Humans generally are very bad at predicting the future and the economic right is even worse at it because unless there is a present danger instead of just a contingent possible danger, then the profit motive which is the biggest driver of human activity (which in reality is just selfishness repackaged) simply refuses to admit that there might be broader responsibilities that we have to each other.
One of those responsibilities is the responsibility to act with decency to each other and that I am afraid, is something that people motivated by profits simply cannot abide with. In the past that has resulted in slavery whereby people become the moveable chattel of other people, to be bought and sold, and when that relationship is severed and the effects continue due to a multitude of systemic factors including the fact that all capital is produced from the excess of past work, then it's going to have very big knock on effects.
Just like the H1N1 Influenza pandemic of 1918-20, there have been race riots on the United States as that country refuses to admit its past mistakes and wishes to perpetuate them into the future. Some starting places to look at include the Red Summer of 1919 and the Tulsa Massacre which actually included aerial bombing of black people's houses by their fellow citizens.
We haven't quite descended into that kind of violence, yet. However, the echoes from the tensions in the United States have made people question their own history in other countries; which includes the pulling down of statues of slave owners of times past.
As someone who has read a bit about the long game of history, as history and what we choose to commemorate, celebrate and remember, is always done by the people of the present, the questioning of the past is hardly a new endeavour. In fact, the defacing of statues and the sacking of treasures is something that probably extends to before antiquity.
When I read columns like Andrew Bolt's in the Daily Telegraph/Herald-Sun/Courier Mail, his insistence that the past is sacred is no less a case of playing identity politics as those he accuses of playing identity politics. It's just that he is waving the banner of a different identity.
I know that not having a university degree or even a high school certificate is no guarantee of the intelligence of a person because loads of people who have never been to university are ridiculously smart and/or have learned their craft in the University of Life but Mr Bolt never appears to be all that intellectually curious. If you are going to successfully make proper arguments against someone else's position, then it is best if you first make an attempt to understand that position. If you are going to attack the intellectual ground of your enemy then you should at very least have read across what your enemy has read. I find it repeatedly amusing for instance that I am accused of quoting left-wing writers, after having quoted Hayek and Von Mises. Actually, all this proves is that if you are going to successfully make proper arguments against someone else's position, then you should also probably understand your own.
The truth is that it is easy to pull apart Mr Bolt's arguments because like so many right-wing nuts, it you apply even the slightest torque and pressure, you can undo them very simply.
News Corp rather inconveniently hides its URLs and its articles behind their paywall, which makes linking to them rather difficult but even so, I am not sure that I want to direct traffic their way to generate ad revenue for them.
I can not for the life of me work out what the Dickens Mr Bolt is complaining about when he poses the question that race rioters would want to tear down a statue of Marx. This makes zero sense on so many levels; basic maths tells you that if you multiply zero by anything, many times over, you still get zero. Nothing times a whole lot, is a whole lot of nothing.
Firstly, I don't understand which 'statue' Mr Bolt is referring to. No doubt there are statues of him around the world but I can't think of any in Bolt's city of Melbourne; nor can I think of any in London. There is a monument in London where Marx is buried but you would expect that sort of thing in a cemetery. It could be that but does that mean that Mr Bolt actually advocates desecrating the grave of a Jewish man? Mr Bolt has already been found guilty of violating the Racial Discrimination Act; so perhaps it isn't past him to add anti-Semitism to his quiver as well.
Secondly, for people who are anti-racist to want to bring down a statue of someone for presumed racism, wouldn't that require that the person in question was actually racist? Say what you like about Marx's political ideology but racism isn't really a strand of his thinking or manifesto; which is what you would expect from someone who more than likely had members of his extended family who were the victims of pogroms across Europe.
Thirdly, to actually address the terms of Mr Bolt's article last week, I have one simple question - "Why?". What possible reason would race rioters want to tear down a statue of Marx, assuming that one existed (which by the way doesn't; neither in the United States, the United Kingdom, nor Australia). Again, that lack of intellectual curiosity is on display yet again.
To place Marx back into history, he wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848 and was writing for various magazines on both sides of the Atlantic during the US Civil War (1861-1865). Not only is Marx aware of what is going on in the United States but he seems deeply concerned for the plight of American slaves.
Before the war started in 1861, he wrote in a January 1860 letter to his colleague Engels that the world was a tinder box and presumably revolution was at hand with “on the one hand the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown, and on the other the movement of the serfs in Russia.”
Marx is deeply concerned with the treatment of people who are mostly powerless and his economic view of the world, however incomplete and inadequate at describing how the economy works, is largely motivated by improving the lot of working people.
The day John Brown was hanged for his raid on Harpers Ferry, Marx wrote that "ending chattel slavery would not destroy capitalism, but it would create conditions far more favorable to organizing and elevating labor, whether white or black.”
Maybe you can make the argument that Marx only views the issue of racism as an incidental problem which sits alongside the broader issues of slavery, wage slavery and the ruthlessness of factory owners towards their workers but he certainly doesn't give cause for race rioters to want to pull down his statue (if it actually existed; which it doesn't).
If anything, black people might have cause to want to revisit Marx and have a look at what he said. In fact, Marx's writings in newspapers and magazines which were the only big media of the day, may have filtered through to Abraham Lincoln himself. Lincoln's address to Congress in December 1861 contains the following:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-message-9
Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them.
- Abraham Lincoln, 3rd Dec 1861
That sounds distinctly Marxist.
Lincoln who inherited a war over slavery (I really fail to see that there was any other root cause), not only was the one who issued the Emancipation Proclamation but politically, he is the first Republican President. I wonder exactly on what basis black people in America would want to tear down a statue of Lincoln.
More than likely, Mr Bolt is preying on the fact that the readers of the Herald-Sun/Daily Telegraph/Courier Mail are just as lacking in intellectual curiosity as him. Marx is probably just another swear word in the land of the Herald-Sun/Daily Telegraph/Courier Mail; like "Aboriginal", "Thunberg", or "the left" which is repeatedly defined by Miranda Devine as "anyone I don't like".
Moreover, the organisation which Mr Bolt works for, engages in victim blaming frequently and is not above doctoring photographs and hacking the phones of the dead to push its point of view.
I am also convinced that it is this kind of article and the subsequent discussions of both it and the regurgitation of this as a topic, which is why we saw the police in Sydney defending the statue of Captain Cook against literally nobody; while they flashed white supremacist hand signals at people and while someone dressed as the cut-price bargain bin version of Indiana Jones stood inside the police cordon. The statue was graffitied anyway, during the wee small hours of Sunday morning and unless Captain James Cook was a Marxist, I just don't think that the people who did this, would be the same kinds of people who might pull down a statue of Marx, if it existed; which doesn't; so it can't be pulled down.
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