A Theory.

Late Soviet-Russian philosopher and social scientist Richard Kosolapov quotes, in his 2002 book "Let's Stalin Speak", his friend a former member of the Presidium of the Central Committee, a philosopher and a professor of Moscow State University, Dmitri Chesnokov who had a conversation with Stalin shortly before Stalin's death in March of 1953. In this conversation, Stalin, speaking about formalism and bureaucratization of the Party, almost pleaded with Chesnokov, when stated:

«Вы вошли в Президиум ЦК. Ваша задача – оживить теоретическую работу в партии, дать анализ новых процессов и явлений в стране и мире. Без теории нам смерть, смерть, смерть!»

Translation: You are now a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee. Your task is a revitalization of the theoretical work in Party, to provide the analysis of new processes and phenomena in our country and in the world. Without theory, for us it is death, death, death!  

These are some of the most powerful and dramatic words from a man known for always keeping his cool and not yielding to panic even under the most pressing circumstances of the early stages of the Great Patriotic War. Yet, here it is--stressing an utter urgency. Why so? The answer, is quite obvious--classic Marxism of the 19th-early 20th Century simply ran its course and stopped being adequate and Stalin knew it, even if to assume some theoretical probability that Stalin's formulation to Chesnokov is somewhat exaggerated, albeit I doubt it--in many respects, events of 1940s-1950s and Stalin's character leave no doubts that such a conversation, with such emphasis, did take place. His no less dramatic statement to Shepilov, a famous economist and chief editor of "Pravda", in which Stalin warns about lack of scientific approach to preparation of economic and political elite in USSR and where he also uses hyperbole of historic urgency and of death for the country, only confirms Chesnokov's episode. 

Stalin recognized that times changed, he also recognized a profound effect of the scientific revolution on the society, not just Soviet, but global and that no matter how useful Marxist analytical apparatus was, the theory was increasingly becoming outdated. It was difficult to apply economic views formed in the times of belt transmissions and steam to economic and industrial reality which already in early 1950s saw a revolutionary spread of radio-electronics, mass means of communications and early computers with increase automation of production. Some Russian Marxists today even dare to assume--the view I happen to share with them--that Stalin didn't have a theory of Socialism (in Russian). Not only I share such a view, but seeing where the Soviet Union was going in 1970s and 1980s I dare to state that nobody had. It is of course, a matter for debate and "what if" scenarios when trying to predict if Stalin could have saved the USSR, or could a working theory be realistically developed, but there is no doubt whatsoever, that market relations were already emerging in the USSR as early as 1940s even within the framework of an extremely strained by war mobilizational economy. Such a theory should have accounted for the human nature which, even with the most sophisticated and effective ideological education and upbringing, couldn't be changed, especially against the background of a country which, on Stalin's watch, was becoming the most educated country in the world. One is forced to recall a famous sociological truism, about marriage and family, which emerged early in 20th Century: the higher is the educational level of a woman, the higher is her professional qualification, the wider her circle of personal and public connections, the more self-reliant and independent such a woman is, the higher will be her requirements for marriage.   

This truism is fully applicable to a nation as a whole and could be reduced to a simple formula--the more educated is a nation, the higher will be its requirements for economic well-being. Humans are many things, and they are not exclusively Homo Economicus, but they ARE Homo Economicus among many other things and that is one of the factors which Marxists decided "to solve" by means of creating  "a new man"--highly educated and highly tempered in his (her) economic demands. What they forgot, of course, were the sources of wisdom which for millennia spoke about human sin, ambition, jealousy, envy and, generally, what came to be known as an individual "pursuit of happiness". They forgot that human nature is hard to change and that to find this "golden path" to both high living standard and sensible consumption is a hell of a task. The ideas were sound, the execution, as is always the case with most ambitious undertakings, left a lot to be desired. Those details which contained those proverbial devils interfered. Marxism was and is well suited to use as an analytical tool, but as a stand alone economic theory--it doesn't work, or, works as not intended. It either leads to a dead-end or stops being Marxism in its original meaning. And here we can draw--and you know that I am extremely uncomfortable with this drawing--parallels with modern severest crisis of the capitalism unfolding in a front of our eyes and which is being prevented from unleashing a global war to resolve its gigantic insurmountable contradictions largely due to Russia's massive nuclear and conventional fire power. 

Remarkably, it is also Russia which, yet again, is playing with a fascinating mix of some Marxist, free enterprise and economic nationalism ideas, trying to create a new model which will lead out of the dead-end neoliberalism led humanity into. Stalin may not have had theory of "socialism", but modern Western "thinkers" do not have the theory of "capitalism" either. Same as Soviet communists, or rather, party "thinkers", who got caught in the peculiarities of the ideology and could not see the way out, modern Western thinkers are in no position to criticize--these were they who justified and helped to implement the economic ruin of the West in general, and the United States in particular, by means of creating an alternative socioeconomic universe, or wonderland, which turned out to be even more bizarre than the most outrageous visions by Marxist fundamentalists. So, here we are today facing the existential crisis of the combined West and de facto disintegration of the United States which cannot produce both effective national idea and save its economy from a complete implosion. Make no mistake, Wall Street will do just fine, for a little while longer. But with the US Dollar being stripped of its hegemony as a main reserve currency and inability of the United States to enforce its parasitic lifestyle which such status of US Dollar provided it for decades, the issue of the real wealth-creation in the United States remains unsolved. It will stay as such for a foreseeable future because not only America doesn't have an economy which can overcome such a challenge without a massive social upheaval, but because American, so called, intellectual class has no theory and is not capable of developing it. In the end, it is not that intellectual to start with. 

As Dmitry Orlov sarcastically noted, while illustrating his thoughts with one of the most ridiculously funny and... accurate memes I ever encountered:

But perhaps most importantly, it must be understood that repatriating production to the US and redeveloping the industrial base will not be a profitable venture, at least not initially. At the outset, and for at least the duration of the first Five-Year Plan, it will definitely lose money. Borrowing it is a bad idea; the federal government is already $21 trillion in debt. Instead, this money needs to be confiscated from the top 1% of the population which owns close to 40% of the country’s wealth. Doing so will yield roughly $50 trillion—more than enough to fund this project. This is best done as part of a Cultural Revolution: round up the one-percenters, make them wear dunce caps and march them through the streets while pelting them with fruits and vegetables and heaping verbal abuse on them. Oh, and take away all of their money and sentence them to a lifetime of free public service.  

American social and political structure is not designed to deal with this issue. No, sure, there are many voices which shame and even accuse America's 1%, but they only are capable to implement the consumption restrictions for the overwhelming majority of deplorables, who do not have that much to start with. One-percenters will remain impervious to any economic and social changes and will continue to buy US one-party Congress, which will do as told while American intellectual class, which is incapable of learning, will continue to create all kinds of garbage such as Critical Race Theory or Gender Studies, on one hand, while trying to debunk those on the other hand, and nearly no one (with some minor exceptions), as empirical evidence shows, will start developing some practical view on the state of the affairs, which is based on the economic realities and the way wealth is distributed. It is a very hard intellectual and scholarly work. I know 99% of present crop of what passes in the United States as intellectuals are utterly unqualified and incapable of developing sound theories. Pseudo-scientific BS and sophistry they produce aplenty, sensible solutions--a number of thinkers who could be counted on fingers of one hand. 

Soviet Union failed to develop the theory of socialism and because of that it failed. The United States failed to develop a theory of capitalism, bar some monetarist BS, and because of that the US is failing and is in at the end of the historically unprecedented de-industrialization. It is difficult to argue with this: 

A new report by EPI Senior Economist and Director of Trade and Manufacturing Research Robert E. Scott finds that President Trump’s trade policies have failed to curb offshoring—and they have not addressed the root causes of America’s growing trade deficits and the decline of American manufacturing... “The Trump administration has taken credit for ‘reshoring’ manufacturing jobs, but the data show that isn’t true. Nearly 1,800 factories have disappeared under Trump between 2016 and 2018,” said Scott. “Additionally, the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods rose significantly between 2016 and 2019. In fact, the real U.S. trade deficit has increased in every year since 2016, reducing GDP growth by roughly 0.25% annually over the past three years. Compounded with the devastation left by the coronavirus pandemic, the blue collar manufacturing workers need serious help from policymakers.”

Even if to "adjust" data for anti-Trump sentiment in media and all kinds of think-tanks, there is absolutely no doubt about continuing offshoring of American jobs. Trump promised a lot, as does every US politician when it is the time to (re)elect oneself. Usually, nothing is done or if done--achieves often an opposite to intended result. It is a systemic flaw. It is not some combination of some factors here and there, which is always the case, but it is an indication of system simply not working as intended, or not working at all. It surely works in terms of profit for very few who own companies but it is not going to change, even when some traditional monetary and trade remedies are applied: taxes, tariffs, political pressure etc. They are increasingly useless and, in fact, often--detrimental to survival of the remaining true economic capacity. And there is no theory which is capable to balance out healthy profits, competition and national interest which is the interest of the majority of people in the nation. It is especially difficult to do in the country where nationhood is a cuss word and has a whole "intellectual" class being busy, both on nominal "left" (which is not left) and nominal "right", hard at work inventing essences (many a Ph.D theses and books are written on that) which will allow to keep the people who populate the country of the United States of America from formulating their true national interest. The only way to do so is to prevent them from coalescing into a true nation. 

Let's harken to 1977, so called Brezhnev Constitution:

Это — общество зрелых социалистических общественных отношений, в котором на основе сближения всех классов и социальных слоев, юридического и фактического равенства всех наций и народностей, их братского сотрудничества сложилась новая историческая общность людей — советский народ. 

Translation: This society--society of mature socialist public relations, in which, based on convergence of all classes and social strata, judicial and de facto equality of all nations and peoples, their brotherly cooperation a new historic community of people  has formed--Soviet people. 

Boy, talk about delusions. 11 years later this whole "new historic community of people" started to kill each-other based on racial, ethnic, religious and other grounds. Believe me, I was there when shit hit the fan. Boy, I thought to myself, when the first tanks started to roll in Baku supporting us, already stretched thin Baku garrison, desperately trying to stop chaos and violence, the theory sucks. It doesn't work. It worked neither socially nor economically, Stalin was right when stated that "without theory it is death, death, death." He was prescient. So, in the world of Critical Race Theory, and Facebook and Twitter being considered an economy, ask yourself a question: does the United States need a theory or will it go down in flames of economic and social chaos. Don't look at me, I am no theoretician, I just call shit as I see it.     

Back To My Cryptic Post--Why Russia Is A Clear And Present Danger to The US-I

You remember my recent cryptic post and how Arctic Fox blew my cover. 

From the cited article (Google Translate): "Vladimir Putin’s thesis that the real reason for the trade war between the USA and China is not at all a distortion of the trade balance or an artificially low yuan exchange rate (as they like about this) say our American partners, but the fact that China has found an effective way to combine state planning and a market economy, and the Americans understand this." 

OK, Putin is spot on here defining the principle, not just a nation, which represents clear and present danger to the neo-liberal world (dis)order. Yes, China is certainly a big threat to the current West in economic sense, but, apart from this principle, metaphysically China is not a threat. Russia is, and for a simple reason--average Chinese and average Westerners have few things in common and many differences which, effectively separate them civilizationally. Average Russians and average Westerners (those who are still sane, of course), on the other hand, are virtually indistinguishable in their outlook, not to mention visually. I know Germans and Americans who look like a god damn bums and drunks from some backwater Russian village, while I know many Russians who are constantly mistaken for Germans, Scandinavians (Duh!)  or look like your typical American. Granted, I still can recognize Slavic features in the crowd of Westerners most of the time. 

It is one thing when a profoundly "alien" culture such as China achieves economic success and, indeed, shows a working combination of the state planning and market economy. I will omit here, of course, some serious structural problems Chinese economy and especially its military power have--on the surface it is still an amazing achievement. But realistically, few White European stock people will immediately rush to learn Chinese (Mandarin) language or will start listening to Chinese music or read Chinese literature en-masse. They will continue to buy relatively cheap consumer goods produced in China, but few will really get into Confucianism or start quoting Sun Tzu at the New Year's party. Russians are different. Many Americans still think (wrongly, of course, but still good example) that Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, played every 4th of July pretty much everywhere in the US, is related directly to America's 1812 War. In other words, it is as much American as it is Russian. It is easy to re-appropriate such things--they are effectively from the same cultural root of Classic Western Civilization.  In the end, the number of Tolstoy's War and Peace TV and movie versions in the West (all of them subpar) is impressive, not to mention Soviet Sergei Bondarchuk's masterpiece, which IS in many respects a Western movie, despite being so Russian. Soviet sci-fi movies by Klushantsev, especially his Planet of the Storms which influenced so many in the Hollywood  sci-fi genre, including none other than George Lucas. 

Soviet education in STEM, some of its key principles and even text books, were adopted in the West. All that and much-much more was possible only between peoples who communicated in the same cultural code, had many similarities in their idiosyncrasies. For the West China is NOT that, Russia, including Wests pathological Russophobia IS. Even hatred of Russians and Russia is profound because West recognizes in Russia its OWN OTHER. China's economic success is bad enough for a Western neo-liberal establishment, which, let's be clear about it, is by far not just those omnipotent Jews, but a serious combination of moneyed and aristocratic strata which is as European in its whiteness and culture as is humanly possible. Russia's success in fusing state planning and market economy and free enterprise--this can have catastrophic consequences for the West as it exists today. In the end--do not forget the most important thing for which Russians have a proverb: once every century combined West goes to Russia to get its ass handed to it. So true, since 1242 Alexander Nevsky's remarkable defeat of Teutonic Knights at lake Peipus (Chudskoe), Russia was in a constant fight with the West for own survival. This is the image, the archetype of the West forever ingrained in Russian psyche by efforts of two geniuses of Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Prokofiev (probably the first ever modern heavy-metal music ever) in 1938:

After all, even Emerson, Lake and Palmer didn't hesitate to base their and rock music's one of the greatest albums on Mussorgsky's music. So, you see--cultural roots of Russia and West have a lot in common, but most importantly: Russian Marxism was Marxism, after all, and Marxism is a strictly Western invention. Well, guess what, the biggest West's handing of its ass on the platter in history, was done by historic Russia, known then as the Soviet Union, under the banners of this very Marxism, based entirely on Marxist view on technological, social and industrial progress. Boy, those Russian T-34s and Katyushas with Lavochkin and Yakovlev's fighters were a pain in the ass for Axis. And once the Banner of Victory was raised at Reichstag in May, 1945, the combined West literally shat its pants precisely for the reasons of those pesky Russian commies having a bit different view of the human rights and distribution of GDP, than it was viewed in D.C. and London, or Paris. And here comes this most important issue, Russians kicked Western ass so many times, granted, losing sometimes here and there, that through this rather consistent ass-kicking they made their views on the social order known--the whole 20th and 21st centuries are about these views. And while China cannot present a record of power accomplishments against combined West, Russian one looks extremely impressive. 

So, here is the deal: Russians, on average, even within new generation, which was not subjected to any kind of Marxist/Soviet indoctrination today still maintain a very "progressive" outlook on life. No, not progressive in modern Western sense, quite the opposite, this outlook is largely "conservative" and nationalistic, but it contains within itself a fundamental social difference of which many Russians wrote and continue to write:

Thirty years passed by since the Soviet project faded in historywhen failed the test of time. But majority of Russians still does not acceptsociety which stratifies into “elites” and “outcasts” as a just one. Russiansstill thinks that all people, regardless of birth, have equal rights to theriches of native land. That preservation of people is more important thanpreservation of wealth. That one cannot live better at the expense of others.  

Here is the trick, in Russia you cannot preserve people within liberal economic paradise. You simply cannot. In fact, you cannot do it anywhere. Russians tried to do the "libertarian" thing in 1990s--it ended with a national catastrophe and de facto economic genocide of population, in millions. Eat this, Stalin, right? So that "experiment" is over, but what is emerging and is clearly visible now in Russia is truly threatening to the world order ran by whiteboard economists, lawyers, journos, political pseudo-scientists, Wall Street swindlers and other people who do not know what real work is and how and what should be produced to keep the country running. Call it whatever you want: a deindustrialization, financialization, neo-liberalism or laissez-faire', it is all pure distilled moon-shine capitalism built around the myth of a "free market" and "free trade"--two of the greatest simulacra ever invented (after America's defeat of Nazism almost alone) because none of those things exist anymore, if they ever existed to start with. Russians, both through theory and tragedy, learned it the hard way and now are doing things which are anathema to Western snake-oil peddlers. Would you believe it, Russians not only want their strategic resources (increasingly being returned back under state control) NOT controlled by financiers, but, oh the horror, they insist that basic health care must be free (or for a symbolic pay, yes, yes MRIs and CatScans included) and no state support for gender-changing operations or plastic surgery. Kids entering universities on a "budget" (free) still constitute a huge share of Russian students. And these are but a few things West have, or don't as in the US, and all of this is dispensed through Russian state's policies. Russians hate their state, they also love it deeply and cannot live without it, because they know without it they will not survive--that's the difference and it is a strategic one....

To Be Continued...   

Ha, Something To Talk About.

I don't read Rod Dreher, nor do I care much what he has to say on any issue and, of course, I can never forget his cowardly smearing of Phil Giraldi after Phil's famous article on Jews for which Phil, who spends his life fighting debilitating influence of Israeli groups on US foreign policy, was banished from The American Conservative. I do not agree with everything Phil writes on the Jewish issue in the US but Dreher is nobody when it comes, however controversial it might be, to life-long service, sometimes very dangerous service, to the United States Phil Giraldi provided. So, in general, Dreher is not a person I would find pleasant to communicate, which is expected when talking to a "writer" without any serious education, profession (B.A. in Journalism is not an education) or experiences, which Dreher's writing proves beyond the shadow of a doubt. Yet, in a surprising move, Dreher posted in his blog at TAC this piece, or rather a letter to him: 

               Cultural Marxism: Enemy Of Real Marxism?

The letter of some Marxist makes some crucial observations and they are dealing with Frankfurt School which is as Marxist as I am Chinese. So, I thought it may interest some of you in trying to figure out what real Marxism is and why it is good only as analytical tool and will never work as intended, inevitably morphing into economic fusionism, but it may also give some ideas of why most "cultural Marxists" would have been and would be beaten in Russia as post-modernist perverts and why many who would be kicking their asses would be those nasty Russian "communists" or Marxists. So, take a look...