For Marxists only ...

The Newtown street library keeps producing rare treasures, the latest to fall the pond's way being copies of Encounter from the 1960s and 1970s …

The magazine was notoriously funded by the CIA - Greg Hunt it here - and the pond had never actually seen it before. Based on the random survey offered by the contents, the British soft left were haunted by memories of Marx.

Oh sure, Stephen Spender might recall his times with T. S. Eliot, and Orwell would be trotted out, but Marx and communism hung over the recipients of American funding like a pall …

The pond immediately regretted it had done nothing to celebrate Marx's birthday, given that the meaningless celebration of a meaningless date is a good way to start off any conversation.

 Naturally the pond turned to the reptiles for help, and a correspondent for The Times came up with the splendid ploy of dissing both Marxists and Randists - though only Randists took the bait in the world of leftist twitterati ...

Scintillating if mysterious stuff, what with the reference to Blackheath (close kissing cousin of Black Helicopters?) and Scarlett (a lightly stirred martini if you please).

It put the pond in a good mood, and ready for a dissing ...

Now the pond has forgotten much more Marx than it remembers, and takes the view that anyone who spends too much time in a library and uses his wife as a practical doormat isn't going to have much grasp of reality, but what's bizarre is the way that our man Finkelstein, having dissed Marx, manages to find some redeeming features in the brutal attitudes of the Randists ...

Well no, two thousand or so Book-of-the-Month Club members (or so the Hartford Courant says here) hardly constitutes a meaningful survey. It would have only been more disreputable if it had been a survey of Readers' Digest readers …

But then the BBC insisted that it was a survey by the Library of Congress, here, which just goes to show the dangers of relying on factoids to bolster an argument.

The NY Times suggested it was done by both august bodies, but what's truly revealing are the other books on the list …

M. Scott Peck in place of Freud and no mention of Shakespeare, but Dale Carnegie and the Book of Mormon are on the list?

And we should trust this sort of survey as a guide to Rand's status?

This is how stupid myths are reinforced, by lazy people scribbling mindless repetitions of stupid myths … such as the notion that Rand's stolid dialogue is somehow a hymn to inventiveness, when its stolidity has all the shape and liveliness of a lead balloon …

Praise her ideas if you like, but don't try to praise her as a writer. That's a crime against the English language, just as King Vidor committed a cinematic crime against Gary Cooper and movies.

Our man Finkelstein then tried to redeem himself by having a go at Rand ...

If that's the best Finkelstein can come up with, it's a pity he doesn't seem to have heard of Rand's relationship to welfare - watching Randists go through gymnastic contortions to explain that self-interest justifies everything is one of the pond's primal pleasures …

But never mind, the real point was simply to have Finkelstein served up as an entrée for the promised, but much delayed treatise by Henry "hole in the bucket" Ergas on Karl ...

Now the thought of Henry analysing Marx filled the pond with terror - how much desiccated coconut  can one person devour at a setting? - and so the pond got in some cartoons to illustrate the finest achievements of laissez-faire capitalism at work in these modern times ...

Isaiah Berlin? There you go, the pond just knew its street library find would come in handy, and who better to explain than the good folks at Quadrant …

...Berlin was depicted, like Talmon and Popper, as a ‘Cold War Warrior’, who was tainted by his associations with Encounter and the Congress of Cultural Freedom, which were condemned as hopelessly reactionary because they received CIA funding.

Talk about piquant ...

The magazine was founded in Sydney in 1956 by Richard Krygier, a Polish–Jewish refugee who had been active in social-democrat politics in Europe and James McAuley, a Catholic poet, known for the anti-modernist Ern Malley hoax. It was originally an initiative of the Australian Committee for Cultural Freedom, the Australian arm of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an anti-communist advocacy group funded by the CIA. (Greg Hunt the footnotes here).

Now the pond is quite happy to accept CIA funding, but in the interim, must settle for a cartoon ...

And now straight from the swamp to the second Henry gobbet ...

And there in a nutshell is the problem with Marx, because the pond finds it extremely hard to spot the differences between the yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst and the Spanish American war, and chairman Rupert and the Iraq war … (and how ironic that Pulitzer is now a revered name for publicity hounds in American journalism when he was one of the inventors of fake news).

Please, another cartoon celebrating journalism today ...

And so back to Henry for another gobbet ...

Indeed, indeed, and the pond is no lover of dictatorship, Chinese, Soviet, Cuban or North Korean, and is bemused when some are said to be excellent for throwing people into gulags, but somehow the state still manages to get into everything, and then somehow the state gets taken over by rogues, thieves and charlatans … and soon enough the pond is finding it hard to spot the difference between the pigs and the farmers ...

Another cartoon please ...

And so to the final Henry gobbet ...

Here the pond must quibble a tad with Henry …for here is Karl in November 1848, at the home away from home for Marxists here ...

Vae victis! 

 The purposeless massacres perpetrated since the June and October events, the tedious offering of sacrifices since February and March, the very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.

And so the pond feels perfectly free to shout - with a cheery smile - Fuck Steve Bannon …fuck him long and fuck him hard, but please, not in a way that he might see as pleasurable … or at least give him a dose of revolutionary terror.

Now about that CIA funding ...

But perhaps a cartoon or two would be a better way to wrap things up ...