"I think the era of capitalism will eventually pass, and a new era is coming soon!"
In 1988, 75 Nobel Prize winners came to Paris. At this event of the world's top minds, experts expressed their opinions on human beings. The development direction was discussed.
The famous historian Arnold also predicted the Third World War and the future of mankind: "The greed and distortion of human beings will defeat the kindness and innocence of human nature."
Nobel Prize winners This gathering is to discuss the world-wide problems left by this historian.
Arnold's book "Historical Research" uses his unique historical perspective to describe the rise and fall of the world's 26 major nations. This historical work also shows his pessimistic attitude towards the future of mankind.
At the gathering of Nobel laureates, they concluded:
"The only way for human beings to gain development and happiness, and to avoid war and achieve peace, is to go back to Confucius in China 2,500 years ago." Looking for wisdom”.
At that time, China's national strength was not strong. Reform and opening up had just begun in the 1980s and 1990s, and its comprehensive national strength was far less than that of developed countries in Europe and the United States.
In China in the 1980s and 1990s, people in poor areas did not even have enough to eat.
However, the Nobel Prize winners at that time agreed that China’s socialism has unique characteristics.
China, with its profound cultural heritage, will play an increasingly important role on the international stage.
In other words, they believe that the 21st century belongs to China, and that Eastern civilization can avoid the outbreak of the Third World War.
Up to now, China has really shined on the international stage and has not disappointed the Nobel Prize winners.
But in the 1990s, why did Nobel Prize winners favor China's development?
This is inseparable from the foreshadowing of Arnold as a historian, as well as the historical trend of the development of the entire world.
Capitalism and Socialism
5th century, people entered the era of geographical discoveries . Capitalism in Europe began to sprout, and Spain and Portugal were the first to enjoy the benefits of the Age of Navigation.The prosperity of European business development has gradually made it the center of the world, and people's living standards far exceed those in other countries.
In this world context, many historians have put forward the " Eurocentric theory ".
From the 15th century to the 20th century, European colonists slowly occupied other parts of the world and continued to primitively accumulate capital to expand their own strength.
During this period, Britain occupied a large area of colonies in areas other than Antarctica, so Britain was known as the "Empire on which the Sun Never Sets."
However, with the great development of capitalism, capitalism that has reached its peak has slowly begun to decline.
The basic contradiction of capitalism is the contradiction between the socialization of production and the private ownership of the means of production. This leads to the capitalists being profit-seeking and wanting to occupy more means of production.
As a result, the wealth gap between capitalists and workers has become wider and wider, and the lives of workers at the bottom are miserable.
When the economic crisis broke out in the 1920s and 1930s, the big capitalists in Britain and the United States, less than 10% of the people living at the top of the pyramid, occupied more than 90% of the country's wealth.
In a capitalist society with sharp class contradictions, its leaders have also adopted various means to ease the contradiction between capitalists and workers.
But no matter what means are adopted, the conflicts between capitalists and workers will not disappear, but will become calm.
As long as the state form of capitalism is not completely changed, the basic contradictions of capitalist society will still exist.
The contradiction between the working class and the big capitalists is a derivative of the basic contradiction. For example, Roosevelt's New Deal allowed the United States to survive the economic crisis, but after a period of calm, the economic crisis would break out again.
This has also led to the innate disease of capitalism since its inception, which is the repeated intensification of social contradictions.
Each country has different strategies for dealing with acute domestic social conflicts, and different forces have taken the opportunity to come to power.
9th century, the capitalist world began to differentiate between camps, which also led to the outbreak of two world wars .Extremists in Japan, Germany, and Italy took advantage of the chaos of the economic crisis to seize state power.
In order to deal with the domestic situation, the fascists had no choice but to divert domestic conflicts and use the outbreak of war to divert people's attention.
By plundering the wealth obtained from other countries, the fascist forces convinced people across the country that their leaders could indeed lead the country to prosperity.
Coupled with the fact that fascist forces have completely controlled domestic public opinion, the news media have all become the government’s eyes, ears and mouthpieces.
Relying on these media machines that speak for the fascist forces, the government has deluded the people across the country.
It was precisely because of experiencing two world wars and multiple economic crises that Arnold realized that capitalism was not the trend of future development.
Some scholars even assert that the process of capitalist development begins at birth and then slowly destroys itself.
The war made Arnold see the ugly side of human nature. When the British and French soldiers fought against the Germans, they did not regard them as human beings at all.
The Anglo-French alliance called the Germans "Germans". When they did not treat the Germans as human beings, they would have a clear conscience when they shot them.
However, the British and French allied forces killed an ordinary innocent German people, and it is very difficult to feel at ease.
At this time, Arnold still had a glimmer of hope in human nature. He originally thought that after two world wars, people should learn to behave.
But After World War II , wars, large and small, continued all over the world.
Arnold saw that except for the fact that humans no longer used nuclear weapons , there was no improvement at all.
They used various means to make themselves exhausted physically and mentally.
So his attitude began to slowly change, and he began to have pessimistic thoughts about the future of mankind.
The disadvantages of the Stalin model
In 1973, Arnold published the book "Man and Mother Earth". In this book, he completely erased the "Eurocentrism" that began in the 15th century.
At the same time, Arnold gave a very high evaluation of China in this book. He believed that socialism has advantages over capitalism.
A socialist society is a society based on the majority of workers and farmers. As the first socialist country , the Soviet Union really shocked the United States and other capitalist countries .
The Soviet Union has been recuperating for some time since Lenin's " New Economic Policy " and has a certain domestic economic foundation.
After Stalin came to power, he began to slowly shift his attention to the construction of socialist industrialization, gradually turning the individual small-scale peasant economy into a collective economy.
After the public ownership of the means of production was gradually established, the Soviet Union had sufficient funds to support the development of industry.
With such means, many heavy industries in the Soviet Union have been greatly developed, and the overall national strength has been rapidly improved.
Stalin, who had complete control over the country's economy, under his leadership, the Soviet Union's military strength could even compete with that of the United States.
At this time, Western capitalist society was undergoing a protracted economic crisis, and the Soviet Union, which was completely isolated from the world of capitalist society, was not affected by the economic crisis at all.
Compared with the continuous decline in comprehensive national strength of countries such as Britain and France, the Soviet Union has successfully achieved the goal of catching up among latecomers.
The Stalin model made the Soviet Union one of the world's leading industrial powers.
However, the development of heavy industry has become increasingly prosperous, while agriculture and light industry have stagnated, which has also restricted the further development of the Soviet economy.
During the Stalin period, everyone in the Soviet Union looked up to Stalin.
No one dared to say anything detrimental to Stalin’s image when Stalin was at the height of his power.
As the shortcomings of Stalin's model gradually emerged, and with the death of Stalin himself, later Soviet leaders dared to criticize Stalin for not recognizing the actual national conditions.
The shortcomings of the Stalin model are also one of the important reasons why Nobel laureates are not optimistic about the Soviet Union, which is also a socialist country.
develops entirely in the form of a planned economy, which means completely denying the role of the market in capitalist society. In the early stages of economic construction, methods such as
can indeed allow the country to fully control the economic lifeline.
However, in peacetime, this measure was very inappropriate. The overall planned economy made the national economy lose its vitality.
The long-term backwardness of light agriculture and light industry caused the Soviet Union's overall national strength to continue to rise, but people's living standards continued to decline, and they did not even have a decent piece of clothing or shoes.
In terms of political construction, Stalin became increasingly arbitrary.
Since the situation in the Soviet Union was not stable, in order to keep power in his own hands, Stalin used direct appointments for most leaders at all levels.
After World War II, Stalin's control over domestic politics became more secure.
Basically, leaders at all levels were appointed by Stalin, and the supervision of the masses became increasingly ineffective.
Socialist democracy and the rule of law were ignored, the human rights that Lenin originally hoped for were lost, and power was concentrated in the hands of the elite.
Although subsequent Soviet leaders were aware of the shortcomings of Stalin's model, neither Khrushchev, Bo Nezhlev or Gorbachev could lead the Soviet Union out of the predicament.
The "Three Husbands" reforms even caused turmoil in Soviet society in the 1970s and 1980s.
The situation of continuous decline in people's living standards has not been improved as it should be, and social conflicts continue to intensify.
Gorbachev even deviated from the direction of socialism and tried to move the Soviet Union closer to the direction of a capitalist country.
The declining Soviet Union already has the possibility of disintegration. At this time, the development of the socialist camp has been dealt a huge blow.
Seeing that the Soviet Union was about to withdraw from the stage of history, at the 1988 Nobel Prize winner gathering, people could not help but regret that the Soviet Union, which was very prosperous in the 1940s and 1950s, had fallen to where it is today.
Optimistic about China
Although the Soviet Union is about to collapse, experts do not believe that socialism has come to an end.
As a result, they focused their attention on China, which was slowly groping on the road to socialism.
Experts are very optimistic about China. The important reason is that historian Arnold visited China twice.
In 1929, Arnold entered China from North Korea and successively visited China’s first-tier cities, Beijing and Shanghai.
The second time was in 1967. Mr. Arnold was 76 years old, but he still dragged his heavy body to China.
On the eve of the death of Arnold scholar, he completed his last monograph - " Looking forward to in the 21st century".
In this book, Arnold puts forward his own opinion. He believes that in world history, the 19th century belonged to the era of the British Empire on which the sun never set.
The 20th century is an era when the American nation shines and regains its glory.
The 21st century has just begun, but China has already made tremendous changes and is destined to achieve renaissance in the new century.
Nobel Prize winners are unanimously optimistic about Eastern civilization represented by Confucius, believing that Eastern civilization can overcome the shortcomings of capitalism and the Soviet model .
As one of the countries with the longest history in the world, China is also one of the birthplaces of the four ancient civilizations.
In China’s more than two thousand years of founding history, each dynasty has been able to maintain ideological and cultural unity.
Confucian culture has been inherited and developed since the Han Dynasty , which gives China a very strong cultural heritage.
Looking at other countries and regions around the world, it is difficult to find another country with a long cultural heritage like China.
China's traditional culture has always maintained its characteristics of being eclectic and drawing on the strengths of others. Nobel Prize winners all feel that Chinese culture has its own unique charm.
The Chinese have long advocated peace as the most important thing. As a peace-loving nation in the world, they are not aggressive.
The basic purpose of China's foreign policy has always been to maintain world peace and promote common development.
Nobel Prize winners are optimistic about China because China will not provoke disputes without reason.
As the backbone of maintaining world peace, China will try its best to avoid the outbreak of World War III.
And even taking into account the actual situation, China's reform and opening up was slowly advancing in the 1980s and 1990s.
National leaders who are crossing the river by feeling the stones have allowed the socialist system to be initially established nationwide. As a new socialist country, China has entered the international stage with a brand-new look.
Although China's economic strength was not outstanding at that time, and there was a certain gap compared with many developing countries, this did not prevent China from slowly reviving.
Nobel Prize winners have also seen clearly that China's path of socialism with characteristics is full of vitality and vitality, which is enough to transform China.
After more than 40 years of development, China has used practical actions to prove that the experts’ conclusions in 1988 were completely correct.
Napoleon once predicted that China is a sleeping lion and should not be disturbed.
Nowadays, China has begun to pay attention to the sustainable development of the economy, slowly slowing down the speed of economic growth, and gradually focusing on the quality of economic development.
finally hopes that China, which has huge development potential, can play a more important role in the fiercely competitive international arena.
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editor | Don’t miss the little star
