> Mark Jones has challenged me again on the Tobin tax, this time on Louis
> Proyect's list. I am therefore copying this post there.
Gimme a break. If I challenged you on the Tobin Tax you either wouldn't even realise your head was off until it fell to the ground, or if you did you'd shut up for a week and then post on something different and within your level of competence like the gendering of underskirts in Louisa Alcott's Little Women. You promiscuous slut, why you go whoring around hell knows what other lists with your loony ideas about Lenin but sit like a gopher in a hole with your mouth zipped up on L-I, I don't know. In any case I am not going to debate Tobin with you. I am not going to debate Lenin with you. If you do drag your theoretical carrion round to L-I, I shall kick you unceremoniously off. Stick that bit of DoP up your Khyber Pass.
I have spent much of the weekend reading assholes like Ian Macdonald on the subject of Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich. He reminds me of you. This is odd because Macdonald is so virulently antisoviet that when you log onto his website a stream virtual halitosis pours off the screen like ammonia and you have to stand back, whereas you, Burford, like to pose as some kind of closet pal of the Soviets. But not so odd, because you're a damn fraud.
Macdonald is so antisoviet he makes Joe Mccarthy look like a red. He is neither sovietologist, nor political historian nor musicologist nor discographer. But he has been a British tabloid journo. This obviously qualifies him as a huge expert on Soviet history, political theory, and music. Macdobnald has made it the task of his life to prove that Shostakovich was actually an anticommunist whose lifelong secret mission was to destroy the USSR by means of composing music which was subversive of communism (but not subersive enough for stupid bureaucrats or Stalin himself to notice).
None of this might matter were it not for the ballooning popularity of Shostakovich, which has made his communist provenance hard to swallow to the many groupies now on the Shostakovich bandwagon. I have discovered that the Net is awash with Shostakovich websites, that in Japan he is bigger than Beethoven and there is even a Japanese orchestra specialising in Shostakovich. Why Shostakovich has suddenly become so fin-de-siecle fashionable in the West is an interesting question; whatever the reason, he speaks to the terminal pomo angst of the intelligentsia. This is what makes it very necessary to prove beyond all doubt that Dmitry was not actually a communist and indeed passionately hated communism. Apocryphal memoirs like the egregious Dmitry Volkov's 'Testimony' have tried to prove as much, and the corrosive Macdonald, as I say, has devoted his life to the minute footnoting of every breath, utterance or passing word of Shostakovich which supports this idea.
The fact that Shostakovich could easily have become a dissident and gone to live in the West, but didn't, the fact that he joined the CPSU as late as 1960 and died a communist; the fact that all his utterances on the subject prove only a deep and abiding faith in the great cause of October, does not embarrass these vultures one whit. Just as Burford has colonised Lenin (counterposing Lenin to the 'hard left' - Wow!) so the Shostakovich revisionists have colonised this century's perhaps greatest composer. IMHO Burford, Macdonald and others are due for a little colonic irrigation. I'm here to tell you that Lenin was a revolutionary, and Shostakovich was a communist. That the greatest music of this century, like the greatest literature, film and poetry, came in the vast cultural outpouring which the Soviet Union bequeathed humankind (cf. the cultural outpourings from modern 'free' Russia); and that it is imposible to understand politics without being a leninist or music without being a communist, and that you, Chris Burford, can kiss my ass. You belong in the same bowge of hell as Bradford deLong, only lower down because he at least is an open apologist of capital and not a goddamn insufferable hypocrite and an *intrigan* as the Rusian has it, like you are.
Yours very truly
Mark Jones