Lecture 5. Шестой вопрос: проблема перехода к рыночным отношениям в россии

Шестой вопрос: проблема перехода к рыночным отношениям в россии.

Переход к рыночным отношениям в России связан, прежде всего, с проблемой трансформации административ­но-командной нерыночной системы к рыночным отношениям со сменой формации

1. либерализация всех сфер экономической жизни. Это значит передача прав государства как основного субъекта экономических отношений административно-командной системы (преимущественно вертикальные связи) к традиционным рыночным субъектам – производителям (преимущественно горизонтальные связи), а точнее сочетание горизонтальных и вертикальных связей. Либерализация цен как частный случай либерализации.

2. разгосударствление экономики - разделение собственности и власти. Приватизация. Переход к рыночным отношениям осуществляется в переходный период, когда в экономике существуют как элементы старой (административно-командной системы), так и зарождаются элементы рыночной экономики. Развитие рыночных отношений в России натолкнулось в самом начале на отсутствие рыночных институтов, рыночной инфраструктуры. Получился, как бы замкнутый круг: рынок не может развиваться без рыночных институтов, для развития рыночной инфраструктуры нужен рынок. В этих условиях стало важным создать правовую основу реформ, последовательно проводить рыночные реформы, и при этом бороться с такими явлениями как кризис (системный, политический, структурный), инфляция, безработица, отсутствие социальных гарантий, падение уровня жизни и борьба разных менталитетов.

В этой ситуации - двойственное положение государства. Ему нужно, с одной стороны, самоустраниться, чтобы не мешать развиться рыночным отношениям, с другой стороны, только при поддержке государства в переходный период, возможно, осуществлять реформы и осуществлять развитие экономики.

THE CIVIL WAR (1861-1865)

By 1850 New England and the Middle Atlantic States were the main centers of manufacturing, commerce and finance. Principal areas of these areas were textiles, lumber, clothing, machinery, and woolen goods. At the same time shipping reaches its height of prosperity, and vessels flying the American flag piled the oceans, distributing wares of all nations.

The South, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River and beyond, was a relatively compact political unit featuring economy centered on agriculture. Tobacco was important for the economy of Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina. In South Carolina, rice was an abundant crop, and the climate and soil of Louisiana encouraged cultivation of sugar. But cotton eventually became the dominant crop and the one with which the South was identified. However, only a minority of Southern whites owned slaves. In 1860, there were a total of 46, 274 planters throughout the slave-holding states, with a planter defined as someone who owned at least 20 slaves. More then half of all slaves worked on plantations. Some of the yeomen farmers, 70% of whom held less then 40 hectares, had a handful of slaves, but most had none. The “poor whites” lived on the lowest rang of Southern society and held no slaves. However, all strata of the Southern society supported slavery – planters because they owned most of the slaves; yeomen farmers and poor whites feared that if freed, slaves would compete with them for land; also, the presence of slaves raised the standing of the yeomen and the poor whites on the social scale, they would not willingly relinquish (отказываться) this status.

In national politics, Southerners chiefly sought protection and enlargement of the interests presented by the cotton-slavery system. Expansion was considered necessary because the wastefulness of cultivating single crop, cotton, increasing the need for new fertile lands. The South believed that it needed new territory for additional slave states to balance the admission to the union of new free states. Antislavery Northerners saw in this Southern view a consp i racy for slavery aggrandizement and were successful in convincing the Congress to abolish the slave trade with Africa in 1808.

The abolitionist movement that emerged in 1830s was uncompromising and insistent on an immediate end to slavery. One phase of the antislavery movement involved helping slaves escape to safe refuges in the North or over the border into Canada. Known as the “Underground Railroad”, an elaborate network of secret routes was firmly established in the 1830s in all parts of the North. Despite the efforts of active abolitionists to make slavery a question of conscience, most Northerners held themselves aloof from the antislavery movement or actively opposed it.

However, with the conclusion of the Mexican War (1846-1848), the US gained a vast territory of 1.36 mln sq km encompassing the present-day states of Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah and parts of New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming. The acquisition revived the question if the new territories would be slave of free. Until 1845, it had seemed likely that slavery would be confined to the areas where it already existed by the Missouri Compromise. Many Northerners believed that if not allowed to spread, slavery would ultimately decline and die. Texas, which already permitted slavery, entered the Union as a slave stare. But California, Utah and New Mexico did not have slavery, and when the US prepared to take over these states in 1848, there were conflicting suggestions on what to do: extremists in the South urged that all the lands acquired from Mexico be open to slaveholders; antislavery Northerners demanded that all new regions be closed to slavery; moderates suggested that the Missouri Compromise line be extended to the Pacific with free states north to it and slave states to the south or to leave the question to “popular sovereignty”, i.e. the government should allow settlers to enter new lands with or without slaves as they pleased and, when the time came to organize the territories into states, the people themselves should determine the question (the principle of popular sovereignty).

The discovery of gold in California in 1848 caused a rush of more than 80,000 settlers for the single year 1849. California became a crucial question and, for the Congress had to define the status of this new region before an organized government could be established.

Senator Henry Clay, the author of the Missouri Compromise, halted again a sectional quarrel with what became known as the Compromise of 1850: California was admitted as a state with free-soil constitution (slave-prohibited); the remainder of the new annexation was divided into the two territories of New Mexico and Utah and organized without mention of slavery; more effective machinery was established for catching runaway slaves and returning them to their masters; buying and selling of slaves (but not slavery) were abolished in the District of Columbia.

Politically, the 1850s can be characterized as a decade of failure in which the nation’s leaders were unable to resolve, or even contain, the diverse issue of slavery. In 1854, for example, the region that now comprises Nebraska and Kansas was being rapidly settled, increasing pressure for establishing territorial, and eventually, state governments. Dominant slave-holding elements in Missouri objected to letting Kansas become a free territory, for their state would then have three free-soil neighbors (Illinois, Iowa and Kansas). They feared a prospect of their state being forced to become a free state as well. For a time, Missourians in Congress, backed by Southerners, blocked all efforts to organize the region. The consequence was passing in 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act (Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic senior senator, Illinois): the two territories permitted settlers to carry slaves with them; later, the inhabitants were to determine themselves whether they should enter the Union as free or slave states.

In Senatorial election of 1858, two candidates from Illinois opposed one another. These were the author of the ill-famous Kansas-Nebraska Act Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. The latter had long considered slavery as an evil. He declared that all national legislation should be framed on the principle that slavery was to be restricted and eventually abolished. He contended also that the principle of popular sovereignty was false, for slavery in the western territories was the concern of not only the local inhabitants but of the US as a whole.

Sectional strife was growing ever more acute. On the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown, an antislavery fanatic who had captured and killed five proslavery settlers in Kansas three years before, led a band of followers in an attack on federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in what is now a state of West Virginia. Brown’s aim was to use the arms seized to lead a slave uprising. After two days of fighting, brown and his surviving men were taken prisoner by a force of US marines commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee. Brown was tried for conspiracy, treason, and murder, and on December 2, 1869 he was hanged.

In the presidential election of 1861, the Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln as its candidate. They declared that slavery was to spread no farther. The party also a law granting free homesteads to the settlers who would help in the operating of the West. The Democrats were not united. Southerners split from the party and nominated Vice President John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky for president. Stephen A. Douglas was the nominee of the northern Democrats. The border states formed the Constitutional Union Party and nominated John C. Bell of Tennessee.

Lincoln and Douglas competed in the North and Breckenridge and Bell in the South. Lincoln won only 39% of the popular vote, but he had a clear majority of 180 electoral votes, carrying all 18 free states. Bell won Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia; Breckenridge took the other slave states except Missouri, which was won by Douglas. Despite his poor electoral showing, Douglas trailed only Lincoln in the popular vote.

Lincoln’s election made South Carolina’s secession from the Union a foregone conclusion. Once the election returns were certain, a special South Carolina convention declared secession. By February 1, 1861, the six states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana) adopted a provisional constitution for the Confederate States of America. Later in the year Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee joined to make 11 Confederate states in all.

On March 4, 1861 Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president of the US. In his inaugural address he refused to recognize the secession, considering it “legally void”. His speech closed with a plea for restoration of the bonds of the union. But on April 12, guns opened fire on the federal troops stationed at Fort Sumter in the Charleston harbor, South Carolina.

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