A Grand Book From The Saker

One reason that Reagan wanted to renew US economic performance by finding a solution to stagflation was to be able to put pressure on the Kremlin with the threat of a renewed arms race. Reagan did not believe that the Soviet economy could stand up to the threat and, therefore, Gorbachev would come to the negotiating table and agree to the end of the cold war. The CIA told Reagan that as the Kremlin controlled the economy, the Kremlin could allocate more resources to an arms race than an American president could, and that if Reagan renewed the arms race the US would lose.

Reagan did not believe this, and he formed a secret committee to which he appointed me to assess the CIA's claim. The committee found that the claim was based in the CIA's self-interest in continuing the Cold War.

The neocons sold themselves to naive conservatives as anti-communists. It pleased American conservatives to have left-wing support originating in Trotskyism against American liberals who ridiculed conservatives for their anti-communism. This is how the neoconservatives took over gullible conservative foundations and media.

However, Reagan was not a neocon. If he was, I never would have been appointed to the Treasury or to the secret committee with subpoena power over the CIA. When the neoconservatives, who had wormed their way into the Reagan administraion as anti-communists, acted independently of presidential authority and broke the law, the Reagan administration indicted, prosecuted, and convicted them.

On the scale of present day scandals, Iran-Contra hardly qualifies, but when the Iran-Contra affair came to light, Attorney General Ed Meese went on national TV and reported it. The White House followed up and launched investigations. The investigations were real and produced accountability:

Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams was convicted, National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane was convicted, Chief of CIA Central American Task Force Alan Fiers was convicted, Clair George, Chief of the CIA's Division of Covert Operations was convicted. Richard Secord was convicted. National Security Advisor John Poindexter was convicted. Oliver North was convicted. North's conviction was later overturned, and President George H.W. Bush pardoned others. But the Reagan Administration held its operatives accountable to law. No American President since Reagan has held the government accountable.

Clair George was convicted of lying to congressional committees. Richard Secord was convicted of lying to Congress. John Poindexter was convicted of lying to Congress. Alan Fiers was convicted of withholding information from Congress. Compare these convictions then with James R. Clapper now. President Obama appointed Clapper Director of National Intelligence on June 5, 2010, declaring that Clapper "possesses a quality that I value in all my advisers: a willingness to tell leaders what we need to know even if it's not what we want to hear." With this endorsement, Clapper proceeded to lie to Congress under oath, a felony. Clapper was not indicted and prosecuted. He was not even fired or forced to resign. For executive branch officials, perjury is now a dead letter law, thanks to the corrupt Obama regime and to a subservient Congress.

Reagan, the nemesis of the neocons is gone, and no Reaganite is allowed near any power position in Washington. In fact, there are only two of us left -- myself and Pat Buchanan. The neocons were resurrected by the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes. The neocons control US foreign policy and what was once conservative foundations and publications. The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, for example, is a neocon propaganda sheet as is National Review.

As for Stalin, the Saker sees him as the thug element opposed to the intellectual element -- the Trotskyists -- among the Bolsheviks. However, as my scholarly work shows, Stalin was a more realistic communist than Trotsky. Trotsky wanted world revolution before communism was working in Russia. To Stalin, this seemed the best possible way to lose control of the revolution. How could there be world revolution when not even Lenin had been able to get communism to work in Russia?

Stalin declared "socialism in one country" and planned anew the process of liquiditating the market and replacing "commodity production" with production for direct use. To do this successfully, Stalin thought it was first necessary to build up Soviet industry so that there would be manufactured goods to exchange for the products of the collective farms. I documented this story in my book, Alienation and the Soviet Economy (1971), especially in the Introduction to the new edition (1990), and in Survey A Journal Of East & West Studies, Autumn 1973 (Vol. 19, No. 4).

Stalin is regarded as a thug because he purged that part of the party, which by happenstance happened to be largely Jewish, because he thought they would cause communism to overreach and fail when it had not yet established its success in Russia.

Even to this day scholars do not understand that Lenin and Stalin were committed to abolishing markets as a way of allocating resources. Both, following Marx, believed that economic justice required that an economy be organized like a self-sufficient family farm in which every participant had an equal stake in the output. The Bolsheviks did not realize the organizational challenge that this presented. Indeed, as I concluded in Alienation and the Soviet Economy, their program was an inordinate aspiration contradicted by a refractory reality.

Anyone who cares to understand Soviet experience needs to read my books, Alienation and the Soviet Economy, and Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis. These are peer-reviewed academic publications. They might also read my articles in scholarly journals, such as my article on "War Communism" in the June 1970 issue of Slavic Review, "A Note on Marxian Alienation," Oxford Economic Papers, November 1970, "Alienation and Central Planning in Marx," Slavic Review, September 1968, and the article in Survey cited above.

In addition to the Saker's interesting analyses, he is rewarding as a person unafraid to speak his mind and as a person from whom one can learn new ways of thinking even when in disagreement with his analysis. These are gifts that few writers convey to readers. For my part, I wish the Saker was my next door neighbor. I would have someone very interesting with whom to discuss the state of the world.