[W]hile Eastern Europe was acquired by the Soviets as a buffer zone, in the long term it proved to be a gate. lt did not shield the USSR from Western influences; it ushered them into the tent.

In matters of economic and social reform, the satellites led, and the Soviet Union followed—albeit usually with a delay, and only after an intervening period of repression and retrenchment. Hungary, following 1956, became an example of a socialist economy that could deliver a relatively high standard of living. Czechoslovakia, during the brief flowering of the Prague Spring, showed that socialist leadership could conceivably coexist with a free press and a multiparty system. Polish Solidarity, although anti-Communist, paradoxically showed what a real worker-led social movement looked like.

—Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye Eastern Europe, (Great Britain: Oneworld Publications Ltd, 2023), 287-288.

I was rather surprised to see this on my X feed yesterday, and can only imagine it is a result of this:

Galloway and several of the people he regularly retweets, including two people who identify as Irish journalists, seem to have a pronounced anti-German mindset which has them seeing the 2025 world in terms of Britain fighting The Nazis™. This approach is also, quite clearly, beyond question.

Lenin in Pskov is relaxed. He stands at ease, right hand on his hip, his gaze attentive, with a slight smile on his lips. He looks out over Pskov and likes what he sees. He’s not beckoning – there’s no need to beckon, comrade, if you are in Pskov you will like what you see as well.

Lenin in Tver seems rather stern, even grim-faced. He appears to be striding forward, and is definitely not beckoning. He’s got something in his right hand that he seems to be swinging down. It’s a determined, rather than welcoming stance.

Branko Milanović:

Those who attack majorities that vote wrongly seem to speak, when it comes to international organizations, in tongues that come from an entirely different era. They call for international solidarity, inter-country cooperation etc. at the time when the world is being divided into political, economic and military blocs. It is a fantasy that under the current conditions which are likely to prevail for at least several decades there will be anything but the very minimal ability to do things internationally whether it be fighting climate change, epidemics, or coordinating monetary policies, rescheduling of debts, trade rules. All of it basically has to go out of the agenda and would be dealt with either bilaterally or from position of force by whoever is in that position. So the presumption that there is some general interest shared by all citizens of the world is entirely inapplicable in today’s times. When one hears some such speakers, one feels that they have been stuck in the 1990s (when such illusions could at least have been entertained) and to not have observed that the world has since changed.

Lenin House, Kazan. Lenin lived here with his family in 1888 after returning from exile for participating in student anti-government activity.

In an Irish pub in Kazan a song by the Cranberries played and I was transported back to San Francisco years ago, where I regularly played the Cranberries for a dear friend from Ohio. I repeatedly have this experience of listening to western music in Russia while knowing that American friends who have traveled little outside the lower 48 fear the brutish Russian Other bent on conquest of refined and wonderful western Europe.

Wolfgang Streeck:

First, an economy is capitalist if its stability – its current reproduction – depends on the successful open-ended accumulation of privately-owned capital for investment in continued open-ended private capital accumulation. Second, a society is capitalist to the extent that its economy is – predominantly – capitalist; if it is, its stability as a society depends on the stability of its – capitalist – economy. Third, from this it follows that in a capitalist society the well-being of private capital – in other words, its continued open-ended accumulation – is a condition of the well-being of that society, and not vice versa. Or, put otherwise, the well-being of a society that has turned its economy over to capitalism is contingent on the well-being of its capitalist economy – on that economy yielding enough profit to make capital owners continue investing in it. Or, moving from a functionalist to a structuralist language, the well-being of the capital-owning class in a capitalist political economy is a – necessary but not necessarily sufficient – condition of the well-being of the capital- operating, or working, class, again not vice versa.

Ω Ω Ω

The upshot is that a capitalist economy, indeed political economy, is a battlefield rather than a court of justice or, for that matter, a self-governing and self-optimizing machine requiring, if at all, occasional expert programming. There is in real life no ideal point dividing between capital and labor the proceeds of a capitalist economy …

This seems on the one hand such a simple insight, but in the couple days since I read it it’s come up in my mind again and again that throughout my life in the US everyone around me very clearly lives with this assumption backwards. People complain about corporate profits at the expense of social well-being with at least the tone of, and often the literal wording „don’t they understand!“, supposing corporate officers must not realize the damage they do, that somehow people „should“ take precedence over profits. Such naïveté is clearly and consistently deadly.