QUADRANT VS KARL MARX; WITH A NOTE ON CENSORSHIP AND ITS PRACTITIONERS

Quadrant Online has an article attacking Karl Marx and all he ever stood for. (See link below.) . I put a comment onto it (since flagged as 'awaiting approval', then deleted.) For the benefit of the Quadrant readership, I post it below, along with some additional notes of my own. . • Ian MacKenzie – 14th January 2022 To be fair, Marx didn’t anticipate the eventual outcomes that flowed from Das Capital and the Manifesto, in fact just the opposite. Like many before him he imagined a utopia where all would be better off, rather than tossed in a shallow grave in the tundra or jungle. The essential problem with Marx’s thesis was that it was wrong. The predicted inevitable empowerment of the proletariat through revolution simply didn’t happen. Anywhere. The first “solution” to this was Leninism, whereby a small revolutionary vanguard elite, the Bolsheviks, “guided” the revolution in 1917. It was assumed that the revolution would then spread beyond Russia, however the defeat of all the communist revolutions in Europe in 1917–1923 except for the one in Russia, proved that this was wrong as well. The next “solution” was Socialism in one Country” proposed by Stalin and Bukharin in 1924 after Lenin’s death and adopted as state policy by the USSR in 1926. Having turned inwards, the USSR quickly descended into state-sponsored violence, terror and dictatorship; the complete opposite to the outcomes Marx and Engels had predicted. Both Trotskyism (permanent revolution) National Socialism (subordination of personal interests to the “common good”) and the Frankfurt School critical theory (and subsequent cultural Marxism) arose in reaction to Socialism in one Country. Maoism was proposed as a solution to the situation where a preindustrial country doesn’t have a significant proletariat. Once again state-sponsored violence, terror and dictatorship were the outcome rather than utopia. . All these “solutions” were required because the original hypothesis is clearly wrong. The real wonder of Marxism is why so many people cling to a failed theory despite the catastrophic outcomes of each successive trial. . MY COMMENT (SINCE SCRUBBED BY THE QUADRANT ONLINE CENSOR, WITH NO NOTICE TO THAT EFFECT): . "Ian MacKenzie: I agree with you in the main. However, I do not think that there is much to be gained by judging any of history’s players by any other standards than those in operation at their own time. Marx and Engels saw things wrong with the world they had been born into, and set out to remedy them; as did a whole train of reformers and revolutionaries down through history: including one Yeshua bar Joseph, aka Jesus Christ, though reform by no means starting with him. "Some things are best publicly-owned. I do not detect much of a push for the reintroduction of private toll-roads, though they were once all the go in Europe. Monarchs trumped local nobilities by creating a system of free royal roads: hence the liberating expression, ‘wandering the the king’s highway’. "Neither Marx nor Engels (nor for that matter, Lenin, Rosa Luxembourg, Karl Kautsky. Karl Liebnicht, etc) set out to create the Frankenstein monster that was Stalinism, any more than Yeshua bar Joseph set out to create the Inquisition and the mediaeval witch-hunts that literally killed millions across Europe. "What the Marxists did see was a self-perpetuating maldistribution of wealth, and of the power that goes with that wealth, which the French revolutionaries of 1789 had set out to remedy. The latter can hardly be held morally responsible for Napoleon and his wars." . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsNoiZNLFhk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pcu54yPeqVQ ) . I offer my readers here these time-honoured tips: 1. do not judge people by what they say; judge them by what they do. 2. Always treat power-seekers and authoritarians of all kinds with suspicion, and as being guilty until proven innocent. Quadrant, both in its print and online editions, is a puportedly 'liberal' website, that practices illiberality and censorship. It should come as no surprise that it is down on Karl Marx and his writings, and that the Quadrant crowd blame Marx for the excesses of Stalinism and Maoism, while at the same time being a cheer squad for the likes of Donald Trump. Quadrant also sides with the extreme Right of the Liberal-National Coalition, which used to be led by Tony Abbott, and in a way probably still is. It is also crawling alive with denialists of anthropogenic global warming, and if it is not a glove-puppet for the fossil-carbon interests, it certainly acts as if it is. As Yeshua bar Joseph famously said, "by their deeds ye shall know them." Ironically, in their coal-shillery the Quadrant crowd provide a living example of what Marx himself was talking about when he famously said in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: "The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." . He who pays the piper calls the tune, and the Quadrant crowd have lumps of coal where their brains ought to be. . Censors down through the ages right from ancient times have sought to control people by controlling their information and ideas. It is vital to this process that the fact that censorship is taking place is kept from those same people: the crowd the censors seek to influence and manipulate. The censors' victims, subjects, call them what you will, have to be kept in the dark as far as possible about the whole process, especially while it is taking place. . I think the above is the likely reason why that left-liberal paperThe Guardian in its letters pages leaves a public notice when it removes a comment from one of its 'comment is free' sections posted below articles. It is also the likely reason why the right-illiberal Quadrant Online management goes to such lengths to hide the fact of its censorship from its own readers. . 'Democracy dies in darkness' is an old saying recently popularised by The Washington Post. Democrats seek always to turn on the lights; antidemocrats, like bats, on the contrary, thrive in darkness. They seek to create it wherever possible, for it is their refuge, comfort and their home, sweet home. Count Dracula would surely sympathise, and understand. . https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/01/marxism/ https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-washington-posts-new-slogan-turns-out-to-be-an-old-saying/2017/02/23/cb199cda-fa02-11e6-be05-1a3817ac21a5_story.html