoned natural idylls and frozen into
geometric abstractions and cold numbers. Their mind suffers from a loss of all
social and historical illusions, a loss of sensibility and sense of historical
progress. It is vexed by a syndrome of stupor with several symptoms:
•
•
•
•
Stupor formalis: formalist artism and an unhealthy admiration for empty
forms, cold abstractions and formal signs.
Stupor geometricus: the loss of historical perspectives accompanied by a
descent into the world of abstract geometric figures and numbers.
Stupor antiutopicus: the loss of utopian perspectives, disillusionment in
utopias and their absurd deformations (Orwell’s Animal Farm).
Stupor nonsensualis: formal signs lose their natural meaning and become
absurd puns (E. Lear’s and Ch. Morgenstern‘s poetry of nonsense).
119
If eusophy pursues universal knowledge detached from applied technology
and industrial production, technosophy meets their demands but remains blind
to human society and common consumers. Booms of consumers’ goods turn
attention to the ordinary needs of common people and adopt populistic views
of social emancipation typical of demosophy. Demosophy implies a
philosophical sociologism that strives for social and cultural materialism and
analyses phenomena in their historical, geographic and social profiles. Its
methodology definitely proved prolific in Aristotelian Peripatetics, Huguenot
historiographers and modern Positivism. Its goal of impartial and objective
universal knowledge suggests J. A. Comenius’ ideal of pansophia.
•
•
•
Pansophia comparatistica: a comparative approach to social phenomena
and a tendency to analyse them on large statistic samples.
Pansophia sociologica: a tendency to visualise phenomena on their social
background and depict them in the setting of a large social panorama.
Pansophia evolutionistica: a tendency to consider all phenomena in their
dynamic growth and historical evolution.
Demosophy brings a culminating peak of scientific renascence but also
announces the first tokens of a coming rapid decline. The crisis of economic
stagflation stupefies science by a strong conservative counter-reaction and
turns it into a sort of sterile religious scholastics. The bloom of scientific
studies is regularly terminated by rehearsals of St Bartholomew’s Night,
fanatic pogroms conducted by the Catholic League. Science has to give way to
metaphysics, a mental disorder manifested by blindness to reality, evolution,
society and logic. The final result is idolosophy showing several symptoms:
•
•
•
•
•
Idolatria scholastica: science collapses and degenerates into religious
scholastics, it turns into a cult of saints and an exegesis of their texts.
Idolatria sectae (sectarianism): scientific sectarianism conceiving
research as persevering in an orthodox doctrine developing an esoteric
wisdom founded by sacred texts of a prophet.
Idolatria heraldica: ardent idolatry as a cult of idols, icons, emblems,
coats-of-arms, relics, ossuaries and sacred texts.
Idolatria aboriginalis: sciences adopts a primitive savage mind’s optics by
failing to see essential but invisible meanings (real genetic categories) and
managing to see only accidental but visible signs: icons, idols, flags, relics.
Dyslogia lombardica: scientific dogmatism as an utter inability to beget a
meaningful thought or to understand foundations of any science, typical of
all scholastics, the disease of ‘ritualistic absent-headedness’ manifested by
the first great scholastic philosopher Petrus Lombardus or by the first
scholastic Marxist philosopher Mikhail Lifshitz who wrote florilegia of
their prophets’ sentences but failed to utter a single sentence of his own.
120
•
•
•
•
•
Jesuititis emblematica: the disease of jesuitism resting in a blindfolded
demonisation of all heretics, infidels and apostates of faith manifested in
an unsound cult of religious orthodoxy and unwavering loyalty to church.
Intolerantia satanica (exorcism): rational science, protestant heretics and
progressive social theories are demonised as devilish devices worth wiping
off the world’s surface.
Obscurantia irrationalis: scientific irrationalism waging pogroms against
scientific objectivism under auspices of irrational cults.
Calumnia pogromistica (inquisitionism): witch hunts, practices of hidden
terror and illegal trials abused by secret lodges against all heretics
Calumnia coprophilica (calumnism): a tendency of right-wing tabloids to
throw dirt, dung and shit on all positive and progressive social values
(impregnative tabloid journalism, graffiti terrorism, shit-daubing euphory).
Idolosophy is only the maturing incubation phase of deep cultural and
scientific crisis that continues with cacosophy (bad knowledge) or mystosophy
(occult, esoteric, mysterious wisdom). In dark ages they may occupy three or
four 7-year cycles while in bright ages they are usually contracted into one
cycle. Cacosophy is a convenient catchword for fates of science in the period
of cultural catastrophism (apocalyptism), a trend symptomatic of culminating
social and economic criminality and growing negativism in culture, arts,
politics, law and morals.
•
•
•
Paralysis regressiva (regressivism): a belief in regressive (Spengler),
apocalyptic (Derrida) or catastrophic future (Stoic Chrysippus, Buffon).
Xenophobia nauseatica: an anti-humanist philosophy of xenophobia,
physical disgust and contempt for all alien races, or for all humankind.
Nausea alienans: the philosophy of nausea as a universal sentiment vexed
by mean anti-humanist xenophobias, an inveterate hatred against all
immigrants and foreigners seen as ‘impudent aliens’ and ‘slimy monsters‘.
The inflexion point of cacosophy is followed by a period of hermetic
spiritualism manifested in astrology and occult sciences. Their designation as
mystosophy indicates predilection for the mysterious and the esoteric.
•
•
•
Pestilentia hermetica (hermetism): a radical turn from objective
knowledge of outer reality to the transcendent supernatural world.
Toxoplasmosis semiotica: a semiotic plague indulging in interpreting
irrational signs and tokens in different ambiguous allegoric connotations.
Claustrophilia infernalis (infernalism): the myth of a subterranean cave
combined with belief in a hollow globe and a hollow underworld inhabited
by a subterraneous race of mysterious over-men.
The final phase of dark ages is represented by ‘sacred wars‘ that cause large-
121
scale destruction and necessarily result in periods of peaceful reconstruction.
Its characteristic ideology may be termed monumentalism as it combines
religious fundamentalism with military heroism (Carlyle’s hero worship).
•
•
Obscurantia militans (crusaderism): calls for ‘a bloody bath‘ and ‘a
sacred war‘ (Christian crusade, Islamic jihad, Greek hagios polemos)
waged against all aliens, heretics and heathens, calls for conquering the
land stolen by barbarian infidels (Bernard de Clairvaux, Ignatio de Loyola,
Joseph de Maistre and Adolph Rosenberg).
Inflatus heroicus (exaggerated bonapartism, caesarism and hero worship):
the theory of a higher race of over-men dwelling in a subterranean cave or
a higher race of ‘nazists surviving in the cosmic space’; their outer
appearance may take shape of astronauts, extra-terrestrials, ufonauts, slimy
monsters or subterranean supermen.
Conclusions on Post-Modernist Fundamentalism
The political illusions of our age are not a result of modern science but a
standard expression of our historical situation and our stage in the lawful
process of economic development. All the keywords of the present-day
political journalism (socialism, capitalism, totalitarianism, democracy,
populism, terrorism) are fallacious misinterpretations of historical reality. They
prevent us from understanding what is what because we do not understand our
distorting standpoint, because we cannot tell who is who and who we
accordingly are. The truth is that ours is not a bright peaceful age of
humanism, science and rationality but a dark age of irrationalism, destructive
wars and genocide. The positive signals of the post-war peace, prosperity,
socialism and decolonisation were just a sigh of short relief submerged deep in
the bog between two descents of the Modern and the Post-Modern Age to the
very bottom of human history. Soviet Communism did not change the scenario
of this catastrophic process in any way, it remained just a local adventure
preserving all the malignant tendencies of the modern irrational neo-scholastic
in a slightly more secular disguise.
We are the lawful heirs of the French Revolution, modern democracy,
modern secularisation and modern sciences but we have betrayed their heritage
by emptying these words and filling them with medieval content. The Modern
Age (1892-1946) was a decline, the Post–Modern Age (1997-2040) is the
bottom and the New Renascence (2040-2090) will be a rise but none of these
periods shall be classed by historians as a blithesome romance. Their crop is
the gravest plague of our times, new irrationalism, fundamentalism, terrorism,
fanaticism and xenophobia that swarm as larvae in the initial phases of the
metamorphosis of a predator insect. Their religion is one of death, intolerance,
122
brutality and violence disguised as new piety, solemnity, sanctity and
martyrdom. Their prophets whine and howl like hyenas bewailing their
martyrs killed in self-murderous bomb-attacks but nobody should be mistaken
about their Jesuit mission. Today they preach pluralism, regionalism and
separatism like Ch. Maurras, M. Barrès, L. Daudet and A. Bartels in their
young days when they fought for Action Française and Heimatkunst. If we do
not disarm them by showing them their image in the mirror of human history,
tomorrow their posthumous children will bring forth the same apocalypse as
their fathers in the older days.
Our times do not need to invent any brand-new political ideals to replace
the old ideals of peace, humanism, democracy, emancipation and tolerance,
because under the threats of disasters we face we should be content with at
least one eighth of their fulfilment. How can we treat the disease of
postmodernist fundamentalism? By anxious warnings, ascetic penitence and
moral admonition? Science alone will hardly suppress religious irrationalism
because in human history irrational religious scholastic has always repressed
rational science. A diseased patient will not recover by spiritual consolation if
surgeons do not excise the tumour on his brain. The malign tumour consists in
lawlessness and high economic criminality due to lack of public control.
Decadent moods of public ideology will not be cured by harangues of
enthusiastic optimism and fundamentalism will not be cured by outpourings of
tolerance and humanism. Both mental disorders may be cured only by
operating on physical disorders in the economic engine.
The prospects of curing mental disorders in public ideology are relatively
low unless we provide their rational elucidation and create a social consensus
as to economic interventions. Such elucidation presupposes comparing large
samples of data, developing a systematic diagnostics of ideological diseases
and explaining our present-day illusions in terms of standard medical cases.
The worst illusion is that we have reached the highest celestial spheres of
democracy and we are called to teach lessons to less developed nations that we
have robbed by reducing their national currency to worthless rubbish. People
believe that they have democratic rights to choose their own authorities
without having noticed their loss of significance and immaterial role. They do
not realise that all democracies in human history have presupposed efficient
instruments of public state control ensuring a democratic participation in
political decision-making and economic ownership. They consider as tyranny
if individual criminal economic activities are limited by the state representing
the will of the vast majority of the nation and by the authorities whose
representatives they have themselves elected. Democracies are regimes where
working masses can take decisions on their own national, public and private
ownership, they are not identical to oligarchies where a few people are free to
123
deprive them of this ownership and bereave them of all the political
instruments of public control. In oligarchies public authorities have no
executive power because their dignitaries act only as manikins and lobbyists
advertisings big corporations. If criminal mafias in Sicily can control all
economic activities in the region, they also have a command of all
administrative activities and political life. They govern also the local police,
courts, authorities and town councils regardless of results in democratic
elections because these political organs control no economic sources, have
nothing to decide upon and lack any real executive power.
Political ideology where a black colour can be passed off as a white colour
and new monarchists can triumphantly smuggle in the contraband of oligarchy
in the disguise of victorious democracy is not ideology but mere idiocy.
Oligarchies where a few magnates (Turner, Berlusconi, Berezovsky) control
all media, press, TV channels, banking houses and strong consortia and
people’s representatives have no chance to influence them can hardly be called
free democratic countries. We are unable to revert these economic tendencies
because they are determined by a syndrome of long-term stagnation common
to all overpopulated and over-saturated economies, yet we should not be as
silly as to crown them with laurels of glory. We should not pass decadence off
as renascence, celebrate crusaders as liberators and praise modern
fundamentalist Jesuits as prophets of religious tolerance. We should unveil
Ussama bin Ladins in our own religions, cultures, races and nations because
our merits in suppressing Moslem fundamentalism may consist in the crimes
of our European Christian fundamentalism. Fundamentalism has plagued all
oligarchies in history when they set out on colonial adventures and felt called
to teach moral lessons to infidels. All fundamentalist oligarchies in history
have led only to stricter bondage and so will ours in Europe although European
working masses will hardly ever turn into new serfs and slaves. They will turn
only into idling bailiffs and soldiers of fortune assisting their betters in
bleeding infidel barbarians and becoming new lords in colonies.
Post-modern politics is a chess play that does not offer its participants any
universal recipes because every player must adopt such strategies as are suited
to his economic strength and position. The best guide to the present-day
political thought is found in the French fin-de-siècle and its political
movements: Boulangerism, legitimist monarchism, religious fundamentalism,
separatist regionalism and expansionism. The prolonged stagnation of the
French 19th century economy in the 70s and 80s resulted in a fever of financial
speculation and a series of stockbroking transactions leading to an avalanche
of financial disasters. Banking houses went bankrupt, corruption and bribery
caused a decline of smaller businesses, small companies fused and succumbed
to the fraud of nouveaux riches’ large companies, taxation was replaced by
124
racketeering mafias, big concerns absorbed weaker competitors and set out on
overseas adventures. The tabloid press responded with a flood of irrationalism,
apocalyptic speculation, horoscopes, brutal violence and social scandals. Its
pages spouted campaigns of xenophobic hysteria against Jews, Germans,
Muslims and all alien elements.
This is why our prospective steps should be guided by careful comparison to
similar strategies adopted in subsequent stages of economic cycles. The role of
parties in the present-day right-wing spectrum may be elucidated by
comparison to the composition of parties on the French fin-de-siècle scene:
•
•
•
•
•
monarchists (count de Broglie, generals MacMahon and Boulanger),
defended great land-owners at home,
theocracy: a revival of Neo-Thomistic scholastic in the wake of Suarez
and Molinist theology, a new wave of Baroque counter-reformation
conducted by theologians of Louvain and Freiburg scholastic,
expansionists (P. Déroulède) and imperialists (J. Chamberlain),
new get-rich upstarts (nouveaux riches) with false aristocratic titles,
regionalists, ‘Small Isolationists’, separatists and anti-federalists:
(Provencal félibres Ch. Maurras and L. Daudet, the Alsace-Lorraine
chauvinist M. Barrès) opposed by the camp of German nationalists united
in Heimatkunst by A. Bartels’ regionalist journal Der Heimat.
We have to realise that we live in a conservative era with an elitist model of
public economy where the decisive political role is played by private
corporative possession and the true spokesmen of this dominant economic
sector are conservative right-wing parties exhibiting the following spectrum:
•
•
•
•
oligarchs: ‘Great Isolationists’ (M. Thatcher, S. Berlusconi) represent the
right wing of conservative euro-scepticism backing up the interests of rich
oligarchy, its oligopolies and big consortia, riches nouveaux, financial
tycoons and medial magnates,
theocracy (Paul Johnson’s Catholic Triumphalism, religious
fundamentalists, legates of papal politics),
sophocracy: supporters of ‘corporative sophocracy’ representing ‘white
collars’ united in modern professional guilds and trade unions (private
advocates’, artists’ and physicians’ chambers),
regionalists: ‘Small Isolationists’ supporting Paduan separatism (U.
Bossi), Le Pen’s FN and Coruntanian regionalism (J. Haider).
Meaningful parallels may be drawn also between with the leaders of The
Third Way or The New Labour (Tony Blair, Lionel Jospin, Gerhardt Schröder,
Manfredo Prodi) and the left-wing parties at the beginning of the last century:
•
radicals: independent socialists (Aristide Briand, Paul Boncour, Viviani),
125
•
•
•
•
reformist liberals: Asquith, Lloyd George and Giolitti’s social reforms,
pacifists: G. Hervé and J. Jaurès against bellicismo and the World War I,
anarchists: Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman,
syndicalists: G. Sorel and his program of l’action directe.
Similar left-wing parties play an important, though not decisive, strategic role
also in our Post-Modern Age. These parties should realise that they cannot
claim a return to socialism or communism but must adopt measures
appropriate to left-wing parties in dark decadent cycles and private corporative
economies. Despite the political predominance of conservative elitist parties,
their rule will be interrupted by regular intrusive 4-year eras of left-wing
currents representing the inner pressures of popular masses. Although every
dark age starts and ends with conservative oligarchy, their phases are separated
by three decades of an intervening semi-bright liberal period. The only hope of
our generations is that left-wing parties are now going to rehearse the glorious
victorious era of the Radical Liberal Left in France and England in 1902-1932.
The first three decades of the 21st century are not likely to bring a new bright
glorious age of socialism but they are certain to provide at least a half-bright
interregnum of economic stability and relative prosperity.
From the French decadence our era has inherited strong tendencies to high
economic criminality, regional separatism, administrative plurality, corporative
tendencies, decentralisation and disintegration. These are standard symptoms
of all stagnating and decaying economies facing great problems with social
mobility, unemployment, cosmopolitanism, inflation and migration from
villages to big cities. Fusions of big oligopolies let European countries absorb
by one octopus pulsing as one supranational cosmopolitan state, whose
expansive tentacles have choked all inner protests. Expansive pressures have
suppressed traditional struggles between monarchists and republicans or
conservatives and socialists, their opposition mitigates and gives way to a new
differentiation between peace-making pacifists and warmongering
expansionists. Every dark age resurrected scholastic, metaphysics and occult
sciences and so did also Derrida’s ‘deconstructed metaphysics’ that called
Nietzsche and Heidegger back from the grave. J.-F. Lyotard’s condition
postmoderne will undoubtedly copy the fates of the Modern Age from
Dilthey’s Geistesgeschichte till Heidegger’s existentialism. The prospective
peripeteias of discours derridistique are predestined to develop from Socrates’
pluralism to Plato’s utopian communism.
Our future will not be governed by abstract moral prejudices but by the
inexorable laws of economic prosperity. New giants have established a realm
of financial dictatorship and little dwarfs, whom it bereft of all their small
financial resources, hurry up not to miss the run on the stock exchange to
challenge the giants in a free boxing ring. The match will have its champions
126
and winners, fans and supporters as well as its victims and casualties. EastEuropean countries had succumbed to the narrow-minded whimsicalities of
Russian isolationism for half a century but now they make incredible haste to
rehearse the horse opera of Argentine’s economic collapse. China and Vietnam
are preparing for the match in a smarter way, they have adopted the strategies
of Elizabethan commercial expansionism and enjoy the attractions of the
capitalist counter-reformation in the old protestant garment.
History knows well that no dark age has ever led to general, even and
equable prosperity, the only possible final score of its global skirmishes may
be extremely high luxury in advanced countries and moderate luxury in their
satellites at the expenses of poverty in underdeveloped countries. Close
satellites will undoubtedly benefit from strong superpowers but their faraway
lackeys may expect disastrous ends. Giants will defeat dwarfs but they will pay
dearly for their victory by idling in leisure and luxury that condemns all rich
civilisations to festering decadence. Britain, Germany and the U.S. rebelled as
Protestant dwarfs against the giants of Imperial Catholic Rome. Yet
industrious work, trade and commerce made them into superpowers and now
they forget about their Protestant childhood. Imperial Catholic Rome sent out
punitive crusades against Protestant heretics and they tend to commit the same
strategic mistake. Lazy giants with idling classes depart and give way to
productive industrious dwarfs (China, Vietnam) that grow into new giants and
take over their lead. History is ruthless to idling giants and kills them by
pouring upon them riches and luxury.
127
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DEMOTIST CREDO
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Modern political ideology is a partly secularised religion and its story can
be understood only if it is reinterpreted in terms of religious movements of
the past. The laws of modern Socialism can be understood only if it is
explained as one of many regular periodic revivals of Protestantism.
History periodically repeats bright ages of protestant reformation and dark
ages of conservative counter-reformation.
The historical clashes of modern Socialism and Conservatism spring from
the conflict between collective national ownership and private corporative
ownership. All democratic movements of the past endeavoured to
outbalance the economic power of private corporations and moneyed
oligarchy. Every epoch and society has had its leitmotif in strife between
civic democracy ruling in secular national states and plutocratic oligarchy
controlling large religious empires.
The political program of the democratic left is not a lawsuit of the poor vs.
the rich but rather one of the masses vs. the elites or productive forces
(working classes, productive intelligentsia) against idling classes
(plutocracy, oligarchy cleptocracy). The former take the lead in
reformations, the latter take over the initiative in counter-reformations.
Every reformation fosters an unwanted child of counter-reformation in its
belly. When the inner economic growth is saturated, its offspring will out.
Every counter-reformation emerges with a new oligarchy that was born in
the middle of ripe democracy, grew into cleptocracy by conquest, robbery
and theft and at last established its rule as new rich aristocracy. It is
oligarchy, magnates and corporations that act as a real adversary of every
democracy, not only factory-owners and bourgeoisie en bloc.
Democratic movements of protestant reformations can prosper only in a
bilateral world of national states that have won independence from large
empires. Every social revolt in the past history went hand in hand with a
national revolt against conquerors from without. Every reformation was a
plebeian secession of a few secular national states from the papal empire.
The road of progress from serfdom to freedom and discrimination to
emancipation is undeniable, but its advances are slowed down by periodic
crises that rehabilitate reaction and regress. Distant future perspectives
play little role in the turmoil of contemporary social struggles.
It is wrong to hope that the most developed western countries will be the
first to carry out social revolutions and reach a stage of socialism. Leading
countries are only the first to expand as empires and carry out counterrevolutions in dependent countries. Empires get rid of their democratic
plebeian opposition by engaging it in colonial adventures.
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9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
There are no stronger democratic movements in large cosmopolitan
empires because the metropolitan plebs becomes colonial aristocracy and
assists the metropolitan oligarchy in becoming cosmopolitan aristocracy.
The raging struggle between republicans and monarchists in bright ages
grows into a brotherly co-operation of expansionists and isolationists in
dark ages because the former seize the realty estates in colonies and the
latter in their native country (e.g. France after the Paris Commune).
The political goals of the democratic left are determined in every epoch by
contradictions of the current economic cycle. Thus utopianism, civilism,
liberalism, socialism, ecologism, feminism and anarchism may be equally
adequate strategies of the political campaigns of one left-wing party.
The periodic oscillation of economic growth requires that every four-year
period (Kitchin’s cycle) of the right-wing supremacy be followed by four
years of left-wing turbulence. So the ferocious Thatcherism of the early
90s was defeated by progressive Blairism (Third Way) but Blairism soon
gave way to regressive Berlusconisation. The right and the left ride one
untameable horse of economic growth. With a few divergences they
pursue the same line so that the present-day Blairism may be more
conservative than the post-war conservative Butskellism and Thatcherism.
Communism can win only by defeating Communism. Democracies can
defeat old oligarchies only by becoming new oligarchies. England could
become an empire only suppressing its Puritan opposition and American
Protestants won only thanks to suppressing their own Puritans.
Secular protestant states can defeat conservative military empires
economically if their production and trade expand beyond national
frontiers and their bureaucratic elites establish themselves as new
oligarchic elites (Elizabethan England, China).
The political success of left-wing parties does not depend only on
charismatic leaders but mainly on the economic control of mass media and
instantaneous tensions of economic bowels. Oligarchies exhibit admirable
stability because few people control all economic power. In oligarchies it
is immaterial who votes for whom, politicians do not need voters, only
rich sponsoring lobbies, newspapers do not need readers, only rich
advertisers. Everyone has as good laws, liberties and rights as he can buy.
All continents and world economies have their inner economic clock of
historical progress. Human civilisation evolves through a process of
periodic oscillation between extremes of centralisation and
decentralisation manifested as bright and dark ages. Bright ages of
prosperity bring renascence, enlightenment and peaceful growth, dark ages
of long-term stagnation revive private corporative economy, conservative
counter-reformation, religious fanaticism and destructive expansive wars.
133
16. Emancipative left-wing movements arise in ascendent cycles as a counterbalance of the right-wing elites that counter-attack by discriminative
movements in descendent cycles.
17. We live in the third phase of another dark age and wage sacred wars and
religious crusades between the Christian and the Muslim world. Old
nation-states cannot help dissolving in new supranational empires but they
should use control mechanism to alleviate threatening disasters.
18. The greatest plague of our age is not AIDS but religious fundamentalism
(Wole Syinka). It is fundamentalism and its spirit of intolerance that is the
real originator of terrorism. Fundamentalism and its ‘sacred wars’ are an
infallible sign of cultural decadence that chokes science by dogmatic
scholastic, secular thought by religious irrationalism, culture by
superstitious astrology and law-abiding coexistence by high criminality.
19. The only realistic political goal of the democratic left is to let science, arts,
education, research, work and justice survive in an age of genocide wars,
religious intolerance and irrational fundamentalism.
20. The Real Socialism in Eastern Europe and the Third World did not bring a
new Enlightenment because its historical position resembled a short
brighter intermezzo between two culminations of the Age of Crusades or
the Counter-Reformation. This is why Stalinist Communism imbibed
Marxism with conservative rightist ideologies and a semi-religious cult of
national leaders, classics and saints. There were only faint glitters of
Marxism reminiscent of Albigensian or Jansenist heresy overshadowed by
the sombre twilight of theocratic revivals and genocide wars.
21. Modern industrialism brought three centuries of democratic prosperity and
secular science but the Modern and Post-Modern Age returned back to the
religious fundamentalism of the Middle Ages. The mid-20th century
represented a short pause in their duration, our civilisation waits for the
coming of a New Aufklärung only in the mid-21st century
22. All political strategies in the economic cycle 1997-2040 must be
preventive and self-defensive: they should defend humanity against
destruction, production against acquisition and plundering, direct
democracy against plutocracy, corruption and lobbying, science against
astrology and irrational speculation, art against commercial crap, health
care against charlatan homeopathy, law against lawlessness and high
criminality and education against prostitution.
134
DEMOTIST CREDEMUS
1.
Mind who you are and where you are because many live their life’s
history as its innocent victims and patients and few are able to influence its
course as conscious participants. You are a soldier of fortune in the Roman
legions, a Christian crusader in the Pope’s services and a landsknecht of
135
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
Habsburg emperors. See though the illusions of your age and mitigate the
disastrous effects of its follies.
As a soldier of fortune, don’t engage in Anti-Semitist pogroms of the poor
starving crusaders in Cologne. Your poverty is no excuse for skinhead
pogroms on the Romanies or on any other darker-skinned neighbours.
Don’t plunder gold in Orthodox churches of Greece. Allah’s faith and the
Orthodox Church is not any worse than yours. Don’t give vent to your
hatred to immigrants from the poor south and east because today’s cosmopolitans were yesterday’s immigrants from the undeveloped colonies.
Don’t join crusades against the Waldenses, Albigenses and Hussites
because their today’s independence is your tomorrow’s independence.
The worst plague of our age is not terrorism but religious fundamentalism.
Anti-Nazi resistance was a legitimate sort of terrorism that worked as a
self-defensive antidote against expansionist terrorism. Unjustified
expansionism can easily make fundamentalist murderers into heroes of
legitimate national resistance.
Don’t sing heroic epic songs on new oligarchs because they have stolen
your share of public property from your hands. When you sold them your
lot in the public common, you sold them also your political rights.
Don’t dance a triumphant war dance on the grave of the Cold War because
all dark ages of corporative economy in the past brought thirty years’ ‘hot
wars’. The Messenian war and the Peloponnesian war were ‘cold wars’ of
peaceful resistance against Sparta’s oppression. We can thank the Cold
War for the long-term bilateral ceasefire that interrupted atrocities of the
unilateral global expansion.
Don’t exhilarate at the prospect of worldwide globalisation and the
coming of the new unilateral world because peace can be guaranteed only
by multilateral balance and national independence.
Don’t greet the collapse of the communal nation-state and high criminality
as a victory of freedom and a liberation of people. All liberations of
oligarchic corporations in the past led to a new serfdom of the masses.
Liberty is a joined vessel balancing the rights of three forces: the state,
citizens and private business. What is unlimited freedom for state
bureaucracy and private corporations is only bondage to the common
citizen. It is only firm democratic laws that make common people free and
keep elites and plutocratic oligarchies in bearable bounds.
Don’t cry that the UNO, the federal state, authorities and tax collectors
should be expelled as tyrants. Common citizens are not free if the streets
are ruled by criminal gangs and taxes are collected by racketeering mafias.
136
12. Don’t crown new oligarchs with the laurel of champions of democracy.
There is democracy in regimes where their money can buy TV channels,
media, newspapers, governments, town halls and police headquarters.
13. Don’t shout that the bastions of Athens and Cairo must be pulled down
because they endanger the military realm of Sparta and the British Empire.
Don’t yell that dwarfs in Oceania are a grave menace to giants in Florida.
14. All pluralist oligarchies (Kimon’s Areopagus, Cicero’ senate, Simon of
Montfort’s parliamentary alliance against John Lackland) had an efficient
decentralised system of high parliamentarianism that applied ingenious
instruments of lobbying and bribery. Pericles’ democracy attempted to
limit the role of the aristocratic Areopagus by emphasising low
parliamentarianism and developing direct democracy that ensures a wide
participation of common people.
15. All empires give the highest political rights to their high-born citizens in
the metropolis but deny human rights to barbarians in their colonies.
Equality is indivisible, barbarians should enjoy the same human rights as
well-to-do metropolitans in leading countries.
16. Immense gains of leading countries with strong currencies are but pitiable
losses of overseas countries with weak currencies. In plutocratic economy
you can enjoy only rights that your national currency can afford to pay.
Reagan’s reforms of free mobile currency rates in 1977 brought only a free
dictatorship of strong hyper-powers over the starving third world.
17. Every political regime has its system of power encoded in some ideals,
slogans and human rights. A sensible man can immediately see through
the false contraband smuggled with such rights as the right to possess a
gun, bank account secrecy, abolition of identity cards etc.
18. Support party-controlled state media, newspapers, TV channels,
governments, town-halls, police headquarters and courts because they
were elected by the voice of people. A democratic society cannot be
controlled exclusively by self-appointed private corporations that can buy
public media and abuse them for the benefit of a narrow elite. Journalists,
judges and MP’s are not independent if they are paid by lobbies, private
business and big corporations.
19. Man is a political animal (Aristotle’s zoon politikon) and every animal
kingdom has its values guarded by some ideological illusions. But it is
high time to make a step from animal feelings to the scientific zoology of
political systems, to give a systematic classification of all regimes,
ideologies and political philosophies.
20. All mass movements in the past were such as they had to be, don’t blame
them as all had their raison d’être in expressing needs of their own day.
137
138
LEXICON OF COMMON POLITICAL MISNOMERS
Anarchism – the final stage of left-wing ideology in the decadent period at the
end of every half-century cycle when oligarchic regimes privatize the common
public property. It is an intellectual revolt of the public moral conscience
against the ruling plutocracy and an attempt to fight it by methods of l’action
directe. Its political ideals consist of democratic representation, human rights,
personal freedom, equality, emancipation, free sex and free love.
Anarchists are usually recruited from intellectuels déclassés, who fell victims
of the process of economic differentiation into the rich and the poor. They act
as shadow ghosts of the ruling oligarchs because they have become poorer
thanks to the same economic mechanisms as have made oligarchs richer. Since
they both aspire to engross the same free-market economy, they also share
similar values (personal freedom, free will, hero worship, individual terror,
irrational instincts) and enemies (state bureaucracy, protectionism, etatism,
centralisation, state reglementation).
Bourgeoisie – In the 20th century everybody (socialists, liberal intellectuals,
monarchists) yells Épater le bourgeois! without seeing that working classes
have been united for millennia with petit-bourgeoisie and such battle-cries
actually denigrate protestant Puritanism. Such keywords of socialist
propaganda throw the socialist cause in chaos, because the proletariat has a
traditional base in urban townsmen, artisans and petty-bourgeoisie. The real
antipodes of ancient, medieval and modern socialism are magnates (no matter
whether slave-holding, feudal, financial or industrial) and corporations
(clerical and military orders, business corporations, criminal mafias) that form
the foothold of the ruling oligarchy in all dark ages. Protestant and socialist
regimes aim to restrain these social elements while oligarchies defend them
and support them.
Building communism and the economic base of communist society –
Communist societies arise as a result of the urgent needs to reconstruct the
national industry in post-war years. Socialist countries will never reach the
goal of building an accomplished communist society, because the farther the
reconstruction has advanced, the better working classes are doing and the less
inclined they feel to stand conditions of hard manual work for low wages.
Building communism is a process of industrial reconstruction that in due
course of time lawfully lapses into a stage of putrescent deconstruction. The
sons of builders of communism turn into a new fashionable elite (Gilded
Youth) and their grandsons improve their living standard to such an extent that
they desire to ape the former nobility and restore its conservative regime. This
is why grandchildren of a puritan protestant regime feel tempted to pull it
down by a counter-revolution and why every communism ends in its negation.
139
Communism – an introductory decade of agrarian reforms, state centralisation
and economic nationalisation at the beginning of every half-century cycle. All
dark ages of disastrous wars find the only possible way out of the social crisis
by dreaming about a communist utopia. Utopias look like a blissful dream but
they start a new bright age under very tough conditions. They bring equality,
equal chances, low prices and full employment but also hard work, strict laws
and low wages. Broadly speaking, almost every interbellum coincides with a
peaceful period of a protestant or socialist utopia. On the other hand, it is
essential to realise that any historical wave of utopian communism was
associated with a post-war or post-decadence regime of strict protectionist
centralism. This applied also to waves of Protestantism because despite their
wide support from popular masses their upheavals were made possible only by
a sort of political absolutism.
Communists – The real class base of every communism is not the proletariat
but a class of ‘humanists’, a sort of enlightened constructive intelligentsia
(teachers, engineers, scientists, physicians) who promote education, rational
science and egalitarian economy. Marx’s idea of communism as an ideology of
proletariat was influenced by the specific cultic vogue of journeymen (G.
Sande, G. Courbet, Millet, George Elliot) in the 1840s. The most venerable
utopianists were Plato, Dante and Thomas More, distinguished conservatives
who stood far above the lower classes. All utopian movements tended to
promote mutual approximation between people’s masses and the enlightened
elites but they ultimately favoured an elitist sophocracy. Also Lenin conceived
bolshevism as a conspirative action of class-conscious intellectual elites,
whereas most social democrats relied on trade unionism and spontaneous
moods that set the proletarian masses moving.
Democracy meant originally ‘the rule of common people’ but in modern limes
it is commonly mistaken for libertarian oligarchy and misinterpreted as a free
pluralist rule of rich economic elites. We should get back to Aristotle and
reinterpret modern communism, social democratism and liberalism in terms of
his tyrannís ‘rule of one’, demokratia ‘rule of many’ and oligarchia ‘rule of
few’. In Ancient Greece and Rome it originally meant the rule of democratic
parties based on the public ballot and electing people’s tribunes on mass
gatherings. Its meaning should be restricted to ‘direct democracy’, i.e. to direct
elections of popular tribunes and representatives by public gatherings. The
infallible sign of democracy is ‘lower parliamentarism’ (comitia tributa in
Augustan Rome, ‘popular courts‘ héliaiá in Greece, medieval urban
communes, Russian soviets, Libyan jamahiriya) with local communities
elected directly by their representatives, whereas oligarchy is characterised by
efficient ‘higher parliamentarism’ (Greek Areopagus, Ciceronian senate,
hereditary senates, British House of Lords).
140
Dialectics is a German expression for what was called positivisme in
contemporary France (Saint-Simon, A. Comte) and evolutionism (Ch. Lyell,
Erasmus Darwin, H. Spencer) in contemporary Britain. The last expression is
the most convenient of the triple because it conveys the materialist idea of an
autonomous development of higher spiritual phenomena from lower and
simpler physical entities.
Direct democracy presupposes direct elections of popular tribunes and
representatives by public gatherings. This delimitation should not include the
direct elections of presidents by all grown-up electorship because these
regularly lapse into a competition of big money (plutocracy). Only wealthy
candidates can afford launching electioneering campaigns and become eligible
for powerful lobbies of big companies.
Dogmatism is almost generally interpreted as stubborn perseverance in
adhering to some beliefs contradicting common sense. The real essence of
medieval as well as modern dogmatism, however, consists in the cult of saints,
in worshipping martyrs, prophets and their sacred words (bible, gospels)
without considering their consistence with reason and experience. The
torchbearers of the Soviet Stalinist dogmatism managed to refute all principles
of scientific Marxism by adducing contradictory statements from Marx’s
youth. Dogmatism does not actually mean weakness for consistent doctrines
but fideism, sterile scholasticism and personal authoritarianism.
Dogmatists – Neo-Thomist scholastics consisted in rehashing words of St.
Thomas of Aquinas, Stalinist dogmatism in rehashing words of Marx and
Lenin. Its coryphaeus Mikhail Lifshits resembled the founder of medieval
scholastics Petrus Lombardus and his florilegium Four Books of Sentences by
indulging in publishing occasional sentences of Soviet comisars and
extemporal commentaries of influential generals. His school replaced Marx’s
materialistische Geschichtsauffassung by ritual hagiography and buried it by
smuggling into Marxist aesthetics the Roman Catholic cult of personalities and
authorities. Neither medieval nor Marxist dogmatism insisted on adhering to
definite dogmas and principles as does science, they insisted only on
attributing an absolute degree of authority to any statement uttered by a classic
or a saint. Dogmatism does not rest in observing consistent dogmas but in
worshipping personal authorities.
Freedom is a vague word for the mutual balance of power between the
masses, state bureaucracy and private elites. No society has ever been able to
bring boundless freedom to these three classes at the same time. When feudal
magnates were guaranteed privileges by Magna Charta (1215), their brilliant
freedom brought their serfs only a new serfdom. So did all other corporative
regimes ensuring enormous privileges for moneyed classes and condemning
the wide masses to clientelist dependence. On the other hand, the strict rule of
141
absolutist regimes in the Enlightenment liberated peasant commoners at the
cost of bans for religious corporations and cutting aristocratic privileges short.
Freedom for corruption, fraud, speculation, racketeering and prostitution
always means serfdom for labour, morals, science and arts. We should clearly
distinguish between ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’. The ‘freedom’ of criminal mafias
regularly leads to new slavery, whereas the ‘liberty’ of working masses leads
to restrictions imposed upon money-owning classes.
Ideology ought not to be understood as a political doctrine made up from
rational opinions and statements but as a system of cultural values peculiar to a
social group. People view religion erroneously as an authentic and truthful
expression of feelings and tend to pass off any scientific doctrine as ‘false
ideology’. Every primitive animal and savage cherishes some instinctive
subjective feelings but rational science requires more than such ideological
attitudes. It presupposes objective views based on truthful understanding of
processes of social development. Nowadays religious fundamentalism is
creeping back into cultural thought and criminalising every attempt at
scientific social thought as ‘false ideology’.
Personality cult is a slightly secularized medieval cult of martyrs and saints.
As decentralized corporative states in dark ages undergo centralization and
begin to dream about utopias of democratic reforms, the fundamentalist cult of
saints brightens into a cult of heroes, classics and strong political leaders. Their
cultural torchbearers are humanists laying their hopes on materialist science
but administering the same pious and devote rituals to their patron providers as
fundamentalist priests. Personality cult is not a neat product of communism but
an infallible sign of its degeneration into conservative bureaucratism. At a
certain stage every progressivist utopianist left lapses into conservative
authoritarian right and this fate occurred also to Soviet communism. It
however choked the democratic left with greater vigour than the monarchist
and clerical right.
Proletarian revolution – The revolt of the working class against bourgeoisie
is just an extrapolation of the revolutions that the third bourgeois estate waged
against the feudal aristocracy. All revolutions in history have been carried out
by lower-class workers, students and peasants but it is various new upper-class
elites that have harvested their crops. Plebeian rebellions have been and will be
a regular phenomenon in social history but few of them meant a direct
accession of the plebs to the political power. No communist utopia has ever
come into being by people’s spontaneous uprising, its programs usually dawn
to the mind of enlightened elites after the close of disastrous wars. Most
communist utopias started by concluding post-war peace whereas people’s
rebellions remained the swan’s song of departing bright democratic ages. A
violent communist revolution is a rare case (the Russian October Revolution
142
was an exception), while revolutionary uprisings of democratic masses (Wat
Tyler’s peasant rebellion in 1382, the French Revolution, Paris Commune) are
a regular phenomenon. Surprisingly, none of them commenced a new era of a
higher social order, but came as a culmination of the masses’ welfare
immediately before its collapse and the ascent of new decadence.
Revolutions take place regularly as a lawful effect of reshuffling between
antagonist forces in the economic engine. They are set moving by unstable and
unestablished social elements (youth, students, young workers) but their usual
result lies in enthroning new elites. Such circulation of elites is an
indispensable tool of enabling the inner self-control of the economic growth.
Small revolutions occur during crises separating two 10-year booms, because
the victory of a new economic strategy can be reinforced only by a new
political leadership. Greater mass revolutions take place during the consumer’s
booms when masses are doing best. They do not open new bright ages of
democratic government but finish them as their climax. Paradoxically, the laws
of economic cycles place people’s rebellions before the coming of reactionary
decadence (French Revolution, Paris Commune). Most of them were defeated
and followed by a long-time reign of conservative elites.
Socialism is a new modern term for popular regimes related to ancient
democracy and protestant reformation in European history. It is their lawful
secular continuation in the modern age when religious ideology has been
replaced by modern secular thought. It is restored to life in all bright ages of
flourishing arts and sciences and it departs or extinguishes entirely in dark ages
of religious fundamentalism. It primarily makes appearance in peripheral
undeveloped countries fighting for independence on powerful empires but it
never wins greater influence in colonial military powers. Marx’s hope that the
proletarian revolution would take place in the most advanced capitalist
countries was wrong. These countries become colonial empires and their lower
classes get corrupted by becoming a new ruling class in the subdued colonies.
Socialism repeatedly revives in the oppressed regions of the colonial empires
where both masses and elites feel exploited by the centre wallowing in luxury.
Stalinism – All post-revolutionary regimes start with noble ideas of social
emancipation but end in establishing bureaucratic centralist states. Their
progressive mission is fulfilled by progressive intelligentsia (teachers,
engineers, scientists, physicians) but their voice is soon shouted down by
conservative repressive bureaucracy (clerks, police, army, judges). Despite all
the humanitarian ideals of the progressive left the decisive role is soon seized
by the conservative right. The conservative Bonapartist or Stalinist right
functions in post-revolutionary regimes in the same way as the monarchist and
clerical right in reactionary regimes.
143
Totalitarianism – All dark ages of corporative economy develop from
pluralism to totalitarianism while all bright ages of nationalised economy
develop from totalitarianism to pluralism. At the end of the 19th century the
decadent age started to disintegrate the centralised state into many independent
regions (regionalism) but in the mid-thirties all countries began to preach statecontrolled interventionism (Roosevelt‘s New Deal). The first pioneers of
fascism (Ch. Maurras, M. Barres, L. Daudet, F. Mistral, J. Nadler, A. Bartels)
were ardent regionalists fighting for regionalist decentralisation (like our
contemporaries Jörg Haider, Umberto Bossi or Le Pen) but in the mid-thirties
with great corporations permeating with state cliques and the army they turned
their hopes to a strong military state. Modern and post-modern fundamentalism
defends corporative oligarchic economy by labelling it as democracy and
attacks state-owned economy by denigrating it as totalitarianism. Such
ideological camouflage actually criminalises all protestant regimes in the
bright ages of the past (Renascence, Enlightenment) as wrong and punishable
and justifies all oligarchic corporative regimes in the medieval dark ages
(Roman Decadence, the Age of Crusades, Baroque, Saint Alliance, 20th century
world wars) as the only admissible and politically correct social order.
Utopianism is remarkable for designing various future-oriented utopias and
long-term projects but its economic goals are fulfilled and consumed within
the short introductory decade of every half-century cycle when they are
harangued and preached by various freethinkers. Its dreams are not pure
fantasies because every utopia is partly carried out to an extent affordable for
the given stage of economic growth.
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A List of Tables
Table 1. The cultural cycle 1997-2040 compared to years 1871-1996 ..........12
Table 2. Reformations and counter-reformations in European history ..........16
Table 3. Masses and elites in bright and dark ages........................................18
Table 4. Cultural cycles of human evolution ..................................................33
Table 5. Types of social structures in a ‘social space’ ...................................37
Table 6. Industrial cycles of economic growth in France...............................47
Table 7. Corporative oligarchy vs. cooperative autarchy in modern states ...51
Table 8. A proposal of an integrated taxonomy of trends in social sciences ..56
Table 9. Trends in modern centralist and dark corporative cycles ................62
Table 10. The theoretical space of macropolitology and its methods..............63
Table 11. The decay of nation-states into mega-states and mini-states...........66
Table 12. A systematic taxonomy of political macro-regimes .........................86
Table 13. A comparison of three formations in England.................................87
Table 14. The parallel political development in Ancient Greece and Rome....92
Table 15. The political formations in Ancient Egypt ......................................93
Table 16. The growth of civilisation in Ancient China ....................................95
Table 17. A schematic morphology of parties ...............................................103
Table 18. A spatial quantification of political trends ....................................104
Table 19. Basic inequalities of trends in the political space .........................105
Table 20. A classification of political trends in bright and dark cycles........106
Table 21. The coding tables of symbols applied by statistic ideometry .........111
Table 22. An ideometric map of English literary and linguistic trends .........114
Table 23. Triangular rotations of ideologies between 1928-2004.................115
145