The Principles of the Bulgarian Agricultural Union (1919)
Document translation: Julia Stavreva 9/14/2022
The Thirteenth Principle.
The Agricultural Union stands for the widest enlightenment of the nation.
It strives for the full implementation of the compulsory education for children of both sexes; strives for this obligation to wait for primary and secondary education as well; strives to open community centers. evening schools, Sunday courses, youth associations, public libraries and universities; strives for the establishment of entertainment centers in the villages as well, strives for the introduction of a daily postal service in all villages, to oblige all officials who visit the villages to speak publicly about their specialty; for full accountability in the work of municipal elected officials, district officials and deputies; strives for the introduction of systematic general and special education in the barracks; for consideration of the Departments of Agriculture, etc.
The Sixteenth Principle.
The Agricultural Union is for private property.
The considerations for this are as follows:
- In the nature of man there is an instinct for property. This instinct is noticeable not only in the adult, but also in the child it is visible. Man has a tendency to acquire rather than possess. His concern for tomorrow’s business creates a stock of goods, which with it dissolves the primitive form of private property. Whoever, therefore, sought to destroy private property, would be confronted with the strongest inclinations in human nature. No social force in the world yet exists which would be in a position to make this change in the nature of man and this change in the structure of society.
- Private property has contributed and contributes to the progress of humankind. Even the development of labor and property is one of the surest measures of the culture of a known nation. Man’s desire to earn and possess goods has made him the pioneer of progress and culture. The historical life of humanity begins with property along with agriculture. When man became the master of the land and turned it into property and possession, then the mastery over his own estate also begins. He has ceased to live at that moment by the gifts of nature and has lived by his own labor and care. This particular work of his and his concern for goods, his property, have thrown him into the abyss of progress and culture.
- Private property coincides with the requirements of human dignity and freedom. Everyone is the owner of everything. Therefore, what he gains is his. An attempt to wrest from him what he has earned is a humiliation of his dignity, an injury of his liberty and prejudice to his individuality.
- Private property. corresponds to the interest of the individual, and the interest of the individual coincides with the interest of the Society. The self-preservation of the social body with the first consideration that dictated legal norms for the protection of property. These legal positions themselves are not something absolutely stable and inviolable. As soon as the individual’s right to property comes into sharp conflict with the interests of society, the latter violates it. But when society for ages tolerates this right, it shows that it is a necessity for its own life.
- Private property in the source of mass economic forces and virtues. If the cares and hopes for one’s own economy disappear, these forces and virtues will atrophy and be killed. The tension and the risk that man exhibits in the acquisition of the goods that constitute his property will disappear as soon as the last one is gone.
- The abolition of private property will bring about the two greatest mischiefs to mankind: it will reduce the productivity of human labor and will dependably increase the power of man himself. In other words, without private property, man’s desire for greater profits is killed, and on the other hand, he falls under the tyranny of society. Public ownership would create a caponage [complete and absolute peonage] regime such as the peoples of parts [of Europe] experienced during the World War. Public ownership, if it were possible in the land, would paralyze agricultural production. Only recently have its supporters renounced it in the field of agriculture.
- In the economic culture of society, we see the reflection of both types of feelings and drives in human nature. Individualism and collectivism in human nature find their expression and application in the private and public economy. The history of humankind shows us that how many individual qualities in human nature are rougher and more highly developed, so much the more the private economy is more self-sufficient, more isolated and, however, shaken off from the social tone. And vice versa: the more the production of clothing becomes more complex, the more a man’s consciousness that his good is dependent on the general good grows, the stronger his social feeling is, the more the private economy sheds its crude individualist character and acquires the appearance of a social economy. The fact, however, is irrefutable that individualism, self-love and self-preservation is a stronger drive than altruism and human love in general. And because of this, private property appears to be a more natural economic-economic form than common property. And since humanity will never set itself the goal, nor could it achieve such a goal, to kill individualism in man himself, the unshakable logical conclusion from this is that private property will never disappear from the life of human society.
It is equally true, however, that in the end private property will also flourish in society because in human nature there are, albeit less developed, social feelings and drives, and because the organization of human societies in political-social ones discovers needs of a more specific general character and public economy. The legal system, which originates from the consideration of the preservation of the social body and from the protection of justice, both up to now and in the future, will strengthen these two hundred pan-economic forms, because they fully correspond to the instincts deeply embedded in human nature.
The Seventeenth Principle
The Agrarian Union is for the equal, when possible, distribution of material, cultural and all other goods between the various layers of the Bulgarian people in general and between individual people and families in particular.
If material, spiritual and moral misery appears in such an acute form in the world, the reason for this, to put it mildly, is that there are people who possess and possess more goods than they need to satisfy their reasonable needs; and in contrast to them, there are those who do not possess a sufficient amount of goods necessary to cover their most basic needs. This order of things has been maintained by force, fraud and ignorance. But the fight against it is as old as the motto of humanity. This struggle, sometimes weaker, sometimes stronger, was constant. It is weakened in despotic and oligarchic or oppressive regimes, when brute force was cruel and arbitrary and when ignorance was excessive. With the destruction of the shackles of monarchism, the so-called social question, i.e., the question of the equal distribution of material goods, emerged with greater prominence in the awakened consciousness of the peoples. The redistribution of power, rights and freedoms, i.e. the democratization of the political social system also causes the democratization of other types of goods, especially material goods. Consequently, no social force today, which represents true democracy, can deny itself the question of a more equal distribution of goods. The Agrarian Union, which claims to represent women’s democracy in Bulgaria, cannot but fight against the uneven distribution of goods between the city and the village, on the one hand, between different classes, on the other, and between different people, on the third. Man, as he has the right to self-govern, the freedom to think, speak and organize his private and public life, he has the right to live that way. The one who owns and possesses more than he needs, he has usurped the right to live of the one who lacks the most necessary goods of life.
The social order, which rests on the crude and godless unequal distribution of wealth, is barbaric, despite its prominent cultural cover. Thus the social order has rotten foundations, it is subject to recurring shocks and endless apoplectic blows. It is a nest of the most terrible social plagues: monarchs, the caste division of society, militarism, imperialism, bureaucracy, idleness and capitalism. This social order creates, on the one hand, ignorant native masses, and on the other, an intelligentsia decomposing in luxury and depravity; it also creates, as a German philosopher notes, workers without participation in property and owners without participation in work. Overcoming this order of things is one of the most urgent tasks of democracy. The question of fairer distribution of goods is not only economic, not only ethical, but also political. The democratic political regime runs the risk of failure if it fails to establish a firm foundation on the reconstruction of today’s crude and barbaric economic structure. Democracy cannot demand complete equality in the distribution of all kinds of goods among individual people, because this is practically absolutely impossible. Even nature itself has not invested such an equality, neither in itself nor in man. Democracy cannot make the whole earth equally fertile, all men equally tall, equally physically and spiritually strong, equally capable and industrious; it cannot make men of equal needs and of equal productivity, without infringing on the most sacred rights and liberties of men, – but it can and must remove the gross, the undoubted, and the obvious to all inequality in the distribution of life’s goods. The Agricultural Union, guided by this principle of justice, humanity and political foresight, fights for the destruction of large land holdings, for the destruction of the Chokoi and Bey homesteads; for the reduction of large wages, for the suppression of usury and greengrocery, for raising the village economically and culturally on a par with the city, for the abolition of various types of privileges, for the abolition of the exploitation of lawyers, light riggers, apothecaries, engineers, merchants, industrialists and the bankers, to destroy the cartels, etc.
The Eighteenth Principle.
The Agricultural Union is for small and medium-sized landowners.
First of all, it is an organization of those owners, who are the vast majority in Bulgaria. An avowed supporter of the principle of a more equal and fairer distribution of material goods, it cannot be against medium and small land ownership, which fully corresponds to the principle in question. On the contrary, its supreme task in the field of economic life is to stabilize the situation of precisely this type of land holdings and to win over them the conditions for free development and flourishing. It must be recognized that precisely this type of landed property is the main support of individualistic property and a prosperous system, and it is also the most suitable for the consolidation of a democratic political regime. The history of this regime speaks eloquently that democracy has been destroyed.
It pitched and settled in those regions of France, Spain, Italy, America, etc., in which landed property is rare and small. This ownership creates the ideal situation, so that the worker, the laborer, participates in the ownership and the owner participates in the labor. Apart from that, the development in agriculture most categorically disproves the fable that medium and small land ownership was not viable. . . It was precisely on this issue that the theory of the socialists was most obviously defeated. A mass of socialist theoreticians, such as Edward Dawood, Bernstein. Herzl, even Kautsky in his book “Social Revolution’ recognize the viability of small-scale agriculture. As for the agricultural knowledge, it gratefully acknowledged that the progress of agriculture lies in the establishment of those agricultural crops that require intensive manual labor, which is abundant and particularly productive only in agriculture. Machinery, which made such a great revolution in industry, cannot find that wide and rational application in agriculture.
Apart from that, it was pointed out that precisely its most complex form – the thresher – is represented in Bulgarian agriculture by the associated medium and small owners, where the risk of its introduction is covered by the wider participation of rural farms. No one will dare to claim that the developed technology is inaccessible to the Bulgarian peasant farms, as long as it brings economic benefits. The plough, the harrow, the threshing machine, the reaper, and the thresher made their way into medium and small farms and were widely used. The farmers, organized in separate companies specially set up for this purpose, organized in cooperatives or municipalities – made even the most complex machinery available and applicable in their small farms. The viability of these farms is obvious to both theoreticians and practitioners. And this is the case when Bulgarian agriculture develops under such unfavorable political, commercial and economic conditions that a foreign political power has created for it. The agricultural union is under the guardianship of its owners.
The Agricultural Union strives to extricate medium and small agricultural holdings from the clutches of usury by destroying them. the very usury and greengrocer, by developing the credit business suitable for them, by securing from encroachment the known pie of the holdings in the form of farm property, by securing them from natural and malevolent blows, by changing the production itself in them and by doing everything possible to strengthen their productive power.
The Nineteenth Principle
The Agricultural Union is for the development of cooperative work in all its forms and ramifications.
The cooperative is the most suitable economic form, which connects three organizational principles of the economic life of human society: private ownership, which is based mainly on personal interest; public ownership/economy, which is based on the sense of community and forced (the state and the municipality); the charitable, which is based on the free will and good will of man (the family and free associations). In this way, through the cooperative, the ideal situation is reached – the creation of such an economic form, in which, while avoiding the disadvantages of the individual and public economy, their good aspects are used most effectively. There is no doubt that the cooperative, especially the rural one, has the task of supporting small private farmers by assisting them in procuring good and easily accessible credit, by facilitating the sale of their products at more affordable prices, as well as in the purchase of their necessary farm equipment, and by connecting them with the discoveries and the forefathers of agricultural science. The cooperative, placed under favorable conditions for its development, quickly manages to cope with this task. But, at the same time, by covering the small individual farms, it helps to develop in their owners all those social virtues which make their own farms accessible to all higher and more rational economic and social forms. In other words, the cooperative has as its main goal the personal interest of the cooperator, but it brings smoothness, transparency into the production of the people and creates a greater socialization in the means of production, without affecting the individuality of the small farms. Beyond that, it develops in the cooperators the sense of solidarity, of discipline, of humanity and of proper social life. It develops with them, both the intellect and the moral feelings. For all these reasons, the Agricultural Union, seeing in cooperative work the importance for agriculture that compulsory education has in general for the education of the masses, not only gives it its unreserved support, but also strives to implement it as far as it is possible, the same principle and obligation in its development among the rural population. In cooperative work the Agricultural Union sees the most effective means for strengthening the situation of small rural farms and generally for the progress of these farms. By means of the cooperative it intends to expel from the villages all the parasitic element; through it, supported, of course, by the state, the municipality and the district, it strives to emancipate the village, the dependency and the city.
The Twentieth Principle.
The Agricultural Union is for the careful inspection of all large private fortunes, and for the possession by the State of those of them which may have been acquired from an undoubtedly depraved source.
The rule until now has been: every crown of private wealth has a vicious source. There are very few exceptions to this rule. During the experience of the world war this rule was confirmed by the most irrefutable evidence. Just at the moment when the masses of the people were shedding their blood for national interests, a swarm of leather-skinned [people] consumed by power, sauntered like hyenas, rummaged through the poor farms, absorbed into them like leeches, ate like moths, looted and gathered their own millions. These [people] accumulated undisputed riches in a clearly vicious and unjust manner. They aroused the indignation of the peoples of all countries. The general call for the confiscation of such riches and for taxation through the extraordinary far-reaching sorrow of the war is the fruit of this resentment. There were too many such millionaires in Bulgaria. The people should seize these riches, because they are theirs and because they are necessary for the stabilization of shaky state finances. The Agricultural Union is the most sincere and most zealous supporter of this state obsession with ill-gotten wealth.
The Twenty-first Principle.
The Agricultural Union is for allowing the maximum amount of wealth that private individuals can possess.
Just as poverty throws a man into a life of desperation and vice, so great wealth degenerates and corrupts a man. Any private wealth that repeatedly exceeds and excludes the ability of its owner to work is an evil, both for society and for its owner himself. It is evil to society because it takes away the benefits of a mass of other people and because it becomes the scourge of parasitism, luxury and perverted life. It is evil for the possessor, because it diverts him and his generation from work, a consequence of which it causes degeneration and because it destroys the moral foundations in the soul of him and his family and turns them into a completely oppressive and vicious element.
People’s wisdom proves that some riches cannot last for more than three generations. There is nothing wrong with that. The first possessor of these riches, because he was accustomed to work, though he may became corrupt after he became rich, managed to preserve himself; the second – his son, because he was apprenticed to his father in the creation of these riches, forced him to live the life of a dissolute man, still manages to preserve himself; the third, the grandson, who did not participate in the work, nor was he used to it, began to live and spend a perfectly gifted wealth. He is a master only in questioning. He doesn’t even have the leadership of his grandfather. He is but a first-class aristocrat who wants to taste all the secrets of human life. He steals wealth left and right and brings corruption in every direction. He carries within himself the wounds of his own decay. He is even incapable of continuing to give birth or to give healthy offspring. The society will perform a blessing for such wealthy families if it takes away part of their wealth according to the law and accustoms them to work and decent life again.
Limitation in the possession of wealth must be established. For this, the Agricultural Union will save something. All riches cannot and should not be lumped under the same denomination, just as all your goods and objects are not measured by any measure. The Agricultural Union maintains that the amount of capital holdings should be divided separately for agriculture, industry, buildings and free capital. It is necessary to determine the size of the amount of land in acres, of which no one should and cannot own anymore. The extent of the free and industrial capital to which private possessions may extend must be determined. In this way, the mischievous influence of capital will be removed and cooperativism will be encouraged. The blame remains (?), a Christian thing and a high moral deed will be done: it will be taken from the one who has, to be given to the one who wants. This is how a radical social reorganization will be achieved, which will bring the greatest possible justice and satisfaction among the people. And the Agricultural Union is for such a social restructuring, because through it they guarantee the material life of every person who lives in the territory of Bulgaria.
The Twenty-second Principle.
The Agricultural Union is in favor of monopolizing all those productions and trades which have a tendency to revert through cartelization or other forms of association into monopoly.
The insurance business, the mining, the cinema, the motographic, the salt production, the tobacco manufactures, even all agricultural works, such as poultry etc. are subject to such monopoly [regulation] by the state, following a state study, because any haste in this regard can stop their development. The Agricultural Union is a supporter of this [state] monopolization to the extent that it will not appear to be an obstacle to the development of these industries and the attraction of capital from abroad. [The Agricultural Union] will accept only that monopoly of the export of agricultural products, which aims to take away the exploitation in this respect from the various merchants and to raise for the account of the producers the price of this production.
The Twenty-third Principle.
The Agricultural Union is against any oppression of the various nationalities in Bulgaria.
It is against taking away the political rights of gypsies, against attempts to the rights of Jews, Turks, Greeks, Armenians and all other nationalities to be educated in their native language and to enjoy constitutional rights and freedom as widely as possible. The Agricultural Union insists that the state must take the same care for these nationalities as it does for the Bulgarian one.
The Twenty-fifth Principle.
The Agricultural Union is for the election of all municipal, district and state officials.
If there is something that threatens the modern state every day, it is the unbridled demands of the bureaucracy for higher salaries and broader state benefits of all kinds. Beyond that, too much pampered officialdom manifests its claims in a sharp and brutal form. Its alliances and its threats of strikes and sabotage rather create obstacles in the development and progress of the state machine. This situation, if it was tolerable under monarchical and coterie regimes, cannot but must be tolerated under the regime of people’s rule. The new state must by all means strive to get rid of bureaucracy and its threats, as it shakes off monarchism and ruling group privilege. [The State] should not suffer in her bosom a skin ulcer that could threaten her at any moment. The bureaucratic caste organization must be undermined at its foundations. In order to achieve this goal, not only decentralization in management is needed, but it is necessary to accept the electability of the officials themselves. Adoption of this principle expands the rights and control of the people themselves over municipal, county and state government. In such a case, the officials will not be appointed and strengthened like ministers or some provincial magnates, but will be subject to the uninterrupted supervision and will of the people. Then their every transgression will touch the public conscience and cause their replacement. The power of the people in the real world would be severely damaged if the people did not win their right to elect officials. Regardless of this, the principle adopted by monarchical countries of benefiting public servants with a pension drawn from the public treasury, thus endangers [the country’s] financial position. This danger has grown so much that all the European countries paid serious attention even to statesmen, who were very attached to this order of things. The electability of officials will take away the possibility of creating a permanent bureaucratic cadre and will make it easier for the state to withdraw its contributions from the maintenance of such pensions.
The Agricultural Union, for all these most important reasons, will insist on the implementation of this principle in Bulgaria in the selection and appointment of officials.
List of works of Alexander Stambolisky
- Political parties or class organizations…
- Our views on state pensions. . . . .
- A voice from the farmer’s environment and a farmer
- Farmer craft by conviction
- My two meetings with King Ferdinand
- What should the politician look for?
- Power, anarchy democracy
- Agricultural workers and their degeneration
- Principles of the Agricultural Union
- My letters from the Prison to Zemledelska Parliamentary group
- Democratic and republican government
- Agricultural union and authority
- The weapon for the defense and victory of Zemledelska union
- The agricultural union and its enemies
- Agricultural union
- The intelligent people in the Agricultural Union (and the parties)
- The difference between Earth. The union and the parties.
- Independent or coalition farming management
- The development of the idea of land. Association.
- The Bulgarian prisoner
- How do we work amongst the people?
- My life in prisons
- The rights of women
- Earth. alliance and diplomacy
- The deeds of my heroes
- Go from the palace to the prison and back
- Revolution and exile
- The fighting spirit of the Bulgarian farmer
- Progressively appropriate tax