Karl Marx on the “evil” of “life” under constant medical “tutelage” (and the comparable evil of press censorship)

Guest Post by Mark Crispin Miller

If we’re going to win this (final) war, we must get over the distracting fantasy—or (as it were) red herring—that Karl Marx started it, and that the Kremlin has (somehow) been driving it

That life under the “new normal” is, or will be, much like communism there can be no doubt; and that “woke” ideology—especially Critical Race Theory and, to some extent, queer theory—derives in part from the works of certain Marxist intellectuals (as James Lindsay holds) is surely true. (I strongly recommend his book Race Marxism, on the rise of CRT.)

While both those things are true, however, it is certainly not true that this catastrophe was hatched by “Marxists,” intent on realizing “global communism,” as Lenin (say) envisioned it, and Trotsky spent his life pursuing it (a Bolshevik game plan that ended with the rise of Stalin). The retro conviction that COVID is a commie plot (along with all the other horrors of these last three years, including radical transgenderism) has all but taken over the health freedom movement, or at least its rightist membership. This is apparent in (to name a very few examples) Stew Peters’ rants, the fiery output by Emerald Robinson, Jesse Watters and others aiming endlessly (and only) at the CCP, and—most disappointingly—in Plandemic 3.

Now, let me state, for the record, that I am not now, nor have I ever been, etc. I am a dedicated member of the movement for health freedom, and do believe in fighting back against the propaganda used to wipe that freedom out. I don’t believe that we can win this war if we keep fighting the wrong enemy, nor can we win it by deploying propaganda every bit as bellicose, simplistic and repressive as the output of the Bolsheviks, or Peter Hotez. If the health freedom movement lets this anachronistic idée fixe distract it from such mighty players as (say) the Department of Defense, CIA and FBI, CDC (another military agency) and NIH, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Council on Foreign Relations and the eugenicists who formed the Club of Rome, and if our movement lets this anticommunist fixation further split the people of this country, it’s going to lose this war for sure—a danger that obliges us to wonder if this Great Leap Backward by our movement may not be encouraged, or abetted, by our overlords.

The role of “communism” in our current plight is an immense and complex question, which no single Substack post could even start to settle. All I want to do here is (as academics say) to put that question into question, and also call attention to this early essay by Karl Marx, which surely complicates the notion that this bio-fascist hell on earth sprang somehow from his thought.

The human body is mortal by nature. Hence illnesses are inevitable. Why does a man only go to the doctor when he is ill, and not when he is well? Because not only the illness, but even the doctor is an evil. Under constant medical tutelage, life would be regarded as an evil and the human body as an object for treatment by medical institutions.

Is not death more desirable than life that is a mere preventive measure against death? Does not life involve also free movement? What is any illness except life that is hampered in its freedom? A perpetual physician would be an illness in which one would not even have the prospect of dying, but only of living. Let life die; death must not live.

Has not the spirit more right than the body? Of course, this right has often been interpreted to mean that for minds capable of free motion physical freedom of movement is even harmful and therefore they are to be deprived of it.

The starting point of the censorship is that illness is the normal state, or that the normal state, freedom, is to be regarded as an illness. The censorship continually assures the press that it, the press, is ill; and even if the latter furnishes the best proofs of its bodily health, it has to allow itself to be treated. But the censorship is not even a learned physician who applies different internal remedies according to the illness. It is a country surgeon who knows only a single mechanical panacea for everything, the scissors. It is not even a surgeon who aims at restoring my health, it is a surgical aesthete who considers superfluous everything about my body that displeases him, and removes whatever he finds repugnant; it is a quack who drives back a rash so that it is not seen, without caring in the least whether it then affects more sensitive internal parts.

—”On Freedom of the Press,” Rheinische Zeitung, 132, Supplement; May 12, 1842
https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1842/free-press/ch04.htm

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