Date: Fri, 7 Apr 1995 07:35:35 -0700 From: Tom Condit <tomcondit-AT-igc.apc.org> Subject: Karl Radek You'll have to forgive me for a total digression from anything we've been talking about, but in some ways this list seems to me to be a cross between a graduate seminar and the kind of barroom conversation in which I got a large part of my political education. What follows is somewhat lacking in the rigor and documentation you'd expect in a seminar, since I learned it all in bars. Karl Radek was famous in revolutionary circles in eastern Europe for his impish sense of humor. The word "Radek" means "thief" in Polish, and Radek adopted it as a pseudonym when joining the German Social Democratic Party after he had been expelled from another branch of the same party on the charge of stealing a comrade's trousers. (No one ever seemed to know any details about this incident.) When he became a victim of Stalin's purges, Radek cheerfully collaborated, and at his trial spun a long tale of meetings with Leon Trotsky at a hotel in Copenhagen where Trotsky recruited him to spy on the Soviet Union on behalf of British (or Japanese, or whichever conspiracy it was the Stalinists were hipped on that year) intelligence. After Radek's death, when his confession was being triumphantly paraded around the world as "proof" of the validity of the Moscow trials, it came out that the hotel where he had set his tale had been torn down two years before the alleged meetings. Even facing the executioner, Radek had his little joke on Stalin. Now that we've settled that, I've never undertstood dependency theory. How does it relate to the fact that the bulk of world trade consists of Department I transfers between industrialized countries, much of it intra-firm transfers, hmmm? Make mine a black and tan. Tom Condit --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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