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o revolution or coup d’etat was necessary; it grew up with modern Sweden and, to the present-day Swede, appears perfectly natural and desirable. Its roots he in the agricultural system. Until well into the nineteenth century, the Swedish peasant had preserved the archaic system of strip farming. Although nominally his own landlord, he was not his own master. His holdings were not continuous, but distributed over a maze of disconnected patches so narrow that it was impossible to cultivate them separately, <a href="http://www.christian-louboutin-2012.com/christian-louboutin-evenings-c-7.html"><strong>louboutin wedding shoes</strong></a> and the land of each village was therefore worked collectively as one large farm. The villagers worked together in gangs, with precise regulations governing their actions. Economically, each village was considered as a mbt walking shoes unit, and bookkeeping and sales were handled communally. It was collective farming, centuries before the Bolsheviks imposed it in Russia. The only difference was that, rather than having managers imposed by a despotic central power, the ancient Swedish collectives were ruled by elected village councils. But once in office, councillors exercised dictatorial powers, to which the villagers submitted abjectly. cheap mbts The old Swedish farming system required absolute submission to the demands of the collective. Its origins lay in an idea of mbt kisumu levelling individual differences. By dividing the holdings, no man could monopolize the best or suffer the worst land, but all would share burdens and favours equally. Not only farm work was regulated, but private lives too. Church attendance, morality and everyday behaviour were supervised by the village council, with punishment of whipping, fine and imprisonment meted out for transgression. The 88 The New Totalitarians individual was required to behave as the community demanded, and no personal deviation was permitted. More than a thousand years of such conditioning produced a collective mentality and a view of personal identity exclusively in terms of membership mbt stockists of a group. Individuality could not develop in this environment, and conformity was the highest of virtues. The collective village system was compulsory, except in parts of northern Sweden. Those were frontierlands, where the colonization of virgin soil was not finished until the beginning of this century, and where a sparse population and the requirements of a pioneer life made the system useless. But, over most of the country, and among most of the peasantry, collective farming ruled. In 18 mbt shoes australia 27, the Diet abolished strip farming and redistributed land to form the consolidated holdings of modern agriculture. The peasants were given six years to demolish their old homes in the village and move out to their new, enclosed farms. Thus the ancient villages were destroyed, the face of the countryside altered and collective farming eradicated at the stroke of a pen. The reform turned the life of a whole nation upside down. Yet there was no resistance to it: Sweden is one of the few countries in which agrarian reform has not caused unrest. The peasants meekly razed their homes, and built new ones, more or less within the prescribed time limits. Although they disliked the change, the population submitted without protest to the dictates of authority, because that is what they were used to. The government had demonstrated that reform, however profound, could be imposed without trouble. The scattering of the villages and the disruption of a traditional pattern of life caused great hardship. Before, the peasants had huddled together in companionable villages at the centre of their fields; now they were separated from mbt shoes sale each other in lonely farmhouses. The scattering of their homes destroyed the contact and community that were part of the The Corporate State 89 old villages, and that had become necessary for their wellbeing. But the change was forced through by the Liberal faction in the Estates, because, <a href="http://www.christian-louboutin-2012.com/specials.html"><strong>cheap christian louboutins</strong></a> as one of their number expressed it: ‘The old system encouraged a conservative point of view.’ It was an early example of the acknowledged use of environment to influence attitudes. Although the mbt shoes old village collectives had been destroyed, their mentality persisted. Deprived now of full use in everyday life, it sought other outlets instead, and out of this need was born the popular organizations. Unknown in Sweden before, they were called into existence by the changes in the countryside. When the villages were destroyed, the inhabitants were driven to seek some method of preserving the contact they had known before. At first, they gathered for no other purpose than the prolongation of camaraderie. But it was not enough; some other spur was necessary for the emergent movement. An ideological push was needed: it had to be imported from the cities. Various men came preaching causes, to gather cohorts of adherents, not because they necessarily had something compelling to say, but because they acted as focal points around which to rally. Associations thus formed, which rapidly grew into national organizations. Their professed aims were irrelevant; their original function was to provide a substitute for the village community and to satisfy cravings for belonging to a group. Temperance societies were the first to appear. Drinking is mbt shoes review a historical Swedish obsession, and it is perhaps only to be expected that, in a country with a puritan background, organization would begin over a national vice. Temperance organizations advanced as the old village disappeared from the face of the countryside and, by the middle of the nineteenth century, when enclosure was completed, they had 100,000 members in a total population of 3,800,000. For some time, the temperance movement was alone in 90 The New Totalitarians providing the solace of the group. Driven by a compulsive longing for the collective, many Swedes took the pledge, while drinking clandestinely, in order to gain admission. After 1850, the revivalist movement, offering social activities in addition to purely religious meetings, displaced temperance as the main outlet for a collective mentality that continued with undiminished vigour. A revivalist fervour swept the country during the latter half of the nineteenth century, the belated arrival of the devotional content of the Reformation. After 1860, the introduction of freedom of worship released pent-up religious feelings-, mbt trainers outlet <a href="http://www.christian-louboutin-2012.com/christian-louboutin-slingbacks-c-5.html"><strong>christian louboutin sales</strong></a> and there was an explosion of free churches. But by the end of the century, religious enthusiasm was spent, and the temperance societies regained their supremacy. In 1900, the temperance movement claimed a third of the Diet members of all political parties, imposing restrictive drinking laws. The temperance movement had developed into a popular organization of the modern Swedish type; it not only satisfied a group mentality, mbt chapa but exerted political power as well. Preserved in all their medieval force by the temperance movement, mbt shoes online the corporate attitudes of the old Swedish peasant communities were handed down to modern Sweden. As if dropping into an instinctive pattern of behaviour, the Swedes distributed themselves naturally among the organizations that proliferated with the development of the country. mbt discount The corporative sense was not confined to the peasants. The upper classes were also arranged in a corporate form. “While the Estates still existed, they took the form of medieval corporations. The bureaucracy has never ceased to act as one. A collective mentality dominated the rulers as much as the ruled. Neither tolerated deviation within their own ranks, and one of the most obvious characteristics of Swedish life has been an unrelieved and willing conformity. When, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the trade unions arose, their work had in a sense been done for them. They did The Corporate State 91 not, as elsewhere, have to preach solidarity and the advantages of collective organization, because they were dealing with people who had inherited a taste for both. Acquiring members was easy since, like the temperance societies, the unions satisfied powerful group instincts mbt . If a powerful sense of the collective accompanied the old agricultural system, it was also fostered by the bruk form of industrial settlement. Isolated and self-contained, the bruk, like the old agricultural village, had a vigorous organization that welded the inhabitants together. The form of habitation encouraged a sense of community. Houses were huddled wall to wall along a single street. Privacy was not respected and anybody was permitted to enter a home unasked. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, a bruk contained on average about 300 inhabitants. Within the confines of so small a number, it was impossible to escape public scrutiny, and the usual pressures of Swedish society were magnified, so that conformity seemed like a law of nature. The bruk did not, like the old agricultural village, have the law behind it in imposing conformity but, in the power of consensus, it possessed compulsion enough. Demanding a highly developed sense of the collective, the work of the bruk generated a pattern of living that left no place for the individual. Out of this developed a profound sense of corporate identity. There was an illustration of the power of this environment in northern Sweden during the 1960s. Workmen refused to move away from a small sawmill bruk that had closed down, although offered excellent positions elsewhere. The security of the bruk collective meant so much to them that, rather than lose it, they preferred to stay and scratch a living or mbt sale exist on social welfare. They were explicit in their dependence on the sense of community for peace of mind. The collective mentality of the bruks and the old agricultural communities was transferred to the cities as urbanization 92 The New Totalitarians progressed and a new style of living supplanted the old. Swedes required no inducements to join a corporative organization, because they had a natural urge to do so. Opinions in Sweden are allowed no validity if maintained by an individual as his own, but, if they are to be accepted, they must be professed as the representative view of a group. It is as if the individual is allowed no right to exist outside a collective body. ‘How can you have mbt walking shoes an opinion of your own?’ asks a Social Democratic intellectual. ‘It doesn’t make sense. You’ve got to get your ideas from a group.’* Out of this soil, Saltsjobaden grew spontaneously. It required no ideological motivation, or political argumentation, but fulfilled a natural requirement. The most obvious effect of the Saltsjobaden agreement was the entrenchment of industrial peace, but its most profound consequence was the establishment of the corporate State. And in this lies the key to the facility with which the expert, the organization man and the political manager were able to assume power. Saltsjobaden was only a stage – albeit a critical one – <a href="http://www.dabeat.org/bin/cpg/displayimage.php?pos=-24"><strong>Puma Ferrari Fluxion II Lifestyle White Yellow Shoes - Sneaker Freaker</strong></a> in a line of development that had been in the air for at least a decade. Nor was this atmosphere confined to the Social Democrats; they were merely the exponents of the idea who happened to hold office mbt shoes uk as it was materializing. Between the industrial legislation of 1928 and the Saltsjobaden agreement in 1938 some employers, frightened by the advancing power of the trade unions, turned to thoughts of legal restraint. In 1934, they persuaded the Conservative party to bring before the Diet a proposal for legislation guaranteeing the right to work without belonging to a trade union, and making any form of coercion a criminal offence. The unions and the Social Democrats naturally expressed hearty disapproval. But, apart from the predictable cries from industry, there were reservations of a deeper nature. A number of Conservative politicians had seen with misgivings the rise * No irony intended. The Corporate State 93 of the trade unions as a powerful monolithic and independent corporation. They feared that a pact between capital and labour might lead to a situation in which the individual citizen was ignored, and the direction of his working life placed exclusively in the hands of collective organizations. Admittedly only a small minority of the educated classes reasoned this way; those who had been influenced by liberal ideas from the mbt lami West. But, through their position in the non- Socialist parties, they carried political weight, and allied themselves with the representatives of industry. In a short while, however, most of these altered their viewpoint, to support the Social Democrats on the issue. The reasoning behind that change is well illustrated by an incident in the Diet. When, in 1934, the legislation guaranteeing the right to