The paradoxes of the Bolshevik-type psycho-social structure in economy

László Garai

Institute for Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Budapest, Hungary

Research antecedents

This paper is going to deal with the society Schumpeter ment when in a writing of the post-World War I period (1922) he stated that capitalism was transforming so obviously into something else that he considered not the fact itself, merely its interpretation, to be a point of contention: whether what capitalism transformed into after the war and the subsequent revolutions and counter-revolutions was socialism or not Schumpeter considered only a matter of taste and terminology (pp. 41-43).

To eschew this “matter of taste and terminology”, when I started studying this radically transformed system whether of market, planned or mixed character I labelled it post-capitalism. In my earlier investigations (Garai, 1987, 1988, 1991a) I was led to the conclusion that the essence of this transformation is the transition from the first, 19th century phase of the modernization to the 20th century second modernization.

I understand by modernization the tendency according to which the society intervenes artificially into natural processes in order to provide itself with conditions of its own functioning. Those earlier studies revealed that during the first modernization period the socio-economic system dealt with its material and human conditions differently: by producing the material factors it depended on, on one hand, and by making itself independent of the human phenomena which had not been produced by it. Now, from the turn of the century onwards running the socio-economic system was no longer independent of the faculties and needs acting in the population and, consequently, it faced the necessity of manufacturing also its own human conditions.

Three classes

When one starts to examine how during the second modernization this necessity has been dealt with, the first statement he can make is about a technology the state in various countries introduced practically simultaneously in the period starting with World War I. The technology in question tried to apply to handling people the same logic of a large scale mass production in processing industry the economic organizations of the previous century successfully used in handling things.

The logic of processing industry ranges things into three classes: the class of useful things complying with the aims of man is opposed to the class of harmful things countering man's aims; between them is the class of raw materials, whose originally neutral attributes can be turned useful upon a useful effect and harmful upon a harmful one. Processing industry exposes raw materials to useful effects and, at the same time, in order to protect these materials against harmful effects it tries to narrow the spectrum of these latters' causes by the most effective procedure, i.e. by eradicating harmful things themselves.

The same way, the state whose ambition was boosted in World War I ranges persons into three classes: the class of those who make themselves useful as means for the state's most exalted ends; those who subject themselves as malleable raw materials to the educational ambitions of the former class; finally, the class of harmful people who traverse the above ends of the state. As this latter class, misusing the malleability of the human raw material, would win over a part of it to their side, therefore the most effective procedure against them is considered to be their extermination.

This practice and the relevant ideology have perfected itself in the totalitarian state. But the date of its birth is not 1933, when the national socialists assumed power in Germany; or 1922, when in Italy the fascists did so; nor is it 1917 when the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. The totalitarian state was born in 1914 when, in various states simultaneously, the still traditional power fulfilled a no longer traditional task: from the raw material represented by civil persons who had been set to “live and let live” the mobilization order produced on a large scale this useful product represented by soldiers. Further on, the totalitarian states inherited this ready-made tool to be used for their goals, and, in addition, also inherited the “know how” to operate with almost unlimited efficiency large scale works in this peculiar processing industry in which the tools, raw materials and pestiferous factors are all human beings.

At first glance one would conclude that the Bolshevik-type society was the survivor of this totalitarian state formation: it made use of the products and the “know how” produced by the two-act World War for forty years after them, and now, with a delay of a whole epoch, it follows its ideological antagonist to the sink of history.

When, however, we consistently apply the viewpoint of economic psychology instead of an ideological approach, we shall discover yet another implication.

A peculiar commodity: the relation

There exists such a difference between things and persons, which makes it impossible to simply apply the logic of handling one of these categories to handling the other one. The point is that things can, while persons cannot unambiguously be by their attributes classified into one of the above-mentioned three groups. Regarding persons, when we try to trace down their attributes in order to explain social phenomena their causes turn out to be relations instead. For instance, someone in majority exerts his influence differently from someone in minority (Moscovici, 1976).

Relations have a logic that is quite different from that of attributes. That gets particularly evident if we compare how does that logic work when one wants to define his/her social identity in terms of attributes or relations, respectively.

Let us see, e. g., the attribute of a fine crop of hair which, if necessary, may clearly differentiate my social category from that of bald-heads. In this case the attribute and the social category are somehow interrelated: if I want to switch over to the other social category I may be compelled to give up my attribute and assume that of the other group. On the other hand, if I want to exchange my attribute for theirs I have to accept that the moment I shave my head close, as a result, I will belong in some way among the bald-heads.

A well-known tendency is connected with this relation: as soon as a markedly different attribute (e.g., skin color) is noticed on someone s/he is made susceptible to be classed in a social category detached from the category of those who noticed the difference. And, on the other hand, when a group of people defines their social identity as categorically different from that of others, they are willing to develop also an attribute that is just as different (cf. the skin-heads).

Completely different is the case when two social categories differentiate themselves along some relations and not attributes. Unlike attributes, the value that characterizes a person in terms of a relation can be detached from the social category to which the person belongs. E.g., I may belong to those who are the majority in some regard, the other group being the minority. It is then possible that I change groups without ceasing to be a majority person, for my very joining may have changed the other group from minority to majority status. Or it may also happen that I become a minority person without changing groups, if some of my fellow-members shifted their group.

Therefore, when a totalitarian state tries to apply the same logic to persons' relations by which the traditional processing industry handles the things' attributes, then everything turns upside down.

So far, the authors of folk-poetry of jokes have taken a greater interest in this upside-down situation than those who should reckon with it for some serious matter. When, for instance, we want to get rid of a harmful effect of a certain attribute, the technology of exterminating the very last specimen of the things carrying this attribute guarantees 100% success. This is turned inside out by the following joke applying the technology to relations instead of attributes: “Are there cannibals among you, gentlemen?”, the missionary asks the natives. “No, sir”, their spokesman replies. “We ate the last one yesterday.”

This paradox turning things upside down, however, immediately assumes a serious countenance when we realize that the basic psycho-socio-economic problem the second modernization has to deal with is just connected to relations. The point is that

the optimum functioning of a market economy requires the relation of perfect competition, i. e. one that no monopoly of any of the economic actors restrains.

And, on the other hand,

the optimum functioning of a planned economy requires the relation of perfect monopoly of the planning authority, i. e. one not restrained by the competition of others.

Now, in fact, the actual psycho-socio-economic relations by the early 20th century it became manifest that competition and monopoly do constrain each other and, thus, for the optimum running of either a market or a planned economy various totalitarian states of the second modernization period by the peculiar processing industry they run have to transform these ambiguous relations into an unambiguous one (either competition, or monopoly).

As to this processing industry whose raw material is the above ambiguous relation, two paradoxical statements have to be done. According to the first one

THE COEXISTENCE OF COMPETITION AND MONOPOLY IS ITSELF A COMPETITION,

between interests in competition and interests in the monopoly. On the other hand, if this ambiguous relation as a raw material gets successfully processed, than the exclusiveness of either of the two relations turns out to be the final product. But

BOTH THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF MONOPOLY OVER COMPETITION AND THE EXCLUSIVENESS OF COMPETITION OVER MONOPOLY IMPLY MONOPOLY.

Whenever in the 20th century the human processing industry functions by the principle of the market, it only intervenes in the spontaneous events to protect the market from the monopoly and guarantee the undisturbed competition. And by this very intervention the competition between monopoly and competition got changed for the monopoly of the competition. This was the main trend in the development of that kind of totalitarian states which had been represented by the fascist Italy and the national-socialist Germany.

With this type of totalitarian states it is customary to state that contrary to Bolshevik-type totalitarian states, their economic development does not break off but continues uninterrupted after the collapse of the political regime, because allegedly these systems have not undermined the market, the basis of economy.

But there is more to it than that. These totalitarian states tried to process their raw material in such a way that the market should be ensured the personal condition of perfect competition (as was expressed by such elements of their propaganda as the promotion of dangerous living, the cult of heroes), while those factors of the economic life get eradicated which is believed to be carriers of monopolies (Jewish businessmen, trade unions, etc.)

“Are there cannibals among you, gentlemen?’ — “No, sir, we ate the last one yesterday.” The paradox of the joke I quoted above is dead serious: in order to eradicate monopoly, the fascist and national socialist totalitarian state made itself the possessor of an unprecedented power monopoly.

The determination of the totalitarian state to shape human raw material failed in the case of fascist, national-socialist totalitarian states not because the technology of processing has been morally abject but because of the above logical absurdities as a result of which the system itself undermined its existence.

In this regard, completely different was the Bolshevik-type society. This difference is not the one that the dominant ideologies of both types of totalitarian state kept in evidence as something exaggerated to cosmic proportions (which shows another facet of their similarities).

The boundaries of differing were determined by the fundamental similarity that both types of totalitarian state were organized by extending the successful technology of processing industry from things to persons, while again both used that double heritage of the world war: soldiers produced from civilians and the know-how of such a processing.

What does differentiate the Bolshevik-type society within these boundaries is that here the human processing technology, when applied to make ambiguous relations unambiguous, is practiced in the interest of planning, in order to protect it from the competition and guarantee the undisturbed monopoly of the planning authorities.

The human processing technology has in any case a paradoxical effect turning intentions upside down. But

a fascist-type state in order to get the market
provided with the competition eradicates competition
and
protected from monopoly creates monopoly

while

a Bolshevik type state in order to get the plan
protected from the competition eradicates competition
and
provided with the monopoly creates monopoly

By the first paradoxical connection the social structure that is to be built undermines itself, while by the second paradoxical connection it establishes itself. The difference between the two kinds of paradoxical social structure is especially important to keep in evidence in order to see why the fascist-type totalitarian states collapsed after the world war while the Bolshevik-type totalitarian societies began to expand. One cannot simply attribute this to the historical eventuality of the fortune of war.

Conveyor-belt to produce relations

If the above argumentation is true and the totalitarian states really turned upside down because the logic of processing industry, which was developed for handling things' attributes had been applied by them to persons' relations, then a social psychological feature of the basic organization of the Bolshevik-type society requires special attention.

In the preceding we have seen the difference between the group-organizing effect of people's attributes and that of relations: how bald-heads and people with a fine crop of hair identify themselves and each other, and how people in majority versus those in minority do so. Now, the Soviet-type societies retrace their existence to a social group whose history began by marking themselves off from the opponent group not in terms of an attribute but by evoking that relation according to which this group once happened to be in majority; that is, in their native Russian: Bolshevik. The members of the group went on identifying themselves by this name later as well. They were Bolsheviks, that is, in majority even when their fraction happened to be in minority within the Russian socialist democratic Party; or later on when this fraction broke with the original party where the Mensheviks, i.e., those in minority not only got the majority but constituted the totality of the membership. And they called themselves by this name when after the revolution those “in majority” liquidated (first in terms of organization and later physically as well) those “in minority”.

This psycho-social peculiarity of the Bolshevik party would have deserved marked attention because it constitutes a special case of a general characteristic, namely that the Bolshevik-type parties referred themselves much more to relations' form then to attributes' substance. Thus, it was more important to have a disciplined unity among the rank-and-file of the party than was the program in relation to which that unity was established and maintained: the same indissoluble unity of disciplined members characterized the Bolshevik-type parties when the program called for a fight against social democratic leaders; when somewhat later it rallied communists together with social democrats in a popular front against Hitler; when it urged a fight against Trotsky who was accused of having entered into a secret pact with Hitler; when Stalin actually had entered into such a pact, so this motive was omitted from the mobilization against Trotsky; when the sole point of the program was mobilization against the Germans, in alliance with the Anglo-Saxon states; and also when after the world war the mobilization exalted the fight against Anglo-Saxon imperialism.

It is a further well-known historical fact that Bolshevik-type parties stress not only their disciplined unity but also efficiently brandish the political weapon called "salami-tactic" against their enemies whom they can markedly divide into those who are willing and those who are unwilling to enter into a tactical union with the communists.

This intention to unite and divide is usually considered from a socio-technical viewpoint, in terms of the advantage that a political organization gets nearer to the realization of its goals if it is united and its enemies are divided. In the case of the Bolshevik-type parties, however, a much deeper effect than the socio-technical is involved which is again mediated by relations' paradox. Unlike attributes, relations can also be defined by the way they are thought about by those involved in them: for instance, whether people elaborate their similarities and differences in a similar or different way may reinforce (or weaken) the elaborated similarity or difference.

If a group is unified by claiming that they are marked by the relation of unity, this relation characterizes it at once to some extent. By contrast, when the consensus is reached about the group being divided, it is at once less divided. Finally, if a group is divided by the question whether it is unified or divided, then the former opinion weakens and the latter strengthens its grounding by its mere emergence.

By elaborating their relations in this way, people define their social identity, and by means of these elaboration paradoxes, the defined social identity may either establish or undermine itself. Now,

a Bolshevik-type party mobilizes all the paradoxes of unity and division in such a way that the social identity of its members turn out to be established and that of non-party-people undermined.

First, by over-emphasizing their unity, the members of such a party get more unified indeed just because this over-emphasizing unifies them still more: thus, the Bolshevik identity defined by this relation established itself.

Second, by applying the salami-tactic to the non-Bolshevik section of society, it achieves that those who are willing to enter into some alliance with the communists and those who are unwilling to deal with them at all shall over-emphasize their division; hence, they manifest their unity in this regard: the non-Bolshevik identity defined by this relation is undermined.

Third, the salami-tactic usually appears as an alliance policy of the moderate Bolsheviks inviting the moderate non-Bolsheviks to think (and act accordingly) that the moderates inside and outside the party are natural allies against the sectarians, extremists of both sides; meanwhile the party-moderates watch jointly with the party-extremists over the strict dividing line that separates the world inside from the world outside the party. Thus the division of the moderates by the question whether they are united or divided, establishes the social identity defined by claims of Bolsheviks to be divided and undermines the one defined by non-Bolsheviks who insist on being united.[1]

If all paradoxes work to the benefit of the Bolshevik-type party by establishing the chosen social identity of (the sincerely committed part of) its members and undermining the chosen social identity of the non-Bolshevik section of society, and if we consider that a person's social identity is nothing but his/her specifically elaborated social relations, then we can venture the statement that

the Bolshevik-type party is a factory for the large-scale production of relations.

This statement might probably sound queer. But anyone who ventures into a study of modern societies in terms of economic psychology will probably have a feeling of queerness from the moment he has realized the connection between the logic applied by a totalitarian state and the logic of large-scale production in processing industry. This feeling will probably grow more intense when during this intellectual adventure one cannot help concluding that the technology that is applied by the totalitarian state according to the logic shared by processing industry fails just because it can only be used to mass-produce attributes and not to mass-produce relations. But now we have just identified the conveyor-belt for the enlarged production of relations: as a useful product of the material processing industry facilitates still more production of useful products, just the same way producing a division among people in respect whether they belong to a definite organization or not facilitates the production of still more division in this respect while producing the unity of the members of this organization facilitates the production of still more unity of people in the organization.

For the Bolshevik-type organizations being a device of an enlarged reproduction of relations we may find a further argument in another odd feature of theirs:

the pattern of unity and division that was demonstrated in the relation between party-members and non-party members is reproduced within the party, in the relation between the Centre and the Membership.

The Center is unified: it makes its decisions with an unanimous vote and never by a simple or qualified majority; at the same time, the membership is organizationally divided into primary units, which can only keep in contact through the center, since getting in touch directly constitutes the capital offense of factionalism. The pattern is further reproduced within the Center: its unified kernel is separated from its institutionally divided membership.[2]

In general, this aspiration for unity and division within the party and its central structures is also considered from a socio-technical aspect, in terms of the gain obtained because the more unified a group within an organization is and the more it can divide its potential rivals, the easier it is for it to acquire and retain power. There is, however, a deeper than socio-technical effect at work here in the case of Bolshevik-type parties. The same effect is demonstrable here as the one whose paradox affecting social identity was seen earlier in the discussion of the relation between party-members and non-party members: those in the Center will be even more unified by uniformly preserving their unity, while the Membership preserves their unity by being actively unified in watching over their... being divided.

The complicity of the victim suggesting that the victim took part with the most active agreement, for instance, in dividing its own ranks, was one of the fundamental determinants of the Bolshevik-type structure. In order to understand it, we should first clarify the question what lent so much significance to the unity of the center and the division of the periphery in Bolshevik-type parties.

As has been seen, it is obviously useful for any political organization to be unified and to divide its rivals. But an organization that has emerged along the substance of some attribute will not make this a matter of primary importance. Some sort of unity is ensured within the organization by the fact that its members are, for instance, all workers, and this immediately separates it from the outsiders who are not. If we are workers while they are not, they may be as united in a party of theirs as we are without being the same workers as we are, and this relation would not change even if within our party we happen to be divided by fractions.

Now, for the Marxian conception of socialism the most important was the thesis according to which the universal human values of socialism were claimed to be represented by the particular class interests of the proletariat, whereby the socialist parties, including the Bolshevik-type ones, were founded as workers' parties. Marxist parties, however, did not conceive of worker quality as a sociological attribute. What made it important for them was the relation in which the assumed historical happening of the whole of society was represented by the activity of its distinguished part. The same relation was then reproduced by the Bolshevik doctrine of the vanguard, which claimed that the happenings of the whole proletariat were to be represented by the activity of its distinguished part, namely the party equipped with the weapon of scientific theory. Likewise, the same relation applies to the party as a whole and a distinguished part of it, the latter comprising the professional revolutionaries of the Leninian old guard at first and the professional party activists of the Stalinian apparatus later.

While the form of the relation attributed to the proletariat thus proved to be transferable to newer and newer substances, one thing became more and more obvious about the substance itself that was constituted by the sociological attribute of the working class. It was what in an essay of his novel Semprun, referring to Marx' idea that “there exists a universal class, which means the elimination of all kinds of classes, which can only liberate itself by liberating all the classes of society”, declared: “the main conclusion of at least the century that separates us from Marx is that this class is not the proletariat”. Supposedly, this issue

made Bolshevik-type parties under-interested in the attributes' substance and over-interested in the relations' form as regards various sociological entities

We have seen above (cf. pp. 3-4 and pp. 6-7) the peculiarities of social organizations that emerge along relations and not attributes. Now, one of these peculiarities implies that such an organization cannot refer the relation of, for instance, unity and division or separation, to any attribute (e.g., to that of being versus not being a worker) but to the relation itself. Consequently, such an organization has no possibility to tolerate (as proposed above) either our division or others' unity, because the only relevant quality uniting us and separating us from them is that we are united while they are divided.

Returning now to that structure of Bolshevik-type societies (constructed like Matrioshka-dolls) in each of whose circles there is distinguished a more inner circle (the working class within society, the party within the working class, the Center within the party, the nucleus of the Center within it — within the central committee the political committee, the organizing committee, the secretariat, etc. — and, finally, at the core of the Center, almost as a matter of course, there is the Leader) it can be stated that every inner circle has power over the corresponding outer circle. And it can also be established that this power is taken over from it by the next circle towards the center. That is how in a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, the power of the working class over society is exercised by the party; the “leading role of the party” is exercised by the Center; and within a system of “democratic centralism” the power of the Center is finally exercised by the Leader.

Yet the most peculiar psychosocial feature to be noticed in a Bolshevik-type social structure is the complicity of the victim. Each circle takes a voluntary and active part in subjecting themselves to the power of the innermore circle, no matter how great a role the coercion plays, either in its Stalinian version (which threatened one's life directly) or the post-Stalinian one (which solely eliminated a varying number of conditions of living). The inner circle not only surrenders the power that is taken from it by an innermore circle but it actively hands over this power to this more central circle.

Precisely, it is because the condition of its power is this active handing over. What may explain this paradoxical condition is the above discussed formula, which has it that it is not the substance of some social attribute that distinguishes a position of power from positions without power in any of the circles.

There is a long past to the practice of social scientists, politologists, Kremlinologists and journalists trying to pry open the secret of power in Bolshevik-type societies by searching for the sociological attribute that accounted for the similarity of the incumbent of power — the members of the new class — and for their difference from those whom they exercised the power over. The discovery that in a “dictatorship of the proletariat” it is not at all the proletarians who have the power was as shocking for the first generations of revolutionaries as it became a commonplace later. Neither can the other assumptions ó whether power was possessed by the office-holders[3] or managers, by those whom the army or the security organs obey, by those who had the capital or who knew the Doctrine, by those who could put to good use the mass media, who were granted a diploma or who had a past in the workers' movement[4] — bring one closer to the secret.

In a Bolshevik-type society the critical attribute we are looking for does not exist. The only criterion also for a power position is defined in terms of relations:

a power position is that which is characterized by unity — as opposed to the powerless position of those divided.

Anyone that hands over his power to the more central circle manifests that he has joined the side of unity. The side of power, that is. That explains the extraordinary discipline that is typical of all circles of power. Those expelled from a circle hardly ever protest or argue against their expulsion: they do not set up the “true” Politburo, the “true” central committee, the “true” party as opposed to the “false” or “treacherous” politburo, CC, or party. Should they do so, they would immediately reveal that they had abandoned the position of unity for that of division. For the position of powerlessness, that is.

Bolshevik-type self-discipline and the abstraction of perfect monopoly

Just as the optimum functioning of a market economy requires the relation of perfect competition of economic actors, the running of a planned economy requires the perfect monopoly of the planning authorities, this paper stated earlier (p. 4).

Without the above-analyzed unparalleled self-discipline through which a Bolshevik-type structure makes its victims accomplices[5] the external disciplinary practice would never have been able to bring society closer to the abstraction of perfect monopoly even if it had used more cruel means than ever in former centuries before. In every other system, in order to suppress the outer circles, the innermost circle monopolizing power must resort to apparatuses of violence in intermediate circles, which, having experienced their efficiency in mediating the central will, may at any moment pit their own will against the former, in competition for social influence.

Self-discipline that could be forged in the Bolshevik workshop of perfect monopoly had a serious condition. In order that an outer circle should resign from power in a disciplined manner to the benefit of an innermore circle, it is required that when it manifests its belonging to the position of unity and not to that of division, this position should indeed be that of power. What makes this possible is a construction in which not only the inner circles within the party reproduce the structural pattern of the Bolshevik-type party as was said above, but the structure continues towards the periphery as well: the outermost circle must have the possibility to surround itself with formations outside it that must be divided as related to it, and over which it can exercise power as the carrier of unity. That is how the Soviet-Russian state, which contained the Bolshevik party and the outer circle of the non-party-society, surrounded itself with an outermore circle of the other federated republics that could only get in touch with each other by way of Russia, through the state and party organs residing in the capital (“the everlasting alliance of independent republics rallied for ever by the great Russia”, as has been sung in the Soviet national anthem).

Then the Soviet Union found the chance to surround itself with the state formations of “people's democracies”, compared to whose division the Soviet Union as a whole represented the unity.

And then followed another attempt, which — had it succeeded — would have shown the entire “socialist camp” as the carrier of the form of unity, surrounded by the colonies liberated in the 1950-1960s, by, in general, the countries of the third world, which would have been the outermost circle at the time, constituting new substance for the form of division. The extension of the outer circle around the “socialist camp” was of paramount importance for the structure, because this would have ensured that the “camp” should feature as the subject of power in its entirety. This would have reinforced its readiness to stay in the position of unity by delegating power with the Martrioshka method, which would have produced a social structure approximating the abstraction of perfect monopoly, as we saw above.

It is a common practice that military expenditures are regarded economic only inasmuch as they imply that they drain resources[6] from areas where their utilization would have been productive, whereas their military use, the analysts point out, is unproductive. The importance of such analyses for social criticism cannot be stressed enough. However, they are inaccurate in their analytic description of connections. They ignore the implication by which those expenses are indeed productive. Whether the Bolshevik party leadership uses them to give economic or military aid to certain components of the outer circle, or it uses them to arm the factors of the inner circles, or again, it actually deploys these means at a certain point of the outer circle which (e.g., Afghanistan) is reluctant to add to the unity of an innermore circle by accepting the division of its outer circle — these expenditures constitute the production costs of the analyzed structure at each point of its extension.

That is, the costs of production of the human resources shaped also in its relations.

The Bolshevik-type system collapsed finally in this quality, namely, as a device producing human resources.

One of the ultimate causes of its collapse was clearly economic: undoubtedly this structure produced human resources, but at such high costs that Adam Smith's statement claiming that the human resource “can be regarded from the same viewpoint as a machine (...) which facilitates and shortens work and which, through causing some cost, recovers this cost with profit,” turned out to be no longer valid here.

Another sharp-featured cause of the collapse was psycho-economic in that sense, referred to the paradox of relations, which has been demonstrated by the present paper.

The coexistence of monopoly and competition is itself a competition; it was argued above (p. 5). And it was also stated that the optimum condition for a market economy is perfect competition, while for a planned economy it is perfect monopoly.

A competition is perfect when none of the participants has predominance over the rest since this predominance might ensure its monopoly. As is known, this condition of the equality of involved factors has never existed in its pure form in the capitalist market, so the functioning of the market was ensured by a competition that came close to the perfect state for a shorter or longer time at most.

After these precedents came the Bolshevik-type system, which went on building out its above-outlined system with increasing success. Increasing success in this system did not mean approximating more and more closely the abstraction of perfect monopoly, but more and more extending the system that was characterized, from the very beginning, by perfect monopoly in its ideal purity.

While this extension remained within a system (that of the Bolshevik Party, then of Soviet-Russia, of the Soviet Union, of the “socialist camp”) that could isolate itself, it made irresistible progress while outside the more and more hermetically closed borders of this system an imperfect competition kept the market running somehow or other.

When the extension reached the point at which the Bolshevik-type system built as Matrioshka dolls tried to construct its outermost circle from the products of the decomposition of colonies, this circle of the system could no longer be isolated from the other system to which these countries used to belong formerly. This triggered off a competition between the two systems, which however did not fit in with earlier forms of the cold war: that side that had just released these areas seized earlier by force of arms, could not arouse suspicion by being ready to recapture them by force, and neither could the other side suggest that it was willing to occupy them by force of arms.

Thus the competition between the systems became an economic rivalry. Since at that time the two systems represented equal weight, their rivalry actually proved to be the first perfect competition in the history of the market.

Thus, determined to further bolster the structure of perfect monopoly, the Bolshevik-type system ensured perfect competition for capitalism, the condition that could manifest all the advantages of a market over a planned economy, which proved to be increasingly misfunctional because of the constraint on the perfectness of monopoly.

That sealed the fate of the Bolshevik-type system.

As a consequence, one can more and more often read that today the fate of the world is no longer decided by the rivalry of two superpowers but by the exclusive goodwill of a single superpower.

If it is really so, that will be the end of that competition and the start of a new monopoly.

And, hence, the start of a new paradox, too.