StephenKMackSD's Blog

A moving tribute to Mr. Nemtsov, yet how convenient that he should be murdered at such a pivotal historical moment! Or is Conspiracy Theory verboten at his publication, except in regard Putin? War hysteria/propaganda, in the West, has reached a kind of denouement. One can’t open such respectable bourgeois publications as the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, the New York Times or even the tawdry Daily Beast, without some scribbler or policy intellectual and or more importantly a credentialed Foreign Policy expert, falling in line with the latest update on The Party Line: Putin as the New Stalin. All of these developments coming after the Coup in Ukraine, for Coup it was, despite President Obama’s assurances to the contrary. We can’t ignore the billions spent by Victoria Nuland and The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies to secure a western foothold at Russia’s very border?  Or is our ethical/political position a selective,self-serving myopia?

There is no doubt that Putin is a thug, yet a thug elected by a majority of Russians: we could have called Bush II that very name.

I’m currently reading The Georgetown Set, Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington by Gregg Herken. A gossipy, very readable at some points, and at others bathetic. The Alsop brothers are the featured players in this historical melodrama, and quite informative it is. Also see Edwin Yoder’s Joe Alsop’s Cold War for a portrait of an Cold Warrior who actually had some experience of war, not as some abstract idea, but as a bitter uncomfortable existential fact, in World War II and Korea. Most of the propagandists for the New Cold War have no idea of what war is, and it’s attendant suffering, deprivation or death, nor the requisite moral imagination to engage in a reflection that might yield a fitting humility.

Political Observer

Death on the Kremlin’s Doorstep

Why erratic?

Having explained why I owe whatever understanding of our social world I may possess largely to Karl Marx, I now want to explain why I remain terribly angry with him. In other words, I shall outline why I am by choice an erratic, inconsistent Marxist. Marx committed two spectacular mistakes, one of them an error of omission, the other one of commission. Even today, these mistakes still hamper the left’s effectiveness, especially in Europe.

Marx’s first error – the error of omission was that he failed to give sufficient thought to the impact of his own theorising on the world that he was theorising about. His theory is discursively exceptionally powerful, and Marx had a sense of its power. So how come he showed no concern that his disciples, people with a better grasp of these powerful ideas than the average worker, might use the power bestowed upon them, via Marx’s own ideas, in order to abuse other comrades, to build their own power base, to gain positions of influence?

Marx’s second error, the one I ascribe to commission, was worse. It was his assumption that truth about capitalism could be discovered in the mathematics of his models. This was the worst disservice he could have delivered to his own theoretical system. The man who equipped us with human freedom as a first-order economic concept; the scholar who elevated radical indeterminacy to its rightful place within political economics; he was the same person who ended up toying around with simplistic algebraic models, in which labour units were, naturally, fully quantified, hoping against hope to evince from these equations some additional insights about capitalism. After his death, Marxist economists wasted long careers indulging a similar type of scholastic mechanism. Fully immersed in irrelevant debates on “the transformation problem” and what to do about it, they eventually became an almost extinct species, as the neoliberal juggernaut crushed all dissent in its path.

Wonderful, insightful, inspiring read

Skip27,
Thank you for your comment. Faced with the complete failure of Neo-Liberalism what is called for, even demanded, is more Neo-Liberalism. See Philip Mirowski’s Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste.
(http://www.versobooks.com/books/1613-never-let-a-serious-crisis-go-to-waste)
For a bracing forensic of the Free Market Delusion and it’s insidious hold on economic/political theory and practice, even the complete subversion of the conception of civic obligation, as the paramount guiding principle of republicanism. For a history of the concept of the cultivation of civic republican virtue see J.G.A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment:
(http://press.princeton.edu/titles/1729.html)
Face the fact that in American, since the so-called Financial Reform of 1999, that erased the protections of Glass-Steagall to the Crash of 2008: self-serving mendacity, not to speak of wholesale thievery, has been the operative philosophy of Capital!
We bailed out the Banks, and the utterly corrupt Investment Houses, one and the same? and then came the successor to the benighted idea and practice of ‘Market Discipline’, namely Austerity: we footed the bill twice, Bailout then Austerity!
Mayor Emanuel  is a hireling, an apologist, a New Democrat whose faith is in his careerist ambition. And his ability to articulate the Party Line of a Thought Collective that has seemingly endless cash reserves, but whose ethical/political status can be described as bankrupt! Your final sentence reeks of a kind of passive political cynicism:

Emanuel may suck, but he is better than anyone else running.

StephenKMackSD

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2015/02/chicago-s-mayoral-election#comments

Sometimes political cynicism reheated has an unattractive aroma. What to call it? the odor of decay, dessicated and dusty? Although Mr. Luce hits his marks with a certain effectiveness, as to Ms. Clinton’s unslakable political ambition, and it’s ruthless exercise of opportunism. For proof of this see the shameless jingoism in her interview with acolyte Jeffrey Goldberg, published August 10,2014, unfortunately Mr. Luce missed an opportunity to write a companion piece or simply an enlightening postscript to this review    :
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/hillary-clinton-failure-to-help-syrian-rebels-led-to-the-rise-of-isis/375832/
Ms. Clinton combines with certain public relations veracity: Feminism, Neo-Liberalism combined with the R2P, Neo-Conservative, New Democratic  alliance in response to their creature The New Cold War, and  the revived War on Terror: ISIL,ISIS,IL .

Political Observer

The effort to overcome the benighted Neo-Liberal model, which is now in it’s Austerity phase of self-rescue, will be a trans-generational battle. The Greeks are just the first followed by Spain and the rest of the Southern Tier i.e. the Profligate South vs the Virtuous North: the Germans the beneficiaries of economic rescue four times in the 20th Century have chosen to be, what is the word, recalcitrant?

We are in the opening phase of that battle and the wisdom of the failed and failing Neo-Liberal model and it’s rationalizers appears to have evaporated in the Crash of 2008, except that those apologists can’t quite bring themselves to anything like self-account. A signal failure both of the economic and the ethical. However those two civic ideals have been buried under the rubble of that dismal failure. Although glossed over by plenty of self-serving statistical data and Dismal Science speculation/metaphysics.

Almost Marx

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5faa51fe-ba7d-11e4-945d-00144feab7de.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3Sfggeg3M

Like all propaganda Ms. Cox’s essay is a parody of actual thought! Rhetorically framed by comic book metaphors about the powers of super heroes. One must ask the inevitable question: at which audience was this directed ? How does Ms. Cox place the blame for the Anti-Hillary phenomenon? Generic Sexism and her Prickly Staff, this last charge an example of our writer’s own experience?
After some boring, cliche ridden preliminaries we arrive at the question of Dynastic Politics. Jeb vs Hillary is the very definition of the shopworn politics of the American Political Present: two more than tired Neo-Liberals with nothing new to say, much less to think. The very act of thought is past the ability of either potential candidate or Ms. Cox, who is left defending Dynastic Politics and Hillary Clinton with this tortured paragraph:

Though some may point toward anti-Hillary coverage as proof that the media are not biased to the left, I consider this tendency toward deliberate, counter-factual undermining as pretty good evidence of that very bias, mostly because you just don’t see this pathology on the right. Base voters on either side rattle their cages when the presumptive nominee doesn’t fit their specific ideological prescription, but the Karl Roves of the world don’t lay into a GOP hopeful just because he (or she, but come on…) is clearly going to win.

The rest is more boring professional journalistic hyperventilating, equaling cynicism, in defense of Candidate Hillary as a welcome political inevitability. Ms. Cox all but declares opposition to Ms. Clinton as  political irrationalism, again, call it by it’s true name, propaganda!

Political Realist

For a partial answer to Kierkegaard’s nihilism in the Concept of Irony, see page 293 in Annette Baier’s Postures of the Mind;
‘I shall suggest that the secular equivalent of faith in God , which we need in morality as well as in science or knowledge acquisition, is faith in the human community and it’s evolving procedures-in the prospects for many-handed cognitive ambitions and moral hopes.’ Etc.
https://books.google.com/books?id=kS73a3FOfeatures of an action OnsC&pg=PR9&lpg=PR9&dq=postures+of+the+mind&source=bl&ots=7kir7dgrPV&sig=LSHdD4YgwiRjq7kQyAEzxLzm19g&hl=en&sa=X&ei=hNPoVKjnOMynNsCxgPAJ&ved=0CFUQ6AEwCw#v=onepage&q=postures%20of%20the%20mind&f=false
Another part of the answer can be found in D.D. Raphael’s The Impartial Spectator, Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy:
http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199568260.do
Page 21:
‘The relevant  features of an action include its effects on some other person or persons, and here imaginative sympathy has an important role.’ Etc.
We are a part of a human community, even though we may vigorously dissent to the felt and expressed values of that community. In a very real sense, we can never reach a state of complete nihilism, as we were born into and reached our point of self-emancipation through that existential medium. Faith was all that was left to Kierkergaard, given his nihilist self-conception of a completely desolate, alienated relation to that community. We are impelled to dissent, yet we must live within, accept the paradoxical nature of our ‘nihilism’.

Philosophical Apprentice

The New Cold War cliches are Putin as the New Stalin, President Obama’s lack of ‘resolve’ and it’s twin European/EU lack of resolve i.e. Merkel, and ‘Russian revanchism’ all carefully articulated by Mr. Stephens. Who then, quite boldly and imaginatively, uses the Long Telegram, and it’s successor the famous Mr. X essay as his starting point:  his extemporaneous and not quite convincing, not to speak of hectoring essay, is the issue of this thought experiment.

What Mr. Stephens leaves out of his political re-imagination, on ideological grounds? is the essay by American political mandarin Walter Lippmann. Perhaps a long quotation from this reply to Mr. X’s position paper will give much needed historical context, in the interest of demonstrating policy debates at the beginning of the Cold War and their relevance for policy debates in the present:

It will be evident, I am sure, to the reader who has followed the argument to this point that my criticism of the policy of containment, or the so-called Truman Doctrine, does not spring from any hope or belief that the Soviet pressure to expand can be “charmed or talked out of existence.” I agree entirely with Mr. X that we must make up our minds that the Soviet power is not amenable to our arguments, but only “to contrary force” that “is felt to be too strong, and thus more rational in the logic and rhetoric of power.”

My objection, then, to the policy of containment is not that it seeks to confront the Soviet power with American power, but that the policy is misconceived, and must result in a misuse of American power. For as I have sought to show, it commits this country to a struggle which has for its objective nothing more substantial than the hope that in ten or fifteen years the Soviet power will, as the result of long frustration, “break up” or “mellow.” In this prolonged struggle the role of the United States is, according to Mr. X, to react “at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points” to the encroachments of the Soviet power.

The policy, therefore, concedes to the Kremlin the strategical initiative as to when, where and under what local circumstances the issue is to be joined. It compels the United States to meet the Soviet pressure at these shifting geographical and political points by using satellite states, puppet governments and agents which have been subsidized and supported, though their effectiveness is meager and their reliability uncertain. By forcing us to expend our energies and our substance upon these dubious and unnatural allies on the perimeter of the Soviet Union, the effect of the policy is to neglect our natural allies in the Atlantic community, and to alienate them.

The Lippmann essay available here:

http://www.learner.org/workshops/primarysources/coldwar/docs/lippman.html

Political Observer

Compare Mr. Timothy Garton Ash’s gentle but firm anti-intellectual attack on John Mearsheimer: ‘Professor Realist’ to the certifiable intellectual bumpkinry of former Air Force General Charles Wald.

First Mr. Ash’s attempt to discredit Mr. M.’s realism, better to call it a self-serving rhetorical cartoon version  of that ‘realism’. Notice that Mr. Ash’s rhetorical frame to the whole is the notorious Yalta surrender to Soviet imperial adventurism!

‘Moscow’s law of the jungle confronts Brussels’ jungle of law. Who’s winning? “Russia is winning” answers the well-known American “realist”, John Mearsheimer. So what should we do about it? “The west should seek to make Ukraine a neutral buffer state between Russia and Nato. It should look like Austria during the cold war. Toward that end, the west should explicitly take European Union and Nato expansion off the table.” Well, thank you Professor Realist. Perhaps you would like to seal the deal yourself? We have the perfect location for your realpolitik summit: Yalta, where in 1945 Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill gave an ambiguous legitimacy to the Soviet occupation of eastern Europe. That’s Yalta in now-annexed Crimea.’

Now former General Wald’s inept dismissal of Mr. Mearsheimer’s ‘realism’:

‘I think it’s a smart argument that a professor would make, but it’s wrong.’

One must watch and listen to the former General’s argument, and also his consistent inability to pronounce Mr. Mearsheimer’s name, that makes him seem clueless, like another garden variety anti-intellectual. See the debate here:
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/2/10/playing_with_fire_a_debate_on
The Ukrainian Coup and it’s American and EU backers has brought to prominence the Neo-Con, Neo-Liberal and R2P zealots, Mr. Ash among the most prominent, of The New Cold Warriors whose target is Putin as the New Stalin. Mr. Ash degrades his status as one of most prominent supporters of the dissidents in the Soviet Union and it satellites: a writer of conscience now supports blackwidow Victoria Nuland and her allies Right Sector and Svoboda!

Political Cynic

Is it any surprise that this editorial at The Economist begins with Left Wing hysteria mongering? This as the West finds itself covered in the soot of the Neo-Liberal delusion that turned to ash? The failure of Neo-Liberalism demands further Neo-Liberal ‘reforms’, so goes the Party Line of the apologists for that exhausted,demonstrably failed political/economic mirage. See Philip Mirowski’s Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste for the dismal history of  the Neo-Liberal Thought Collective’s mendacious ascendency and staying power:

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste
For an alternative view to this Economist editorial see Jillian Tett’s essay at the Financial Times on debt forgiveness and the Germans, from an address by Benjamin Friedman, aptly titled A Predictable Pathology.
A link to Ms. Tett’s essay:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3Rqy6UMA0
A link to Mr. Friedman’s essay:

Click to access friedman.pdf

The fact that the Germans were bailed out four times in the 20th Century 1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953. What bearing might that have on the Left Wing hysteria mongering at the Economist, and the issue of the Greeks and debt forgiveness? And/or a range of other options, open to EU technocrats, in alliance with the Greeks, to first and foremost alleviate the suffering of Greek citizens, as the primary issue, not the rescue of the Neo-Liberal delusion in it’s various iterations!  But the alleviation of the suffering of the Greeks is utterly antithetical to the whole of the Neo-Liberal Project:  civic good is in direct opposition to the argued ‘value’ of Markets and Market Discipline!

Almost Marx