MaxSpeak Going Viral!?

We’ve had the honor of a surge of new subscribers over the past few day. We are up to 340 now. Who the hell are you people? Where did you come from? Of course I crave the attention, tucked away here in the isolation of semi-rural Virginia. I say semi-rural because I’m in a housing development where all the houses look more or less the same, but you can drive for ten minutes and see wineries, cows, horses, and sheep. A few neighbors have chickens, llamas, or firing ranges.

I don’t ask for money, and commenting is not limited to those who pay, a disreputable practice in my eyes. Of course, I don’t need the donations for living expenses. I finance those with Social Security. This is not a job. My spending needs are modest, frugal in many ways. I drive a sixteen-year-old car and watch a ten-year-old TV. (Honda Pilot and Sony, each runs like a top.) Clothes? Don’t make me laugh. My principal vices are Asian take-out, books, and premium cable channels. A few gadgets now and then, but how many laptops and tablets can you own? I have seven or eight. I used to build my own PCs, but that’s gotten old, and my eyesight and motor skills have declined.

On the other hand, I don’t turn money down either. Donations boost my usually-sagging morale. I do try to publish elsewhere, lately in In These Times and The Baffler, less recently, in many other places, but only for money. It is a sad fact that unpaid writing commands less respect.

For the benefit of you new folks, a bit of re-introduction. I’m a retired economist and hippie-child of the 1960s. Soon to be a grandfather. (!) Majored in English lit as an undergraduate at Rutgers, earned a doctorate in economics at the University of Maryland. I worked at a leftish think tank in Washington, D.C. for 18 years — The Economic Policy Institute. Then I did a decade at the U.S. Government Accountability Office. I’d go back to work at either, full-time, in a heartbeat. EPI for the action, GAO for the dough. (Purpose of the money would be to pay off my mortgage and buy a house for my daughter. Plus there’s a baby on the way.)

In my flaming youth, I aspired to a revolutionary transformation of the U.S., taking up a sack of bankrupt ideological nostrums to that end. In my old age I have taken to sorting out where I went wrong, partly in faint hopes of providing useful guidance to others, mostly for intellectual closure. Now I’m a Bernie Democrat.

This coming week I hope to write about the 19th Century Gotha and Erfurt Programmes of the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD), and the furious denunciations they received from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. I’m starting to think Marx and Engels sabotaged our chances for socialism for decades, if not for centuries, to come. The 19th Century SPD, even as far back as 1875, had a vision that still compares favorably to our current lamentable state.

The brains behind the old SPD were Edouard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky. I hope to learn more about them and talk about them here. We need to make Bernstein great again.