StephenKMackSD's Blog

Here is a book review by a brilliant literary stylist and economic thinker, Joshua Clover. Read for yourself ,as he addresses each of the issues raised by the authors of the books under review and marvel at his grasp of ideas from politics,economics and history. And while he accomplishes his appointed task one can only admire his literary gift, as integral to that task. One is reminded of Richard Bronk’s ‘The Romantic Economist’. Mr. Clover is a writer and thinker who commands attention by virtue of his excellence.

Here in the Guardian is an interview with the Pretty Boy Reactionary. He is a tough little scrapper and proud of provoking us old style lefties with his Historical defense of Empire. But an Empire tarted up like an expensive streetwalker, with the insight and imagination of a this ready and able apologist.Here is a quote:

“Ask me not are you rightwing, but ask me are you a committed believer in individual freedom, the values of the enlightenment? Then, yeah, if being rightwing means believing Adam Smith was right, both in the Wealth of Nations and the Theory of Moral Sentiments, then I’m rightwing. If being rightwing is thinking that Karl Marx’s doctrine was a catastrophe for humanity, then I’m rightwing. If you think that it’s rightwing to say that the welfare state has trapped 10-20% of the population of western Europe in a dependency culture, an abyss of social failure, then I’m rightwing.”

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Isaiah Berlin, visiting Moscow in 1945, complained of the “remarkable pall of total inertia” that hung over Soviet writers. Most had been reduced to the confines of prescribed socialist realism, a genre of homily derided as “boy meets tractor”. Bulgakov had died censored in 1940, Pasternak was translating Shakespeare and working on Doctor Zhivago in secret, Mandelstam and Babel had been killed in the purges, lost in the same gulag system as Solzhenitsyn’s fictional Ivan Denisovich. Stalin corralled the liriki (writers and poets) to match the efforts of the fisiki (engineers and architects), to serve the breakneck industrialisation of the 1930s. By the 1940s Soviet literature had collapsed into the banality of paean. Even Akhmatova was reduced to writing poems in praise of Stalin to try and get her son released from the camps. Continue reading →

Socialist Realism, the approach prescribed for writers and artists in Stalin’s Soviet Union, has long been described, usually with a sneer, as neither “socialist” nor “realist”. Western critics then pass on to what they judge to be “real” art – the work of internal dissenters, published in samizdat or smuggled abroad (Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky), or of Russian writers from the post-1917 emigration (Bunin). In his acknowledgements, Frank Westerman, the Dutch writer and journalist, makes the point. “In Western reference works,” he complains, “the only literature of lasting value from the USSR is that which was clandestine, banned, confiscated, hand-copied, smuggled to the West or never published at all.” Continue reading →