OPE-L message, Re: [OPE-L] Fw: W J Blake clarification requested

same Blake and Blech. He emigrated from the US after the War and lived in poverty in England. As Jerry noted, he was a journalist in the 1920s

I have a sinking feeling that somehow these two MSS as well as Shoul's Radcliffe dissertation have been lost in my move; they have not yet surfaced. By the way, thanks again to Jerry for having told me about Shoul's dissertation.

I also have this suspicion that Raya Duyanevskaya (a pseudonym I have been told) was Shoul's nom de guerre. But I have no way of proving it.

It's not a great book (as Elements of Marxian Economic Theory...An American Looks...); quite rambling, not theoretically tight and not innovative. But massively learned.

And... he is often quite eloquent. From William J. Blake in an unpublished mss Imperialism from 1948 (I have quoted this passage at least three times before).

One cannot abstract from the history of capitalism its constant wars,
either at home or in the colonies, its armaments, its large military
establishments, its struggles for plunders, its terrible human and
material costs, and then assert that such things, enormous as they
are, are excrescencies. The idea of abstraction is dear to these
economists, but it is not an act of legitimate abstraction. They

choose to assume that an ideal system of production and exchange goes on: that this system operates without political consequences, that it can thus be viewed as having a normal existence independent of its action in most countries, in a large part of the course of economic history. Now, abstraction is legitimate as a weapon of exploration. One can go beneath the great indicative appearance of capitalism and
seek to isolate its law of wages, prices, interest, rent, profit,
etc. But from that to refusing to consider the costs of its actual
working out, when making a specific analysis, there is no
relationship at all. The persistent tendencies of any system
culminate in its political manifestations, and wars and destruction
are no more to be reckoned out of the costs of capitalism than its
payments for machinery. The system of supply and demand does not
achieve economic harmony such that it avoids crises and wars. These
inflect its course. It is a masquerade of inflation, bankruptcy,
boom and bust, fraud, unemployment, race hatred, colonial oppression,
war, devastation, reconstruction. This Satanic medley is what it is:
there is no pure system operating outside of all these
consequences and which would prevail, a Platonic ideal, were it not
disturbed by these recurrent miseries and shame, apparently arising

out of another world?"

If I reread the mss I may change my mind about its importance. Especially valuable may be the critique of theories of possibility of international cooperation.

I have forgotten so much I once knew about his life. I communicated to Rick Kuhn that one of Stead's short stories is actually about the many lives of Henryk Grossmann, a good friend of William J. Blake's. And to truly write about Blake one would have to have read his novels.

Steve Palmer has put some of Grossmann's work up on the web; I just have to find Blake's and Shoul's mss and see whether he wants to put them up to.