SSG: Spy/Spec-Ops Group discussion

I've had a change-of-heart about John leCarre'.

Fantastic novelist; yes. Student of human psychology, yes. Economist, no. Ideologically and politically, he is a simplist.

Splitting LeCarre the novelist from LeCarre, the political thinker, should not be wrenching. Yes, LeCarre was himself a low-level 'spy'. But for the purpose of his fiction, he gives us merely 'good guys vs bad guys'. That is not realistic.

There have been other prose stylists in the English language before JLC, which we admire today without embracing their viewpoint. So must we do, with LeCarre. We must abandon him to move forward.

His novels never paint an accurate picture of socialism or economics.

Since, 'The Spy Who Came in From the Cold' we learn that Bolsheviks are heartless, cold, and inhuman. That may very well be. His delineation of their behavior, certainly makes them into monsters.

In a sense, they are monsters. Even without his prose: what nation slaughters twenty million of its own people? Scholsynystin can tell you. Dostoevsky can tell you. We don't need LeCarre to draw exaggerated, wild-eyed bogeymen for us.

In that same novel however, LeCarre strips Marxism of every last shred of credibility. He is superb at doing so. Caustic and ironic to the Nth degree. But he does this, for the purpose of dramatic writing.

But it is not so simple, in reality. In reality, Marxism continues to this day, to haunt every turn and twist of capitalism.

Marx was a hundred times the thinker LeCarre was. Marx delivered reality, not psychology. Marx delivered facts.

LeCarre is still my favorite novelist of the 20th C.

But I feel cheated by him, at the same time. I feel robbed. Manipulated. I feel now, that he took advantage of the dramatic intrigue concomitant to his low trade, to pollute clear grasp of world order.

We all want to loathe 'the other guys' in those backward 'other countries'. 'Bolshies' are the some of the greatest villains ever afforded any author.

And LeCarre had a field day. He romped, he made the most of it.

But LeCarre didn't --perhaps couldn't--present a more fair, square choice for readers to decide upon--in terms of economics. He didn't even touch on political reality. He pandered. He sensationalized.

His characters ever scoff at socialism, sneer at it ...and they enlist us to scoff at it. It's just something 'those dirty backward foreigners dreamed up'.

But Marxist thought will not go away because of novels. It's way bigger than that.

Marx was not a paramecium, not an amoeba. We like to apprehend him as such.

Yes ..when he fell on hard times ...he walked around covered with bedsores, fleas, and debt.

But he was stone-cold formidable as an economist; to such an extent that modern economists even today must still grapple with his ideas.

His ideas don't go away. LeCarre's heroes and villains --sad but true --do go away. They are fictions, pawns.

My new understanding is this: forget about agents lurking in alleys and boot-knives and microfilm and microdots and blackmail and betrayal. It's all so childish.

Economic theory is the real arena about which John LeCarre could not write about. He does us a disservice. In economics, there are no 'good guys vs bad guys'.

It's all just one world where we are just one species trying to meet all our needs. Marx address this; LeCarre does not.

Articles:

https://classandclassstruggle.weebly....


https://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2012/0...


https://socialistworker.org/2009/04/1...

Cyclical, economic crashes in the West:


Great Britain

South Seas Bubble of 1720
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_S...

Post-Napoleonic Depression
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Na...

Panic of 1825
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_o...

Panic of 1847
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_o...

Panic of 1866
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_o...

Great Agricultural Depression 1873-1896
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_D...

USA

The Panic of 1819
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_o...

Panic of 1837
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_o...

Panic of 1857
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_o...

The Panic of 1873
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_o...

The Panic of 1884
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_o...

The Panic of 1893
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_o...

The Panic of 1907
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_o...

~The Crash of '29

~Great Depression 1929-1939

~Oil Crisis 1970s


Modern Times:

~'The Great Recession' (subprime mortgage lending crisis & corporate bailouts)

The current ongoing, hanging-on-by-our-fingernails mess, every year, every single year since.

Fact: capitalism is an unstable and inefficient system. We're on borrowed time.

p.s.

Naturally, for the purpose of drama, when Alec Leamas is interrogated by 'Fiedler' (or whatever his name was) in East Germany during 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' they discuss matters relating to personal freedom, citizenship, duty to the State, etc etc etc. At the same time that Fiedler is trying to expose Leamas' cover story and 'get at the facts'.

Most espionage books do the same, no matter who the author is. A fiction paperback simply won't sell if the topic is economics. But, economics were always the heart of the East/West rivalry.

I despise Bolshevism. They should all be taken down to the basement of the Lubyanka and shot. In the classic manner: delivered to the back of the head as they descend the stairs.

But ..on the other paw ... I'm coming to understand that the West's appetite for entertainment (which LeCarre supplied) is also an unworthy path.

LeCarre and his spy-novelist pals do us all an injustice by too-broadly painting socialism (and socialists) as 'the enemy'. When someone is, 'an enemy' ...you don't have to lend them any credence. Anything they say is immediately discounted.

LeCarre writes fiction. I've enjoyed his works for years. But it only goes so far. The direction in which the world turns, the choices we must make ...needs better input than 'friends and foes'. This is the only model in which he writes.

I'm sure LeCarre understood the principles of economic history. His flaw is that he never did this justice in his entertainments. Perhaps he couldn't. The novel format can only do so much. You can't risk 'losing' your readers.

But in the real world: scholarship counts. Marx and Engels were scholars. As was Luxemburg.

At some point (I now feel) one has to go beyond the cowboys-and-indians entertainment and get to the heart of the matter.

The heart of the matter is: economic theory. And in that sphere, Marx is a powerhouse. Marx vs LeCarre? No contest. Marx clobbers LeCarre and every other western espionage writer.

Socialism is not a formless, menacing blob like 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'. Not only Frederick Engels but many other patriotic Britons and Americans embraced socialist ideals.

So: I resent LeCarre for just this: marginalizing the intellectual conflict between East and West. I can see why he did so...he was earning his living.

But boy! What a panderer.

I would surmise that, today, economics are not the only, or even the biggest factor, in the East vs West rivalry. Raw political power and the autocrats who crave it are now possibly the biggest part of the equation here. You have Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jing Ping in China, Lukachenko in Belarus, Erdogan in Turkey, the Generals in Myanmar and countless other autocrats around the World who are ready to start wars, crush or intimidate other countries and suck as much money for themselves in order to stay on top, the good of their own citizens be damned. This is a clear case where cutting the head of the serpent would more effectively stop/prevent problems than trying to slice the tail of the serpent in pieces.

'Socialism' is also too often a poorly used/understood term. Saying in the USA or UK that socialists are the enemy is a gross oversimplification. UK, Canada, Scandinavia and much of Western Europe could be rightly called 'socialist' countries by many due to their public social programs. Are they the enemy because of that? No! You are right, Felix: it is time to abandon leCarre's simplistic notions and start to write about the real World out there, like Iran vs Israel, China's expansionism in the South China Sea or Putin's appetite for Ukrainian/Baltic territories.

Thanks Michel.

I feel that somehow, or in some way, the grappling between economic systems which leads the way forward to any kind of political progress.

At a certain point you can start to see that all political theories hinge on matters of economics.

Rome fell in large part due to finances; the French Revolution failed because revolutionary Paris could not feed itself. Caesar, Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler all lowered taxes (or promised to). They had to. Financial unrest leads to regime change.

What we see today is that modern politicians too, make whatever adjustments they must, to finance their nations. Financial stability means security.

I think it's increasingly clear to all: when you can't provide basic necessities to your constituents, your people will rise up. A government's duty is to keep it's population housed and fed and healthy, at all costs. I think we're all realizing it.

And what is this forbearance? Nothing else but the deepest wisdom of socialism (which, by the way, goes back a lot longer and a lot deeper than the murdering Bolsheviks).

Yeah. Definitely not our 'enemies', these 'dirty foreigners' ...when they have ideas which could improve our own civilization.

It's time to stop jeering at the 'bad teeth' of Britons or the healthcare of Canada without most of us knowing anything at all about the topic. Exactly how good is healthcare in Britain? I don't know, but I'm sure it's better than conservative critics make it out to be. I know for sure healthcare is better in Europe than it is in the USA.

Pardon me, Paul but I don't see much of a rebuttal here. I hear someone praising leCarre's prose skills, praising his sensitive handling of character psychology. Well, join the club. We all enjoy his writing.

But leCarre's not the first, nor even the best novelist who ever had these skills.

He's not even the first in his own genre to write brilliantly. There were others before and others after.

Besides, how to rate-and-rank such merit, such significance? How would one even judge?

Any reader's opinion is as good as another's. Someone might enjoy Alan Furst more than leCarre. Someone else might admire Thomas Harris.

But what do such judgments matter? It's all subjective when it comes to fiction.

Subjectivity is immaterial, because we're talking about two very different forms of writing. You're giving me an aesthetic argument, one which you can't close.

Think: you can take Marx to leCarre ...but you can't take leCarre back to Marx, and carry the game.

I could attend a book-group on John leCarre, and bring up Marxism. But you couldn't attend an economic symposium and bring up any of leCarre's views. You'd be laughed out of the room.

It's 'thick-end-of-the-wedge' versus thin-end. Without Marx, there is no leCarre.

You're surely not saying, "All I need to know about politics, I learned from John leCarre"? You surely don't rank Marx the lesser 'talent', for not writing prose fiction entertainments?

I could easily turn around and chivvy leCarre for dodging real-world, objective ideas.

(2 of 4)

Remember: rave book reviews --from me -- for leCarre, are prominent all over Goodreads. I'm on record as a gigantic fan.

But I don't believe learning can start and end with him.

My beef with leCarre is that he, 'has it all his own way'. He's writing subjective, psychological, character-driven fiction. He chooses his players. His characters are his mouthpieces. They serve the purpose of immersive sensationalism. No more noble than Elizabeth Gaskill and 'The Italian'. Or, Stephen King.

All of leCarre's output is clearly based on underlying political ideas he doesn't hardly do any justice to at all.

If anything, he deliberately emphasizes inaccuracy. He chooses to 'villainize' Marxist theory, which is anything but villainous.

So: which writer is more substantial? As I see it, this is the best defense against accusations of 'pomposity'. Marx certainly has more substance.

I'll go one better and suggest this: the true fan of John leCarre, should naturally want to know what the deeper East-West conflict is all about, should want to learn about all the stuff left out of the novels.

(3 of 4)

Recall: What Is to Be Done? and it's influence on Lenin.

That's a kind of 'beach read' which wasn't just picked-up and set-down. A great novel shows all sides of a topic, a question, a theme.

Great works are not on the level of ... a TV series.

Whereas, with LeCarre: I can't recall a single instance where he allows a Marxist character to emit a single, substantial, Marxist tenet.

Let's go down the list.

~Karla never speaks at all. That's his trademark. A bit convenient, huh?

~Bill Haydon? Nothing from him either.

~Josef Fiedler: he and Leamas discuss authoritarianism versus individualism. Not economics.

~Liz Gold? Leamas pins her down at one point. He asks her straight out, what she believes in. Her answer: 'I believe in history'. Groan. One of the hoariest, most simplistic chirrups any clownish Marxist might ever utter. No wonder Leamas snorts.

I rest my case.

Talk to a real Marxist sometime. He won't say any such thing as Liz Gold. He might talk instead about the Labor Theory of Value (LTV) or the Theory of Surplus Value, which is something that concerns every economist on the planet today.

The fact is, economics determines modern life. It's not fiction. Our economic system is struggling. Marxism has many powerful ideas which could serve us well.

LeCarre does economic thought a disservice, entirely. He lumps everything together: Marxism, bolshevism, communism, socialism ...it's all one to him.

In reality, none of these are one and the same thing.

(4 of 4)

Final remark which occurs to me: the implication that I should 'come to my senses'. Huh? I'm not in the habit of saying things I don't stand behind.

One can always insist on a 'conventional' perspective I suppose. One can insist on reading a novel 'strictly for entertainment'.

One can dismiss all dialectic, all intellectual heritage, all western history. Is that the way you approach literature? Not me.

Naturally, I don't believe in the 'prophecies' Marx and later Lenin spouted (which lend themselves so well to sensationalists).

What I do believe in, is scholarship. When it comes to scholarship, Marx is top-tier. A world-shaker. In league with Einstein, Freud, and Darwin.

Just facing the bare facts. LeCarre is in league with, John Buchan, or Eric Ambler. Those were his mentors. He's not a pioneer of ideas; he's a novelist. All novelists come and go.

If you mull over what I've said, I wager you'll come to agree with me.

It's not a diss "against" JLC (although I did jest that way in the header of my post). My bad.

I'm really just sayin' something that shouldn't be very agonizing to anyone at all. its rather mild, actually.

Just this: JLC is a 'jumping-off point' to go much farther.

And (if one is truly interested in geopolitics), look towards economic systems.