[Marxism-Thaxis] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89 (NY Times)
www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/books/04solzhenitsyn.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin August 4, 2008 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89 By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose stubborn, lonely and combative literary struggles gained the force of prophecy he revealed the heavy afflictions of Soviet Communism in some of the most powerful works of fiction and history written in the 20th century, died late Sunday in Russia, his son Yermolai said early Monday in Moscow. He said the cause was a heart condition. He was 89. He outlived by nearly 17 years the state and system he had battled through years of imprisonment, ostracism and exile. Mr. Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst onto the literary stage in 1962 with A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The book, a mold-breaking novel about a prison camp inmate, was a sensation. Suddenly, he was being compared to giants of Russian literature like Tolstoy, Dostoyevski and Chekov. Over the next four decades, Mr. Solzhenitsyns fame spread throughout the world as he drew upon his experiences of totalitarian duress to write evocative novels like The First Circle and The Cancer Ward and historical works like The Gulag Archipelago. Gulag was a monumental account and analysis of the Soviet labor camp system, a chain of prisons that by Mr. Solzhenitsyns calculation some 60 million people had entered during the 20th century. The book led to his expulsion from his native land. George F. Kennan, the American diplomat, described it as the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times. Mr. Solzhenitsyn was heir to a morally focused and often prophetic Russian literary tradition, and he looked the part. With his stern visage, lofty brow and full, Old Testament beard, he recalled Tolstoy while suggesting a modern-day Jeremiah, denouncing the evils of the Kremlin and later the mores of the West. In almost half a century, more than 30 million of his books have been sold worldwide and translated into some 40 languages. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. Mr. Solzhenitsyn owed his initial success to the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchevs decision to allow Ivan Denisovich to be published in a popular journal. Khrushchev believed its publication would advance the liberal line he had promoted since his secret speech in 1956 on the crimes of Stalin. Soon after the story appeared, however, Khrushchev was replaced by hard-liners, and they began a campaign to silence its author. They stopped publication of his new works, denounced him as a hooligan and a traitor, confiscated his manuscripts, and interrogated his friends. But their iron grip could not contain Mr. Solzhenitsyns reach. By then his works were appearing outside the Soviet Union, in many languages, and he was being compared not only to Russias literary giants but also to Stalins literary victims, writers like Anna Akhmatova, Iosip Mandleshtam and Boris Pasternak. At home, the Kremlin stepped up its campaign by expelling Mr. Solzhenitsyn from the Writers Union. He fought back. He succeeded in having microfilms of his banned manuscripts smuggled out of the Soviet Union. He addressed petitions to government organs, wrote open letters, rallied support among friends and artists, and corresponded with people abroad. They turned his struggles into one of the most celebrated cases of the cold war period. Hundreds of well-known intellectuals signed petitions against his silencing; the names of left-leaning figures like Jean-Paul Sartre carried particular weight with Moscow. Other supporters included Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, W.H. Auden, Gunther Grass, Heinrich Boll, Yukio Mishima, Carlos Fuentes and, from the United States, Arthur Miller, John Updike, Truman Capote and Kurt Vonnegut. All joined a call for an international cultural boycott of the Soviet Union. By the late 1960s, Mr. Solzhenitsyn had become one of the most prominent and recognizable symbols of Soviet and Communist repression. That position was confirmed when he was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in the face of Moscows protests. The Nobel jurists cited him for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature. Mr. Solzhenitsyn dared not travel to Stockholm to accept the prize for fear that the Soviet authorities would prevent him from returning. But his acceptance address was circulated widely. He recalled a time when in the midst of exhausting prison camp relocations, marching in a column of prisoners in the gloom of bitterly cold evenings, with strings of camp lights glimmering through the darkness, we would often feel rising in our breast what we would have wanted to shout out to the whole world if only the whole world could have heard us. He wrote that while an ordinary brave man was obliged not to partic
[Marxism-Thaxis] State, Local and Private Pensions
State, Local and Private Pensions by Michael Hudson _www.counterpunch.com_ (http://www.counterpunch.com) (July 31 2008) The great economic fight of our epoch is being waged by the FIRE sector - Finance, Insurance and Real Estate - against the industrial economy and consumers. Its objective is to maximize property prices and the volume of debt relative to what labor and industry are able to earn. Rising debts and real estate prices go together, because asset prices depend on how much banks will lend. For creditors, the dream is to obtain an ultimate backup at public expense: government insurance that they will not lose when debtors are unable to pay. The political problem is how to get the government to insure and protect bankers rather than debtors, given that debtors are much more numerous when it comes to the voting booth. In such cases campaign contributions are the balancing factor. Governments are "privatized" and "financialized", that is, turned from democracies into oligarchies. The banking system aims to make sure that the only losers are the customers it is supposed to serve: debtors, homeowners and employees of companies being "financialized" as the economy is de-industrialized. Indeed, financialization and de-industrialization are becoming almost synonymous. The trick is to get voters to think they are getting rich while actually they are being painted into a debt corner, along with their employers, local government and the federal government too. For a while the bad-debt overhead can be bailed out by creating yet more debt, backed by public guarantees in what even the Wall Street Journal acknowledges is "socialism for the rich", that is, privatizing the profit and socializing the losses. But when has government been anything else, for thousands of years before anyone coined the term "socialism"? The so-called July 30 "housing bill" supports the price of mortgages that are the major asset base of most banks and other financial institutions today. What ultimately supports the price of these mortgage packages is the price of the real estate pledged as collateral. And despite Mr Greenspan's celebration of soaring housing prices as "wealth creation", it really was debt creation. As housing prices plunge, the debts remain in place. The question is, whose balance sheets are to plunge into negative equity territory - those of indebted homeowners, or those of banks that have made the bad loans and the financial institutions (largely pension funds, I'm sorry to say) that have bought "toxic mortgages"? Financial bubbles in their early phase inflate asset prices more rapidly than debts rise. This helps the financial sector encourage a belief that debt pollution is a quick way to make the economy rich - as long as one looks at financial balance sheets rather than tracing growth in the actual means of production and living standards. Living in the short run, most people do not see the financial war going on, and imagine that finance and industry, labor and capital are fighting for the same kind of economic growth and wealth. The reality is a conflict between financial and industrial growth objectives, subject to the adage that the solution to every problem tends to create yet new, unforeseen problems - ones often are larger in scale, requiring yet new solutions that cause yet larger and even more unforeseen. This is how societies transform themselves for better or for worse, crisis by crisis. Usually each side fights for its economic interests. But it is best not to crow too loudly over victory. The financial bailout is depicted as a housing bill, not as a giveaway to financial interests. And it is best not to acknowledge that the financial system's victory now threatens to push the economy further down the road to insolvency, headed by a squeeze on state and local finances, and pension funding public and private. Problems threaten to arise when creditors win too one-sided a victory. Here's what has happened so far. Early on the morning of July 30, President Bush signed the law that the Senate had passed at a special session the previous Saturday. Its aim was to restore US housing prices to unaffordably high levels, requiring new buyers to run even deeper into debts to obtain housing. Rather than rolling debts back to more affordable levels, the government now will use its own credit to guarantee payment on whatever portion of the unpayable exponential growth in debt cannot be sustained by the economy at large. The new "housing law" (a more honest title would have been the "financial bailout and giveaway act of 2008") authorizes the Treasury and Federal Reserve Board to provide unlimited credit to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and infuse new lending power to the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and localities to support the "real estate market". This is a euphemism for saving mortgage lenders from the traditional resp
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Bushwa will getcha like a case of anthrax!
In a message dated 8/1/2008 9:20:43 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: >> No, but I think you are missing the point. One reason why politicians can use things like anthrax incidents (whether or not they are behind them) to start wars and enrich themselves is the lack of alternatives--in communications and in politics. I would call a real left entity something that had mass membership and at least the potential for developing a path to political power. That doesn't exist in the US and many other countries. Most likely intellectuals would find such a party uninteresting.<< Comment "A path to power." "A real left entity." As a force of explanation and clarity, I have come to trust nothing in the institutional bourgeois ideological sphere. Allow me to dodge the anthrax discussion, although I recall the cowardly conduct of our Congress, when these distinguished members thought - or were lead to believe, they were under an anthrax attack. This matter of a "path to power" is something that many of us, including yourself and Ralph have thought about and tried to think out for at least a couple of decades if not 40 years. Many of us have approached the matter from some side or form of insurgent Marxism. In the mid 1990's, I began a sober assessment of what I understand to be the course of American history and general world history on the basis of Marx method of inquiry, leaning heavily on how I understood the current qualitative changes underway in the productive forces. This lead to a rejection of the historic Leninist form, as it has been passed down to my generation. This rejection of the Leninist form did not demand the rejection of political Leninism, which can be summarized as the collective actions of insurrectionaries to seize political power and hold onto it. Stated another way, the question of the "path to power" had to be thought out based on American society and the world at the approach of the 21st century. This rejection of the historic Leninist form was not an easy thing for me because the early part of my life - roughly from age 17 - 40, was lived in factory circles organized on the basis of the Leninist concept of party organization (I will be 56 next month). "A path to power." I have thought about this question all of my adult life. My conclusion is that it is time for us to move on and say goodbye to the Leninist form. Political Leninism or the art of insurrection lives, but we must first admit that "art" is a living things composed of all the subjective equations in the minds of the individual and the mass. Art in the sense of insurrection is the study and application of how one understands the context of will in the battle to take political power and implement a program - series of actions, on behalf of a class, knowing full well that concession always have to be granted to preserve a coherent mass base of support that allows one to rule and govern. I believe Ralph and yourself will agree with this proposition. My principled disagreement with comrade Ralph is . . . . nothing. A principled disagreement for instance cannot be based on Ralph assessment of say, a James Baldwin versus my assessment. The same applies to CB and Jim F. I do not know or at this point in time possess a coherent view of the "path to power" of the communist revolution in America, but something different is coming into view. The industrial proletariat as the child of large scale industry, as it arose and evolved against a feudal backdrop and manifested the various boundaries of the industrial revolution or capitalist development, and its alleged leading role as the revolutionary agent of change in the context of wills between bourgeoisie and proletarian, seems to me to be a issue demanding historical summation. Was the physical gravity - weight, and political will of the industrial proletariat sufficient to overthrown the bourgeois property relations in one or any of the more advanced capitalist countries? Was all the revolutionary forces in the more industrial/capitalist countries scoundrels and fools tied to capital and by one way or another comprised with the bourgeoisie and prevented the overthrow of the power of capital? I believe in retrospect that no combination of subjective and objective factors of the social equation would have allowed us to overthrow the power of capital in the advanced capitalist countries for several reasons. Sorry, but I have thought this matter out for the better part of 40 years and cannot tell anyone or write about a concrete path to insurrection - power on behalf of the tolling and oppressed masses in America. And this drives me and everyone else up the wall. Does this not mean that we are in a period of transition? What is "left" today? Something different is evolving on a planetary basis and we have to guess the
