A FIFST RESPONSE

The response to my invitation was extremely gratifying. Let me begin with the easiest responses. John Williams writes “I am interested in what you have to say about G.A. Cohen and analytic Marxism more generally.” As it happens, 32 years ago I published a lengthy critique of a book by Jan Elster in which in some considerable detail I came to terms with “analytical Marxism.” If you follow the link at the top of the page (which is, I am afraid, not clickable but has to be copied and pasted – my apologies), you will find a very large repository of my writings, among which is something that is simply identified there as the “Elster paper.”  Elsewhere – it will take me a while to find it – I have published a detailed critique of one argument by G. A. Cohen. I hope that will satisfy your curiosity.

 

A number of you asked for my opinions about things I either have not read or do not have opinions about and I am afraid I cannot help you there. For example, although I studied Spinoza 70 years ago with a great scholar, Harry Austryn Wolfson, I have never written about his works and really have nothing to say about them. Rather more surprising, perhaps, is the fact that I have spent almost no time reading or thinking about Wittgenstein, a fact that is very much to my discredit, I should think. Sorry about that.

 

The same thing is true about Dick Rorty.  I knew him back in the day and found him quite unimpressive. I was genuinely surprised when he became a really big deal. I do not think I have actually ever read anything by him so once again chalk that up to my inadequacy, not his.

 

My favorite comment was by Achim Kriechel.  Back when I was able to take long walks, one of my favorite early-morning routes in Paris took me along Boulevard Saint Germain past Café Flore and Deux Magots, opposite Brasserie Lipp.  It was always early in the morning when I walked there and the waiters were just setting the tables and chairs out. I do not think I ever stopped for coffee but that little spot is burned into my memory.

 

Enough for the moment. Tomorrow I will start to address some of the serious questions which I have something resembling answers.

YET ANOHER DEVASTATING LOSS

I thank all of you who responded to my last post and I shall try to answer some of the requests and questions soon. However, in the middle of the night when I got up (as I do every night) I got the terrible news that my dear friend Milton Cantor had passed away last Saturday, and that is what fills my mind. Milton was 96 years old and as I think I mentioned on this blog, the last time I spoke to him his principal concern was that he could not get into the Amherst College library to check footnotes!

I love Milton very dearly. I have long thought of him as my best friend even though we have seen each other rarely since I retired and moved away from Western Massachusetts. As I have said here before, Milton had a rare gift for friendship and for many years, reaching back half a century, he took me into his heart and surrounded me with love.

Milton was a good man, an old-fashioned lefty and a fine scholar. 

God, there have been so many terrible losses lately.

LET'S TRY SOMETHING NEW

As faithful readers of this blog know, I have struggled for some time with the unusual character of the format. Over the past several years, this blog has drawn to it a small circle of consistent commentators whose exchanges, sometimes extending to 50 or 60 or more comments in a thread, are at best only tangentially related to what I have originally posted.

 

I enjoy teaching, which is to say explaining complex ideas, and my recent experience visiting first a class in Canada and then an adult education gathering in Oregon, persuades me that I still have some things to say. So I am going to try something new on this blog. Instead of posting a comment and waiting, more often than not with disappointment, to a response from the usual suspects, I have decided to invite readers – most especially those who do not usually comment – to suggest subjects they would be interested in having me write about. If I get requests, I will sift through them, looking for those about which I have something useful to say, and will then post my replies.

 

This will not, of course, stop the dozen or so usual commentators from entering into arguments with one another about subjects unrelated to my posts, but it will give me a sense that I am speaking through this blog to people who are interested in what I might have to say about the topics suggested.

 

Over the course of my long life, I have written about a more than usually broad array of subjects, venturing into more than half a dozen academic specialties – philosophy, history, politics, economics, sociology, literature, psychology, Afro-American studies, among others – and I hope that if I do receive some questions they will span an equally broad spectrum of subjects.

 

So the floor is yours. What would someone like to hear me talk about?

AN IDLE THOUGHT

 Some of you may recall the very large Chinese economic initiative launched some years ago by Xi called One Belt One Road.  The project, due to be completed in 2049 for the centenary of the People's Republic of China, is a vast complex of land and sea routes designed to link the Chinese economy to the economies of the nations of the entire Eurasian landmass. Several of the important components of the land branch of this project run through Russia. It would seriously hinder the project for Russia to be ostracized from the world economy. That is probably something worth keeping in mind as we watch from afar how China responds to the Ukraine disaster.

CATCHING UP

What with taking my wife to occupational therapy and physical therapy sessions, dealing with my own Parkinson’s disease, navigating the complexities of the pandemic, and appearing in Canada or Oregon as a guest lecturer, I am afraid I have let the comments section slide by me even though there have been several comments to which I wanted to respond. So what I will do here is just go through the comments for the last week or more and try to pick up, one after the other, those that call for some response.

 

Here we go in no particular order:

 

Someone masquerading behind the elegant nom de blog “Marcel Proust” asks: “Is this a situation in which it is better to live on one's knees than to die on one's feet (h/t La Pasionara) because of the risk of nuclear annihilation?”  This is an extremely complicated and difficult matter and I am limited severely by my lack of useful inside information. Are there back channel contacts between senior US and Russian military commanders that could conceivably lead to Putin being deposed in a palace coup?  Does the US have intelligence accurate enough to tell when the Russians are preparing to launch a nuclear weapon and could they intercepted and shoot it down? And so forth. I just do not know. By the way, chemical weapons, terrible as they are, are not in any sense “weapons of mass destruction” and their use poses problems of a totally different sort from the use of nuclear weapons.

 

Tony Couture:  thank you for the long and informative comment about Moodles.  This is something with which I am completely unfamiliar and it sounds extraordinarily time-consuming for you. I will have to look into it.

 

Barney, great to hear from you. By the way, folks, because my big sister Barbara was called “Bobs” before I was even born, I was always “Rob” in the family. Even if he did not give his whole name, that is the giveaway that Barney is my cousin.

 

John Rapko, I am very touched by your offer to send me a copy of Geuss’s book when it comes out.  Ray was a student at Columbia when I was teaching there in the later 60s but I do not think he ever took a course with me. Those who knew him had only the highest opinion of him, I recall.

TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS, ONCE AGAIN

According to what seem to be reliable reports, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is stalled. The Russians are said to have suffered the deaths of 10,000 or more troops and two to three times that many wounded. The Russian losses of tanks and other armored vehicles are apparently huge and continuing. In the past few days, there have been more and more discussions in the media about the possibility of Russia resorting to the use of what are referred to as “tactical nuclear weapons.” I do not get the impression that the people talking about this on television have the slightest notion of what a “tactical nuclear weapon” would be or what conceivable use it would be in the Ukraine war.

 

I have talked about this on this blog quite recently and I am going to repeat now things I said then. If you find this tiresome, go somewhere else and amuse yourself on another blog. This is far and away the most important thing now happening in the world and I am going to talk about it again and again and again.

 

The distinction between strategy and tactics has for centuries been a part of military discourse. The term “tactics” refers to maneuvers or decisions or actions taken on a particular battlefield in the context of a particular battle. How to combine tanks with foot soldiers to greatest effect is a question of tactics. Whether to combine all of one’s forces or spread them across the field of battle or perhaps divide them into several wings to surround the enemy forces is a matter of tactics. So are the decisions about how most effectively to combine airpower with ground maneuvers. The Russian decision to divide into several columns the forces advancing from the north on Kyiv is a matter of tactics.

 

The weapons referred to as “tactical nuclear weapons” are fission bombs each of which is rated as the equivalent of perhaps 3000 to 5000 tons of TNT or some similar explosive. This is referred to in shorthand as a 3 KT or 5 KT tactical nuke, a catchy form of speech that sounds hep and knowledgeable, what was called when I was young “inside dopester.”

 

Let us think about this for a moment. If Russia were to send a flight of 50 heavy bombers to attack the capital city of Ukraine and if each of these bombers were to carry four so-called “blockbuster” bombs, each containing the equivalent of 1000 pounds of TNT, and if all 50 of these bombers were to drop their bombs on the capital city, causing enormous amounts of destruction and death, this would be an attack using a total of 100 tons of high explosive. If Russia were to send such a flight of bombers every day for a month, it would at the end of that month have delivered to Kyiv an explosive power equivalent to one so-called tactical nuclear weapon rated at 3 KT.  In one month, Russia would have destroyed Kyiv with conventional weapons. Using a single tactical nuclear weapon, Russia would destroy Kyiv in roughly 3 seconds.  To ensure the complete destruction of Kyiv, Russia might have to double down and use two or three tactical nuclear weapons.  Not by any stretch of language can this be called a “tactical decision.”

 

The phrase “tactical nuclear weapon” is a contradiction, a deception, a device employed by people who seek some way of justifying the use of weapons, which they possess, for which no justified use can be found.

 

Russia is said to have 4000 nuclear weapons. As I have said before and will say again and again, if a nation has nuclear weapons and the people who control those weapons cannot be deterred by rational self-interest, there is nothing anybody can do to stop them from using those weapons.

 

Vladimir Putin cannot use nuclear weapons. It is not he who sits in the bunker or flies the plane or enters the codes into the device that launches the weapon. He gives orders. If he were to order the use of nuclear weapons, “tactical” or otherwise, would the generals and the colonels and the majors and lieutenants obey his orders? I have no idea. If he were to order the use of nuclear weapons and if the officers who actually control those weapons were to obey his orders, would the weapons actually fly or would they splutter and fizzle? I have no idea and I do not know whether American military commanders know either.

 

Tomorrow, I will try to say something speculative about what Biden could do short of launching a nuclear war to try to stop Putin.

ASK AND IT SHALL BE GIVEN

Some of you will recall that a while back I announced that I was available for zoom visits in classrooms wherever I was wanted.  Last Thursday, I spent a delightful hour and a half with some students at Laurentian University in Canada. I have just finished two hours with a marvelous group of people my own age in Eugene, Oregon as part of an OLLI course taught at the University there by retired Bates College Prof. David Kolb. In several weeks I will be appearing at Georgia State University in Atlanta to talk about Charles Mills’s book The Racial Contract.

 

This is fun!