Of Hats and Rabbits, 3

1.(What it is) There were meetings in Washington, New York, Paris, Zurich, London, Berlin, Frankfurt, Milan; meetings in front of cameras and behind closed doors; meetings at which the giant teeny-weenies of the capitalist order-- those central bankers, ministers prime and sub-prime, presidents, secretaries; meetings at which that cast of midgets and mumblers performed like fleas at a pocket circus, yoked together by a single thread, dragging in unison the wagons of the public treasury across the stage to the oohs and ahhs of journalists, columnists, experts; meetings where promises were made; meetings where the governments put the public money where the private mouths were, upturned, open, empty.

And after every meeting, after every agreement, the bourgeoisie found themselves right back where they started from: gripped, controlled, hounded by declining profits. Money, it turns out, is everything, or at least the image of everything. And for capital, image is everything.

Money, in its loss, represents the overproduction of capital; it represents, in its powerlessness, the overproduction of the means of production that eviscerates [1. verb trans.--disembowel. 2. verb trans.-- bring out the innermost secrets. 3. verb trans.--elicit the essence of., OED] the rate of profit, that obstructs capital's ability to maintain its own reproduction. It represents in its weakness the inability of private property to maintain the production for value. It represents the conflict at the heart of capital, between the means of production and the property relations that encapsulate them. Money represents all there is to the bourgeois order-- and all there is is weakness, decline, devaluation.


2. (What it was) Overproduction of capital never signifies anything but overproduction of the means of production... Marx, Capital Vol. 3

Picking through the rubble of its 2001 recession, the U.S. bourgeoisie found life after dotcom digital death in the five pointed star of reduced factory employment, war, dollar devaluation, increased oil prices, and reduced capital spending. If expanded reproduction is the lifeblood of capital, then the US bourgeoisie decided that it was time to drink the blood, to intensify accumulation through increased, and unreplaced, capital consumption.



Annual real investment in manufacturing fixed assets had peaked in 1998 at $198.3 billion, and ended 2000 at the $198.1 billion mark. By 2003 the amount had fallen to $147 billion. That same year manufacturing profits began a spectacular recovery. By 2004, manufacturing profits where 12% above their 2000 peak according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. On a year-over-year basis, profits in 2005 increased 50 percent. In 2006, they grew another 24.4 percent.

Net capital investment did not increase to the amounts of the prior decade. Increased capital consumption limited net capital spending to amounts half, and three-quarters of the net amount invested in 2000. In fact the amount spent annually has remained below the 2000 mark for every year following. However, replacement and expansion of fixed assets, even on a restricted basis is essential to capitalism. Reduced net investment is accompanied by increasing gross investment, and so capital reproduces itself, it expands, on a reduced, but increasingly costly, basis.


The rate at which profits accumulated exceeded the rate at which capital investments were made, but as the capital investments continued the rate of growth of the rate of return on that investment slowed. Slowing from a growth in rates from 15.2% in 2004 to 20.6% 2005, the rates in 2006 and 2007 were 23.1% and 22.5% respectively. The more it expanded, even/particularly on the reduced basis, the more investment required in equipment and materials, the more capital overproduced itself and reduced the rate of growth of the return on its expenditures.

For capital, rate, speed, velocity time is everything. A deceleration in, not just the rate of return, but the growth in that rate, means that more and more time is being consumed between the extraction of value and its realization as profit.

And with money the mirror, the lens, the image of capital, it is in the money markets, in the exchanges of paper, that the merest slow down in the ability of money to turn its tricks of disappearing and reappearing bigger and stronger, is magnified, leveraged, into paralysis, freeze, collapse.

3. (What it's not)

What it's not is a problem of "underconsumption." Consumption only exists as a "derivative" of capitalism's need to simultaneously aggrandize and expel wage-labor from the process of production. Consumption exists only as an index to capital's achieving expanded reproduction, sufficient profitability, and its success at exploiting wage-labor at an intensity sufficient to overcome the declining rate of return inherent in this reproduction, this profitability, this exploitation.

What it's not is a problem of "fictitious capital." Fraud, swindle, charlatanism are ever-present in the circuits and cycles of capital, and while these fine qualities are necessary for the conduct of capital's daily business, these fine qualities are not sufficient. Fraud, swindle, charlatanism do not create, nor can they substitute for, the social relation that determines both capital's ecstasy and its despair. Like every other bit of the circulation process, like every other market exchange, the dishonest exchanges are a zero-sum game. Nothing is created in exchanges real or fraudulent.

4. (What it will be).

Confronted with the overproduction which is, in fact, it's essence, capital can do no more and no less than to debase the values it has spawned, attempt to destroy the means of production, and demand an increase the exploitation of wage-labor. The difficulty capital encounters in actualizing this process is not the encounters with various other and competing capitals, but with the human component of its mode of production. Class struggle is the only obstacle to a world of increased misery.

S. Artesian

October 18, 2008

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Of Hats and Rabbits, 2

1. When measuring an age by the size of its heroes, it's important to keep in mind that heroes, like assets, like securities, have both a notational value and a mark-to-market value. In the discrepancy between those two, notational and market, values is everything we need to know about size, direction, and velocity, of the age and the heroes.

Measured by its heroes, and adjusted for the market vs. notational values, clearly this is an age of, not advanced capitalism, but advanced capitalist dwarfism.

So..... Alan Greenspan, once a genius, a colossus, a wizard, a fountainhead gets carried in the financiers' books of positions on that notational value. Meanwhile the mark-to-market value shrinks; not just shrinks, evaporates, withers, disappears and finally Greenspan is "uncovered" in all senses.

Marked-to-market he's back to being just another ugly face wobbling down the runway of riches-to-rags capitalism, flogging his faux erudition for the chance at another meal. "Will obscure, equivocate for food" says the blurb beneath his picture in the fashion/finance guide.

What else can we expect? What heroes can be produced by a system so venal, so petty, so miserable that it at its peak, that its peak, that its moments of greatest profit and power are measured not by the collective advance of the human species but in the reversal of those previous advances; that its moments of greatness are just that reversal? What can be expected where a "golden age in financial freedom" is accompanied, fed, sustained by another dark age in which all of science, art, humanity is politicized in the service of its own destruction?

2. So... in its plunge into the abyss of declining asset values, capitalism's financial oracles, heroes of digital and analog media, propose a rescue that consists, on paper, of a single solution-- "Don't Look Down"-- as if the acceleration of a falling body due to gravity, as if terminal velocity, depended on an orientation of the head.

Comedy, horror, unintended and intended, ripple through the despair of the traders, brokers, economists, bankers, like shivers in forensic chill of a morgue.

The Wall Street Journal advises that shotguns and canned goods are sound investments in times like these.

The Financial Times advises Lehman Bros. (before bankruptcy): "When seized by a panic attack, focus on breathing slowly and deeply."

It reports on Washington Mutual: "The destruction of shareholder wealth in the US financial sector is relentless. Washington Mutual, which parted company with chief executive Kerry Killinger [great name, bet he chose it himself --s.a.] on Monday, is joining Lehman on the rack."

It wonders out loud: "If propping up the banking system is not a socially useful role, what is?"

Finally! Finally the bourgeoisie, blubbering all the way home from the bank, grasp Marx's analysis of capitalist commodity production as private property but realizable only in a social role.

Socially useful role? Obviously, the market is judging the social usefulness of the banks, and deciding that such usefulness has been grossly overvalued. Far too much time has been expended on the capitalist reproduction of value.

And finally, none other than the shaved head knight in a white Dodge Charger (dual quads, Hurst four speed, 6 miles to the gallon), Secretary of the Treasury Paulson, mutters aloud, channeling Stevie Wonder, "Heaven help us all."

3. So...what distinguishes the present predicament of capitalism from previous predicaments? Why is this dark night different from all other dark nights in which all cats are black? In a word, nothing. In a word, everything. In a word, magnitude.

Global finanical instruments have been measured at 167 trillion dollars, almost 3 times world GDP. In 1980 world GDP and global financial instruments were approximately the same size.

Total global financial instruments were measured at 53 trillion in 1993.

Credit default swaps are at 62 trillion-- that is to say the "bets" on defaults have a notational value far greater than the market values of the securities at risk of default. Homeowners have negative equity when the amount due on their mortgages exceeds the value of their homes. It makes more "economic sense" to walk away from the home. Credit default issuers are in exactly the same position except they want to run, not walk.

All eyes and sighs turn to the "lender of last resort," that creator of windows, that builder of bridges, the Federal Reserve. And the Fed itself? After opening its windows, after accepting lower rated collateral, what about the doctor's own health?

The FRB, which one year ago, had 90% of its assets in US Treasury Securities has undergone, with the opening of the Primary Dealer Credit Facility and other mechanisms, an inflation in the notational value of assets with a decline in the quality of such assets-- to the point that now only 50% of the Fed's assets are in US Treasury instruments. And the market value of the other assets? Nobody knows.

However, the source for this distress, the predicament in capital is not in the overleveraging of the capitalist economy, the reproduction of expanding debt levels designed to parse, to chop, and ration available profit. These are manifestations, appearances of the real predicament, the real conflict beween expanded capitalist reproduction and profit; between private property and the accumulation of capital.




Next: Of Hats and Rabbits, 3. Roots and Prospects

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Before We Go Any Further

1. No bailouts; immediate cancellation of residential mortgages on family units

2. immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan; reductions in defense spending to be pooled into Social Security trust; universal single payer healthcare trust.

3. No export of capital; ban on US investors utilizing offshore shell companies; no US DFI by corporations, holding companies, trusts, banks,syndicates, etc. etc.

4. Seizure, without compensation, of all assets of financial institutions unable to meet market obligations, depositor demands.


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Of Hats and Rabbits, 1

1. Moose and Squirrel

"Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat."

"Again?"

Six months ago the U.S. Federal Reserve put the Bear Stearns rabbit into JP Morgan Chase's top hat by insuring the purchaser against possible loss on 97 percent of the Bear Stearns' book-- positions, obligations, outstanding trades-- in mortgage back securities.

At the same time, the Fed opened a brand new window, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, intending it to function in parallel to the Fed's discount window to its member banks. Overnight loans at the NY Fed's prime rate would be made available to the investment banks which were designated primary dealers in US Treasury securities. Collateral requirements were loosened to accept investment grade corporate securities, municipal securities, and mortgage and asset backed securities that could be priced by the dealer's clearing bank.

That last bit was the dicey part. After years of "marking to market," of steering their jolly pirate ship/party boat, the USS Leviathan, with an invisible hand across the green span of the world's oceans, the lusty free marketeers of America had precisely no market for these mortgage backed securities and thus no way of pricing the items they most wanted to unload at the port of New York Fed.

With no way to price the securities that represented both asset and debt, there was no way within or without the Fed to refinance the debt. There was no way to recirculate the values that once were. And without circulation, there's nothing. Finance is nothing. Refinance is everything.

The notational values existing only in the book entries of the investment banks could not be passed on. The buck had stopped all right. With that, the book was being closed. And burnt.

Meanwhile....meanwhile who didn't, who couldn't, experience a shiver of pleasure, of glee, of schadenfreude, viewing the pictures in the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, of the hundreds of thirty-something year old, bullet headed, over tailored, investment bankers stumbling out of their offices in Canary Wharf, in midtown, downtown, sans their company issued Blackberrys--your service has been discontinued-- carrying their personal histories of pillage in cardboard boxes that read Iron Mountain?

Now, just maybe, now it will be possible to eat in a restaurant in Manhattan on a Saturday night without hearing them bellow like moose in the rut or chatter like squirrels amped on steroids, about their deals, their positions, their bosses, their companies.

Yesterday's sharks just so much chum in today's waters.


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A Brief Word

Six months after the Fed guaranteed Bear Stearns' losses to JP Morgan Chase, six months into $500 billion in write-downs on the mountain of junk called "assets" with another trillion to go; after Fannie and Freddie got laid and the Treasury got scared; six months into overdue, seriously overdue, 'I'm not kidding you are really late' overdue, delinquency, and foreclosure; six months into a wasteland of cancelled IPOs, LBOs, credit lines, Ms&As, six months into the portfolio of photographs and streaming video showing all those young near and real MBA investment bankers, financial advisors, hedge fund floggers, structured investment vehicle dealers, specialty market makers, all dressed up with cardboard boxes in their arms with only one place to go --home, and that home overdue, seriously overdue, and I'm not kidding overdue-- after all that IT HAS ONLY BEEN SIX MONTHS.

And after six months of incantations, jawbones, collateral easing, calming statements, rescue and resuscitation, of here epinephrine, of there defibrillation, the Fed and the Treasury had to let a patient go. The Lehman Bros died of complications.

In truth, it's not medicine that the Fed practices, not even shamanism despite the hocus-pocus of interest rates. It's triage. The Fed and the Treasury reviewing their own finances, assessing the criticality of their own health and that of the life-blood of the financial markets, the short-term "repo" markets, decided that their own credit ratings, their own abilities to operate with and in the money markets outweighed Lehman Bros rescue.

In the long-run for capitalism, the short-term is all there is. Finance is nothing. Re-financing, and re-re-financing is everything.

Much more to come

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The Shipping News, 2

Ships On The Ocean


So I'd like to know
Where you got the notion
To...rock the boat
(Don't rock the boat, baby)
Tip the boat
(Don't tip the boat over)
--The Hues Corporation


1. In 1997 the currency and financial crises that swamped the export-driven NIEs of Asia and the Pacific soon revealed themselves to be just one face of that many faced coin of the capitalist realm, overproduction. The secret to money, after all, is contained within the secret of the commodity and not vice-versa.


The over-accumulation of industrial assets became, as it always does, the overproduction of commodities and declining profits. Failure to realize expanded value in the circulation of commodities necessarily reproduces itself in the devaluation of the means of production and the means of circulation. The secrets to accumulation and trade are in the secret of the commodity and not vice-versa.


By 1998, the shipping industry had absorbed, painfully, a 33% decline in asset values. Earnings per vessel declined. For the entire decade, the annual earnings per year average $4.2 million. Things were to get better, as they sometimes do. By 2000, the annual earnings had increased to $7 million.


Things were to get worse, as they always do, before they got better again, as they sometimes do. By 2004, earnings had recovered to $11 million per vessel per year, and 2008 estimates are for earnings of $13.7 million. Except estimates are often optimistic and early, and sometimes wrong.


2. 2oo6 was a very good year for the maritime trade; 2006 was a very good year for capitalism in general. In fact 2006 was the peak year for the recovery of capitalism, for its profitability, from the 2001/2002 contraction. The secret to maritime trade is in the secret of profitability and not vice-versa.


The UN's Review of Maritime Transport 2007, reporting on 2006 performance, noted that value of world merchandise trade had grown by 8%, twice the rate of growth of world GDP. Seaborne good tonnage increased to 7.4 billion tons with ton-miles increasing 5.5% as longer haul south-to-south trade increased.


The world maritime fleet increased 8.6%, exceeding the previous record for increase of 7.2% in 2005, Total fleet capacity measured 1.04 billion deadweight-tons (dwt). Oil tanker capacity increased 8.1%, dry bulk carrier increased 6.2%, and these 2 categories represent 72% of fleet tonnage. The highest growth in tonnage was recorded by the container ship segment which grew 15.5% to represent 12.3% of fleet tonnage.


The average vessel age declined to 12 years, with that of tankers at 10 years, container ships at 9.1 years.


"Productivity" measures, however, absorbed the impact of the record deliveries. Tons carries per deadweight ton of capacity declined to 7.3 and thousand ton-miles operated per dwt declined to 30.1. The surplus tonnage increase to 10 million dwt, with tanker surplus at 1.4% or 4.5 million dwt and dry bulk carriers at .6%, or 2 million dwt. Still, hardly anything to worry about. In 1990 surplus rates for the world maritime fleet measured at 9.7 percent.

The greatest growth in tonnage and ships was recorded in the sector that has been recording the greatest growth for more than 20 years, container shipping. Container shipping has grown from 7.4% of total dry cargoes in 1985 to 24% in 2006. Since 1988, container shipping capacity (measured in TEUs--twenty-foot equivalent units) has increased sevenfold. At the start of 2007, the container fleet capacity had increased increasing 16.2% over 2006 to 9.4 million TEUs. More than 1/3 of this fleet is less than 5 years old.

And, in 2006 for the first time since 2001, the increase in capacity exceeded the increase in the world's container trade which grew 11.2% to 1.13 billion TEUs.

3. A very good year was 2006. Shippers took delivery of almost 2400 new vessels, a record 71 million dwt, 20% above the 2005 mark.

Nothing inspires growth like growth; nothing inspires spending like spending. The bourgeoisie, see nothing in those floating fixed assets in good, or nearly good times, except an increased revenue stream; seeing nothing but clear sailing and a bigger wave ahead/behind; never seeing the deadweight in all those deadweight tons until the seas have dried up; never missing their water until their ships run high and dry, continued to fill the order books of shipmakers.

While deliveries slowed in 2007, orders for new shipping did not. In 2007 tonnage on order for container ships tripled from the 2006 level; tonnage on order for oil/refined product tankers nearly tripled; for dry bulk and general cargo carriers doubled. Since construction times from order to delivery are from 1 to 2.5 years, the merchant fleet will more than double between 2006 and 2010 as the generallow average age of the existing fleet means break-up rates (the process of tearing down obsolete shipping) will not impact overall capacity.

For the bourgeoisie to make so dramatic a statement of confidence in world-wide liquidity, and the accelerating growth rates for trade, it is of course more than fitting that such increased purchases were made right as growth in trade is decelerating and lines of credit are drying up. More than fitting, it is in fact the increased purchases, the increased expenditures on these floating fixed assets that are the means for circulating capital, that drives international capitalism from expansion to contraction, from expanded reproduction to declining rates of return.

No more and no less than the increased price of oil reapportions profits to, does more than channel the profits, more than canalize the revenue streams of all other industries, to the petroleum majors, but also measures the overproduction of the means of production, measures the inability of capital to realize a mass of profit quickly enough to offset a fall in the rate of return, the increased freight rates of the maritime shippers are more than a response to increased operating costs, increased fuel costs. Increased maritime rates measure a declining rate of return on investment brought about by the very "over-investment" in the industry's real assets.

In 2005, total world import values transported by the maritime fleet increased 13.4%, while the freight revenue from these shipment increased 31.2 percent. The average freight tariff for advanced countries amounts to 4.5% of the value of the goods in shipment. For developing countries, the ratio is 7.7% of the value. For the period 1990-2000, the tariff ratio had dropped 22% for the developing countries, only to begin moving upward again in 2004. For the advanced countries the tariff ratio has remained essentially unchanged.

The relative higher rates for developing countries are directly a factor of longer dwells (loading/unloading) at ports with lower throughput capacities. The inequity in development then refracts, and perpetuates, itself in a penalty, a microcosm of unequal exchange.

The price inflation of shipping rates cannot offset the declining rate of return for the industry. It will instead bring the over-investment, overproduction of fixed assets with longer and slower rates of return into painful relief, as there will be "too many" ships on the ocean, too many ships in the construction yards, too many ships on the order books, too many ships in the list of collateralized loans.

s.artesian

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Summer Reading

Way back when... Thirty-four years ago, A. Solzhenitsyn was allowed to leave the then Soviet Union and reap the usufructs of advanced capitalism. Around that same time, Solzhenitsyn's Letter to the Soviet Leaders appeared in print and those who actually read, rather than promote, his work learned just how right the Soviet leaders were to send this master of literary banality packing.

Way back when, when the predecessor of The Wolf Report, Nightwatch, appeared in print on actual paper, I wrote an appreciation of sorts of the man, and the circumstances that brought the man to his new home.

Way back when, Nightwatch prided itself on featuring regularly, in its every most irregularly scheduled publication, obituaries, marriages, births-- "transitions" that in their absurdity, venality, false propriety most clearly illuminated the darkness at the heart of modern capitalism. What a Difference a Day Makes, and made, way back when.

The Solzhenitsyn report was written in that vein, with that intent, but its length, which is to say, and singularly concentrated attack, required that it appear as a separate piece.

I never thought much more about Solzhenitsyn, not to mention my most unliterary criticism of the man, but my former collaborator on Nightwatch, noting the death and the outpouring of appreciations offered in tribute to the now stuffed literary lion suggested I reproduce it here, where it may be preserved, like Solzhenitsyn himself, and ignored, like Solzhenitsyn himself, eternally.

So...edited [in brackets] and abridged, here comes, there goes:

A Five and Ten Cent Baby in a Million Dollar Store, Fall 1974

While capitalism exports credits, grain, technology, and complete industrial plants to the USSR, the Stalinist bureaucracy returns the favor by exporting minerals, some natural gas, and some unnatural gas in the person of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, to the capitalist countries. Somebody's getting a raw deal along with the raw materials. It sure isn't Solzhenitsyn. He stands to make a cool million off his exile. It isn't the bourgeoisie. They will get their percentage of the gate. It isn't the Soviet bureaucracy. [Solzhenitsyn's exile goes right to their bottom line as a plus]. But Solzhenitsyn is a total liability for human emancipation. Once again, Stalinism has forced the working class to carry the burden and the debts of Stalinism's own deformity.

....A "dissident" in the USSR, Solzhenitsyn became a "champion of freedom," a "defender of artistic truth." Now that Solzhenitsyn is out, so is the truth. The champion of freedom is an organic reactionary....His struggle is nothing but the slavish praise for the historical poverty of Russia. The real crime of the Russian Revolution, according to Solzhenitsyn, was disturbing the sanctity of that poverty.

Hard on the heels of Solzhenitsyn's arrival in the West came the publication of his Letter to the Soviet Leaders in which he fuses his literary and political purposes into one-- the slavation [intentional reversal of letters] of Russia from the "horrors" of modernism and for the spiritual regeneration through a return to the past. Holy Russia is Solzhenitsyn's cause, but how little he knows of earthly Russia and how much less he understands. Of the Russian Revolution, its advance and decline, of this single most important event in all of modern history, he knows nothing and detests everything. In this, Solzhenitsyn is a perfect example of petty Russian cretinism. Solzhenitsyn claims Marxism broke the tranquility and strength of Holy Russia, [catapulting] it into the clutches of a profane world. ... nothing so evil could have grown up in the natural soil of Holy Russia, the revolution was imported from the West.

Solzhenitsyn employs Spiro Agnew's criteria of social development, Malthus' principles of political economy, and Teilhard de Chardin's philosophy as he argues that Russia is doomed to destruction of the bureaucracy maintains its ideology of "economic growth" and "international revolution." A moron always stands on the shoulders of other morons but that does not mean he will be able to see past his own noses, especially when the eyes are crossed and the brain is addled.

The "ideology" of Marxism can only bring calamity after calamity for Holy Russia argues our Calamity Jane. The calamity will be war with China... and then Russia, like the West will collapse in the calamity of economic "over-development." Solzhenitsyn's solution to these calamities is "zero-economic growth." Modern technology, large scale industry and agriculture, world trade, cities, and even babies must be renounced. The underdeveloped countries, who don't have all that much to renounce, must employ "small-scale technology, simple machinery, and increased manual labor to insure their purity. Well, it just so happens that much of the underdeveloped areas have existed on just that diet and those rations for 200 years and see how good life is there? ...1974 is making the idea of zero economic growth a reality. In the first half of 1974, the US GNP actually declined 4.1% and the rest of the world isn't far behind. So let's hear it now. Is everybody happy? Is the world any "cleaner," any less strapped for wealth?....If Solzhenitsyn really hates economic expansion, he should love the Stalinists whose desperate need for technology already obsolete in the West reveals just how backward they are.

It is economic growth that Solzhenitsyn views as the greatest calamity of all, for it disrupts everything dear to his backward little heart. How he longs for the good old times of the good old time villages with their good old time Orthodox churches, their good old time Black Hundreds, their good old time smallpox and typhus, their good old time wife-beatings and illiteracy. And all this nostalgia from a man born in 1918. What a true novelist's memory to remember the joys never experienced. How poetic he waxes as he dreams of the resurrection of the small towns made for "people, horses, dogs" (not necessarily in that order). Solzhenitsyn's five year plan calls for the construction of these charming little outhouses all Russia with transportation provided only by horses and battery-powered electric motors......

Intellectual poverty always extols the virtues of physical poverty. The real positive outcome of Solzhenitsyn's un-development of the USSR will be the Christian salvation of the Russian people who suffering will once again produce that chorus of moans and groans that are music to the ears of every priest. Solzhenitsyn performs a service here in articulating religion's inherent need for absolute immiseration of human life. Poverty may be murder on the body, but it's gangbusters for the spirit.

Marxism opposes and uproots poverty and religion, and both at once. For this reason, Solzhenitsyn finds Marxism more intolerable than Stalin's labor camps where both poverty and religion flourished. Solzhenitsyn never read Marx, but that's no drawback. Stalin never read Marx, Mao Tsetung never read Marx, most Marxists haven't read Marx....Solzhenitsyn calls Marxism a "primitive, superficial economic theory, it declared that only the worker creates value and failed to take into account the contribution of organizers, engineers, transportation, or marketing systems." Like capitalism, Marx never ignored the role of engineers or advertising agents, but like capitalism, Marx knew that only the proletariat created surplus value. In 1972, US Steel's executives were bemoaning the fact that only one-third of their employees was involved in actual production. The company's top heaviness, they complained, devoured profits before they were realized.

...Economic development drags in its wake the possibility of concrete human freedom. Solzhenitsyn despises that freedom above everything else. He craves "authoritarianism with love." Solzhenitsyn wants a Czar, nothing more and there is nothing less. It is no accident that Solzhenitsyn's books as well as this letter reek with a secret admiration for Stalin, who after all, provided his own brand of "authoritarianism with love." How Solzhenitsyn must have embraced and even fondled his imprisonment in the labor camps. Those were the days that come closest to the good old days he desires for the future. "Authoritarianism with love," cries Solzhenitsyn. "Long live the chains!" cried the Spanish guerrillas... when they threw Napoleon's troops out of Spain and restored the conditions of their own slavery. "Long live the chains!" echoes Solzhenitsyn

So what could the Soviet bureaucracy do with dear Aleksandr? Trial and imprisonment. But Solzhenitsyn obviously was mentally incompetent and unfit to stand trial. A mental ward? But Solzhenitsyn was already insane and an idiot to boot. Shoot him? but to do that the Stalinists would have had to reverse fifty years of policy and actually fire a shot in defense of the proletarian revolution. Solzhenitsyn had to be exported, and the bourgeoisie eagerly accepted him, COD.


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