----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, November 11, 2005 5:59
PM
Subject: Re: [OPE-L] Fw: W J Blake
clarification requested
----- Original Message -----
From: Paul Bullock
To: rakeshb@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 6:04
PM
Subject: W J Blake clarification
requested
Dear
Rakesh,
In late 2003 you
kindly sent me this attached note, saying Blake was a journalist. I
was a bit confused reading this since this is not what it said/says in
his books introduction. Are we talking at cross purposes. I referred to
William J Blake who in 1939 published the 'Elements..' used in the email
title. But he was a stock exchange 'worker'(!) and banker, not as you say in
the email a journalist! I don't understand how he could have lived in
poverty later. Is there some error on your part or are we
talking about different Blakes??
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
You say you have 2
MSS from a 'Blake'... is it not possible to publish these
?
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.
What strikes me is
that some of the best material is literally unavailable to english readers..
eg probably the MSS you refer to, especially if one is on
Imperialism...!!!!
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 From William J. Blake in an unpublished mss Imperialism from 1948 (I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.
and Grossmans
full book and several of his articles. Would it not be a great service to do
something on Blake as an intro to publishing his MSS? ( like the service
Rick is trying to render to Grossman?)
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.
I look forward to
your clarification... .
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.
Best
regards
Paul
Bullock.