September 29, 2018 Saturday
Bedtime Story
The Fate of NEP
So what does the first sentence of the
second paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence say?
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and Pursuit of
Happiness.”
Sweet words but hollow as a pipe.
And yet, just like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin
Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, Lenis too sought to construct exactly the same
kind of society where all men are equal.
I have described to you quite vividly the
kind of loss and deprivation that Vladimir Lenin came out victorious with after
taking over power.
Not a very ideal situation for the ruler to
establish equality and prosperity for all due to which he had to change track
and introduce the vices of the West into his system.
Tragically he did not live long enough
dying in 1924 just three years through his Novaya Ekinomichaskaya Politika.
Just like today’s Russia, this NEP created
some very few wealthy men who were called NEPmen – the nouveau riches who took
advantage of the opportunities for private trade and small scale manufacturing
in a short boom of entrepreneurial activity.
In the words of the professor of political
science at the University of California, Berkeley not only were “private
property, private enterprise and private profit largely restored in Lenin’s
Russia” but it even turned to Western capitalistic nations for cooperation and
investment willing to provide “generous concessions to foreign capitalism.”
Strangely enough, Lenin himself did not
consider it a betrayal of socialism ideals since according to Karl Marx a
nation must first reach “full maturation of capitalism as the precondition for
socialism realization.”
This mandatory condition implies that for
socialism to be practiced in a nation it must be totally modernized,
industrialized and self-sufficient through capitalistic means before it can
pride itself to advance to the higher order of socialism where people can hope
to have fixed wages with capped working hours and government backed health and
social securities.
This one sentence should sum up the
complete irony and conundrum of socialistic ideals.
Alas Lenin’s NEP was not to last long.
With the demise of Lenin in 1924 things
began to go downhill for NEP.
NEP after Lenin got complete support from
the Politburo member Nikolai Bukharin and a left Communist; he saw the dire
necessity of running a free market economy to sustain a devastated nation.
Bukharin’s slogan to peasants “Enrich
yourselves!” and his idea of attaining socialism “at snail’s pace” was no to
the liking of his Party and its higher cadres including Stalin.
Stalin in the power struggle after the
demise of Lenin had successfully placed himself in the victorious side and who
like many others were convinced that the NEP program was not working quickly
enough.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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