Report From Moscow

 My wife, Marina, has returned from a two and a half week to Moscow to visit her 93 year old mother.  She almost got bumped from her Turkish Airlines flight out of Moscow through Istanbul, but her travel agent managed to get her back on.  Very glad she is back. Anyway, a few first hand current reports.

Yes, in terms of living standards, in Moscow most things are operating and there are plenty of goods in the stores, although prices are high. There is a major effort to have things seem "normal," lots of cooking shows on TV.  It is true that a lot of foreign goods are not available, although there are odd exceptions. Thus apparently French and Italian wines are available. Also, KFC is all over the place, although this would appear to be a franchise. Apparently Marriott hotels have been bought "for a dime" by the Saudis, who are now badly mismanaging them.

Many things are either not reported or reported very differently than over here. So supposedly the referenda on annexation were "transparent." People lined up to vote were shown on TV and there were some international observers testifying to this "transparency," from Syria, South Africa, and Brazil. No guns being pointed at anybody supposedly.

Yes, it was a big freakout when the partial mobilization was announced. One of her best friends had her son conscripted.  Apparently there is a known going price to get out of being conscripted: 5000 euros, yes, euros, not rmb/yuan or USD, and definitely not rubles, with the ruble/euro rate much worse in practice than the official rate.

My wife reminds me that there are still many "good and wise people" there, but unfortunately they are not in charge or having much say with those who are.

Oh, and a festschrift is being organized by the Russian Economic Federation for our old friend Victor Polterovich, now 85 years old and probably the most eminent economist in Russia at this time.

Barkley Rosser

Pharoah Sanders Has Passed

 One of the greatest musical performances I ever saw live was in Spring 1966, sorry have not tracked down exact date, in the University of Wisconsin-Union theater. It was a live performance of the final group of John Coltrane. None of his great quartet from "A Love Supreme" were in it, but it still completely blew my mind. 

Somehow this group had another saxophonist besides the greatest of them ever, Coltane, this guy Pharoah Sanders. He was really intense, arguably more so than Coltrane himself. Now, at age 81, Sanders has passed, one of the greatest jazz saxophonists ever. 

Apparently his original name was "Farrell." He was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. When he got to New York in the early 60s, ne nearly starved initially. Eventually he got in to various groups such as Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, and then Sun Ra's group, with Sun Ra changing his name to "Pharoah," reportedly on Sun Ra not hearing the pronunciation of his name correctly, although obviously it was an apprporiate name change.

His work has been described as "spiritual jazz." This has been described in the Nation as providing "a frenetic blend of spiritual jazz that, through shrieking horns and loose rhythmic structure, was meant to summon higher powers. The idea, it seemed, was to blow the sax so hard that the music reached God's ears."

Not that I am particularly a theist.

His most commercially successful album was with the pianist of that group I sae in Madison, Coltrane;s last wife, Alice, with whom he produced "Journey in Satchidanda," which I used to play for my older daughters when they were young, a seriously great album

Barkley Rosser

Tom Schelling Is Rolling Over In His Grave

 Thomas Schelling got his Nobel Prize in economics for saving the world from global thermonuclear war in the 20th century, when many thought it was inevitable. Rival nuclear game theorist, John von Neumann, said to bomb the Soviets as soon as possible, like, tomorrow, preferably before noon 

Schelling won the debate in real time, being an advisor on "Dr. Strangelove..." bringing about as a result of that the installation of the "red phone," for immediate and direct communications on such matters between the then USSR and the US. I suspect that phone still exists in some form, bur I do not know

What Tom got his visit to Stockholm for, which I told him in person he would get before he got it, (yeah, really), was his formulation of how to find a socially beneficial game theoretic solution when many of those exist. He proposed finding a socially agreeable solution that all accept that is also socially good. This proposal he put forward and became accepted was no first use of nuclear weapons, period, even though, of course, the US violated that at the end of WW II. But while it did not become formally or officially accepted, this doctrine became accepted in practice, and we had no nuclear wars, and Tom was the most important person behind this, both intellectually, and in terms of policy in the 1960s.

So unfortunately before he died in 2016, he lived long enough to see the beginning of the unwinding of his rule. When Putin conquered and annexed Crimea in 2014, and much of the West put some pretty minor economic sanctions on him for this, one of his media flunkies (apologize I am not going back to dig up this immoral asshole's post or who is, let him die unknown), declared: "We can turn New York into ashes," or words to that effect. The moment I saw that media post, not shut down by Putin, I knew that Tom Schelling's hidden and implicit rule that had prevented the world from being destroyed in a global thermonuclear war, was over.

Needless to say, as he has become more desperate as his poorly functioning military is being defeated by the military of the nation he invaded without a shred of justification, Putin is making himself not only a world historical war criminal, but a total hypocrite. He actually reminded the world that Ukraine gave up what was then the world's fourth largest stash of nuclear weapons in 1992  He ludicrously complains that somehow now they regret that. No, he claims they are actively trying to get them back, which is another excuse for his invasion.

But, of course, in 1992, when Ukraine gave up its large stash of nuclear weapons, Russia along with US and UK signed the Budapest Memorandum/Accord that involved recognizing both the independence and the territorial integrity of Ukraine. Obviously Putin violated this in 2014, with both the US and UK failing to respond. That he now reminds of his violation of this agreement at this point is, well...

Barkley Rosser

Happy 155th Birthday to volume one of Capital!

In his 1965 farewell lecture at Brandeis University, Herbert Marcuse read a long passage from the Grundrisse's "fragment on machines" and then observed: “But Marx himself has repressed this vision, which now appears as his most realistic, his most amazing insight!"

In Time, Labor and Social Domination, published 28 years later, Moishe Postone addressed the same section from the Grundrisse and commented:

These passages do not represent utopian visions that later were excluded from Marx's more "sober" analysis in Capital but are a key to understanding that analysis; they provide the point of departure for a reinterpretation of the basic categories of Marx' s mature critique that can overcome the limits of the traditional Marxist paradigm.

Who was right? Did Marx repress his most amazing insight or is that insight from the Grundrisse a key to interpreting Marx's analysis in Capital? I would argue that both Marcuse and Postone are partly right and partly wrong. Marx didn't so much repress his realistic, amazing insight from the Grundrisse in Capital as hide it under bushels of supplementary illustrative material. You can find it there if you are patient and know what to look for. 

In that respect, passages from the Grundrisse are indeed a key to understanding and reinterpreting Capital. But what is the key to understanding and reinterpreting the Grundrisse? It is the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the Natural Difficulties, that Marx cited and quoted from repeatedly in the Grundrisse, that Engels claimed Marx had "rescued from its oblivion," that Marx was fascinated by in the notebooks published as Theories of Surplus Value, and that Postone, Marcuse and almost every other interpreter of Marx's thought has ignored.

I discussed this peculiar omission in an article published last year, "The Ambivalence of Disposable Time: The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties at two hundred." In the last few weeks, I have completed a 21,000 word manuscript, "A shadow of things to come" that probes further into the backstory of the pamphlet and forward into the fate of disposable time in today's world. I'm sure it's not the sort of thing academic publishers would be interested in and thus am uncertain about how I will present my arguments to the public. 

How To Dismantle An Empire

 My late mother seriously admired the now late Queen Elizabeth II. Not only was she a conservative Anglophiliac with overwhelming British ancestry (all the "nations" of the UK) who had tea in the afternoon at the proper British time in more or less the proper British way, there was also the matter that the queen bore a son her heir only seven months after my mother had me. I was raised to see Charles as a   a sort of cohort.

Indeed, i came to view him with great sympathy, although in later years he would come to be highly embarrassing in many ways well and widely known. But in 1958, the second time I was in UK, on arriving I saw tabloids with front page stories about some ridiculous matter involving Charles, I think it was about him playing games in streets uncontrolled, or something like that. I felt total sympathy for this guy about my age whose every action, however trivial, ended up on the front pages of newspapers with all kinds of people weighing in censoriously.  I was horrified. But now, finally, he is King Charles III.

So the death of Elizabeth II is semi-personal, reminding me of the death of my mother at 97 in 2010, who really revered the late queen. But given this personal aspect, I wish to consider this appropriately seriously and substantively.

A takeoff for me, having just returned from my first trip to Europe in three years for conference on Nonlinear Dynamics in Economics and Finance in Urbino, Italy, is an FT Weekend piece by Simon Schama. He raises deeper historical issues, in particular the matter of QE II overseeing the dismantling of the British Empire. He notes that the main three earlier British monarchs who reigned for long times: Elizabeth I, George III, and Victoria, all who suffered various vicissitudes during their reigns, those reigns all ended with Britain (or still England Wales for QE I), the nation ended stronger and more powerful by pretty much any measure at the end of their reigns compared with their beginnings. For QE II, the outcome was quite the opposite. She oversaw the dismantling of the British Empire.

The extremity of how great the decline was needs to go back before her accession 70 years ago. Schama emphasizes as Elizabeth's ultimate promise and commitment she held to whole life, and probably more than anything else why so many mourn her personally, was made five years before her accession in February 1947, three quarters of a century ago, in of all places, South Africa. She famously declared: "My whole life, whether it will be long or short, shall be devoted to your service."

Now that time was even more full of British Empire than it was on her accession when the old imperialist, Winston Churchill, was the first of her 15 prime ministers, the last of whose accessions, Liz Truss, was her last Act of State, the day before she died at Balmoral, literally standing on her last legs. In Feb. 1947, her father was still Emperor of India, whose independence later that year Churchill would oppose, although ineffectually as Clement Atlee was PM. This was also while South Africa, although independent, still appeared to honor officially allying with UK in both of the world wars, with the victory of the apartheid-imposing National Party coming the following year of 1948, also the birth year of both me and her heir. 

Also, Britain still controlled the Palestine Mandate, without yet an independent Israel, also to come in that following year. The British Empire was as it had been at its peak in the immediate aftermath of WW I, only missing a few pieces out of the Middle East officially, such as Iraq, handed over to Lawrence of Arabia's old friend, as well, Faisal, whose son would be assassinate when he was overthrown in in 1958 by a Baathist coup. Ireland also was still held in that immediate aftermath, leaving a century ago, arguably the first piece to do so in this long dismantling.

Today it is pretty much gone. When she accessed, it was still true that "the sun never sets" over what UK officially ruled, although technically once the Indian subcontinent left in 1947it was no longer an Empire. There is still its ghost in the Commonwealth, which the British monarch still officially heads (along with lots of other things, including the Church of England). But she was the official Head of State of only 14 of those at her death, with several of those moving to change that soon such as Jamaica, Barbados doing so recently (those 14 include the core 5 Eyes nations of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but even they could go). Beyond that there are only odd scattered bits of direct British rule with English speakers on them, such as Gibraltar and the Falkand Islands, which Margaret Thatcher puffed herself up over by reconquering from Argenitna, although probably only because the US played in with its senior role in the Five Eyes of ultimate Anglophilia, a matter Charles de Gaulle of people was all too well aware of.

The gradual dissolution of this vast empire, probably the largest ever in world history, with the possible exception of that of Genghis Khan, which dominated the world for the century of the Pax Britannica, contrasts sharply with that of the more sudden dissolutions of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires at the end of WW I, with the delayed partial dissolution of the Russian Empire with the end of the USSR in 1991, although the successor Russian Federation still resembles a smaller version of it with its many sub-national units, with its possible dissolution in WW I undone by the Bolshevik Revolution that held most of it together, although Finland got out, while in WW II Stalin was able to absorb certain territories never part of it, such as western Ukraine.

The essentially sudden dissolution of those three empires led to conflicts that still plague the world. The worst probably came out of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, which had been in long decline and shrinkage. But the problem of Israel and the Palestinians, of Syria and Lebanon and Iraq all come of that dismemberment, not to mention some of the problems in the Balkans, which triggered the beginning of that fateful WW I. And the Austro-Hungarian dissolution has left us also with those gnawing problems in the Balkans, not to mention the simmering resentments in Hungary ruled by Orban who supports Putin and Trump with his population still dreaming of lost sub-rule over parts of Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovakia, and sub-Carpathian Ukraine, where the dominant local group is the rather historically important Rusyns.

Well, I suppose the gradualism of the dissolution of the British Empire saved its former parts from such conflicts. Clearly the conflict between India and Pakistan is serious, and the British went along with the partition that arguably gave us that. The British themselves arguably aggravated one of the worst conflicts coming out of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, with them in WW I making promises to both Arabs and Jews regarding what would happen with Israel and Palestine. 

While it was gradual, for the first decade of Elizabeth's rule, the British government fought hard against various independence movements, such as the Mau Mau in Kenya, with slaughters in various places. Critics of Elizabeth II point out these events as reasons not to mourn her, that she did not somehow stop all this, or at least just resign in protest, or whatever. One of the more outspoken was Karen Attiah in WaPo today, who essentially says she should have resigned upfront over all this, although, frankly, Attiah completely destroys her own credibility by in the end taking QE II to task because after Nigeria won independence in 1960, when in the 1970s the Ibo tribe in Biafra tried to obtain independence from Nigeria, the British government supported the Nigerian government. It turns out that what Attiah is really worked up about is that she is an Ibo and her grandfather was forced to flee. Oops, talk about a complete collapse of credibility. Frankly, WaPo should not have published such a blatantly worthless piece of self-aggrandizement and hypocrisy, even as I was and remain sympathetic to the Ibo cause.

Certainly in the first years of her reign Elizabeth did nothing to assist in a peaceful end of the Empire. But her defenders point to her playing a role in the longer run of accepting that it was going to happen and making it do so with a minimum of violence, not fully avoided of course, and a maximum of broader acceptance and tolerance. A crucial sign many point to was in 1961 the year before the majority of British colonies in Africa gained independence. She danced publicly with Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, which had gone out the door first in 1957. This symbolically set the course.

She famously never publicly questioned policy of any of her 15 prime ministers (she also had 14 US presidents, 13 of whom she met, all but Harry Truman). But one of the few moments there appeared to have been a hint of a disagreement involved the matter of sanctions against apartheid in South Africa in the early 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher was not enthusiastic and opposing supporting them. Somehow the Queen managed to get it out unofficially that she disagreed with Thatcher, which led to a major row with many criticizing her for going beyond her authority. But in the end she won, with her helping to push Thatcher to support the sanctions that in the end would help end apartheid, with her later meeting Nelson Mandela, who clearly appreciated her role in this world historical event, especially given the historical role of the British royal family's involvement with slavery in the past.

The change all this brought can be seen in Britain itself as well, where while there is certainly plenty of anti-immigrant sentiment and racism as there is in the US also, one finds the incoming Conservative government of Liz Truss, who models herself after Thatcher reportedly, having descendants of immigrants from former colonies holding the top three cabinet posts: Home, Exchequer, and Foreign Secretary.

One can criticize Elizabeth II for apparently never outright apologizing for any of the past, even as she bowed her head in certain locations where serious wrongs were done in the name of British rule as well as noting that indeed many people suffered in the past. According to Schama in his essay, her greatest single speech was one where she did this in Dublin in 2011, a speech she herself largely wrote against the wishes of many in her inner circle, in which she acknowledged the sufferings on all sides in Ireland in the past and supported the Good Friday Agrementof 13 years earlier that ended the Troubles in Northern Ireland. This was all the more important and difficult given that in 1979 the IRA had assassinated Lord Mountbatter, uncle of her husband and her own second cousin. Schama declared that this speech "put a period" on those peacekeeping agreements.

Barkley Rosser

Will The Iran Nuclear Deal Ever Get Reestablished?

 It keeps looking like it might, but then ne obstacles seem to appear. President Biden promised to undo what I have long argued was the worst foreign policy mistake made by Donald Trump. He should have just done it right after he took office, but he made a bunch of extra demands and the negotiations went nowhere. Then the moderate Rouhani government was replaced by the hardline Raisi one, something some of us like me forecasted would happen if he listened to these people who thought he should make demand about missiles and foreign groups, none of this going anywhere.

Anyway, there have been fresh rumors of a nearly done deal, but it seems to be stalled out now on two items.  One is US demanding Iran let IAEA inspect some sites. The other is Iran demanding Biden promise no future president will undo the deal the way Trump did. But he cannot promise that, or maybe he can promise it, but he cannot deliver it, and they should know that.

A further complication is thr Ukraine war, with Iran now supplying Russia with drones. This is not directly a part of the negotiation, but it is souring the atmosphere, although Russia is pushing for the deal to be cut.

Another complication is that the Iranian leaders think that Biden is desperate for the extra 2 mbpd of oil production and exports that would probably come out of Iran with an end to sanctions. But they may have not notieced that gasoline prices in the US have been steadily declininb for nearly three months. Not quite so desperate, and also burned by MBS, who gave him a miniscul 100,000 mbpd increase in production for that fist bump, now withdrawn on request of V.V. Puting because of the ongoing decline in oil prices.

Anyway, the JCPOA should have been revived long ago, but here we are, and unclear if it ever will be.

Barkley Rosser

Where Will M.S. Gorbachev Be Buried?

 Mikhail Sergeivich Gorbachev died on the same day as our daughter Sasha's 33rd birthday. Sasha herself noted that if it were not for him she probably would not exist. It was ultimately Gorbachev who decided that the USSR would obey the Helsinki Accords rules on letting people get married and so on April 4, 1987 let my wife Marina leave Moscow for the US, the top story on CNN that evening. For that we are personally grateful to him and respect him, despite other things he did that one may not support.

Some people do not support, him, only 8% of the Russian population according to a poll taken in 2017. President Putin has announced that he will not receive a state funeral, perhaps justifiable given that the USSR no longer exists, although Putin has regularly claimed to possess the powers for Russia that the USSR had as a part of continuity. But in fact Putin has all but said this decision follows his claim that the breakup of the Soviet Union was "the worst event of the 20th century," and he has blamed Gorbachev for it happening, arguably not entirely unreasonably.

Of course, views of Gorbachev in the 14 nations that were formerly republics of the USSR before it broke apart are almost certainly much better than they are in Russia, although I have not seen specific polls on the matter.  As it is, Gorbachev himself did nor seek to break up the USSR, even as he failed to prevent its breakup and many of his actions aided in its breakup, a complicated matter that was also brought about by things out of his control, such as low world oil prices after 1986 that tanked the Soviet economy.

While some of those nations remain as dictatorial or even more so than they were in the Soviet period, such as Turkmenistan and Belarus, most of the former USSR now has much greater freedom and democracy than it did in the Soviet period, this true even in Russia with Putin's backsliding back towards the way things were, including overturning some of Gorbachev's greatest achievements, such as the 1987 treaty on intermediate nuclear arms, although it must be noted the US has gone along with that as well.

There is much about Gorbachev that many do not realize. He was always a good Communist and Leninist, praising Lenin as late as 2006. He was initially brought to Moscow by Yuri Andropov, who was a tough guy hardliner, but sought to reform the Soviet economic system so as to improve the Soviet military and overcome the stagnation of the late Brezhnev period (Brezhnev curiously now rising in popularity). When Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko provided the swing vote for him in the 4-3 Politburo election in 1985 that put him in power over Moscow Mayor Victor Grishin after Brezhnev sidekick Chernenko died, who had succeeded Andropov, Gromyko declared he did so because of Gorbachev' supposedly "sharp teeth." And until the disaster at Chernobyl, Gorbachev's policies looked a lot like what Andropov probably would have done, his anti-alcohol campaign and his "accelerationism" to catch up to the US economically within the Soviet model, which looked not to bad until oil prices collapsed.

After Chernobyl, Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika policies, along with democratization, in effect involved pursuing for the USSR an ideal of a form of "liberal communism." Many have argued that such an ideal was (and is) impossible. But we have seen Communist parties operate within democratic systems in a democratic way, as in the Eurocommunism of Italy and also in India, although it was never in charge of the national government in either of those nations. But the city of Bologna was long considered to be the best run city in Italy for decades in the post WW II era under Communist mayors, and the state of Kerala in India has also been held up as having some of the best socioeconomic outcomes of all states in India, again reflecting years of rule by the Communist Party. Of course, arguably, what one sees in such cases is really just social democracy like what one sees in the Scandinavian nations.

The fundamental problem for the USSR was that once democratization was allowed, this led to the demands for independence by many of the republics, and this ended up with the USSR falling apart. Arguably this was inevitable. WW I brought about the breakup and end of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, with the Russian one surviving out of the fluke of having the Bolshevik revolution.  But the long stagnation of the system that came out of that revolution inevitably set up that holdover of the Russian Empire to fall, even if Putin has been trying to undo that breakup.

A serious question is to what extent after Gorbachev lost power, and even to some extent before he did so, bad behavior by the US and other western powers undermined the chances of either the USSR or Russia having a successful economic and political transition to being prosperous and democratic nations.  Of course some of the former republics have managed it, with the Baltic states the most prominent examples, even as others are far from it such as Tajikistan. One area where the US probably blundered was in arming anti-Soviet Mujaheddin in Afghanistan with stingers and other more advanced weaponry once it became clear in 1986 that Gorbachev was planning to leave. This may have proven to be less important for Russia than for the US and the rest of the world with the subsequent strength of the Taliban, clearly evident in their return to power a year ago.

Besides some bad advice on economic policy in the early 1990s, probably the item Gorbachev himself has complained about the most, and in this has supported Putin at times, including as recently as late 2021, despite Putin mostly denouncing him, has been on the troubled matter of the expansion of NATO eastward. Gorbachev apparently believed that George H.W. Bush promised no such eastward expansion at the time of the 1990 reunification of Germany, although defenders of Bush note that the promise then made was specifically about no NATO troops in the former East Germany, which has apparently been kept. The Warsaw Pact still existed at that time, as did the USSR, and the idea that Poland or Estonia might be joining NATO seemed an absurdity. While indeed US neocons have pushed for NATO to expand eastward, the fundamental push for that came from the nations who wanted to join after indeed the Warsaw Pact and USSR did break up. The US resisted for some time the requests for it coming from Poland and the Baltic states. Perhaps George W. Bush should not have suggested that Ukraine and Georgia could join, which clearly aggravated Putin big time. But when Putin invaded Ukraine this year, it was not at all on the verge of joining NATO, and his invasion has led Sweden and Finland to join NATO.

Which brings us to the matter of a burial place for Gorbachev, with where somebody is buried a very big deal in Russia. We can see it with Stalin, who initially was put in the mausoleum on Red Square with Lenin. Then in 1956 after Khrushchev made his speech denouncing Stalin he got moved to some obscure location. Then later Brezhnev partially rehabilitated him by putting him in the row behind Lenin's mausoleum with a bust, along with people like Brezhnev himself and Andropov. The nest layer of the hierarchy down from that was being in the Kremlin wall itself, where people like Yuri Gagarin and John Reed are.

Now nobody is buried there, and the most prestigious cemetery is behind the Novodevichy monastery, where in fact Khrushchev is buried along with many famous Russian and Soviet cultural and scientific figures are buried.  Russian playwright Chekhov is there as is the Soviet aircraft designer Tupolev. Many of the graves are quite picturesque. Among those buried there is Gorbachev's wife, Raisa, who died in 1999, with some more recent Russian political figures getting themselves buried near there.  There is a pretty impressive statue over her grave, which happens to be just in front of where my wife's maternal grandparents are buried. 

So, the obvious place for Gorbachev to be buried is next to Raisa in the Novodevichy cemetery. But there is not enough room there for another monument, and more seriously, if Putin really wants to diss him, well, that is the most prestigious cemetery, and if he will not give Gorbachev a state funeral, he may not want to bury him in such a prestigious place.  We shall have to see just how down on Gorbachev Putin is, and where Gorbachev gets buried will be a substantial signal.

Addendum, 9/1/22: Apparently the memorial service for Gorbachev will be held tomorrow in the Pillar Hall of the former Soviet House of Unions the Tverskoye district of Moscow. Putin will not attend. Gorbachev supported the invasion and annexation of Crimea, but is reported to have opposed the current "special operation" in Ukraine, doing so in an interview on July 22 with Andrey Veneditkov.

Another addendum, 9/2: While he allowed cooperatives and foreign companies such as McDonald's, which opened its famous outlet on Pushkin Square in Moscow while Gorbachev was still in power, he did not substantially alter or undo the existing command socialist system of the USSR or decontrol prices. So, it continued dominating the economy with its problems until the end of the USSR at the end of 1991.

Barkley Rosser